India's patent and research efforts disappointing: Prez

India's filing of patent applications depicts a "disappointing" figure as compared to nations like China, the US, Germany and Japan and this should be taken as a challenge, President Pranab Mukherjee today said.
On a two-day visit to the state, he was speaking at the convocation of the Sido Kanhu Murmu University.
He said it was time to "invest in education" and Indian universities should catch up with their counterparts when it comes to qualitative issues of teaching and research.
"The question to ask ourselves is, are our universities up to the job? There is need for Indian universities to catch up with their counterparts in the quality of teaching and research. Research and innovation must be given new impetus.

"Out of 260 lakh students who were enrolled at the undergraduate level and above in 2011-12, only one lakh or 0.4 had registered for PhD."
He said the total number of patent applications filed by Indians in 2010 was close to only 6,000 while 3 lakh applications were filed by Chinese, around 1.7 lakh by Germans, 4.5 lakh by Japanese and 4.2 lakh by Americans.

"The number of patent applications by Indians comprised only 0.3 per cent of the total applications filed in the world, a disappointing figure for a country with a share of 17 per cent of the world population. These figures indicate the magnitude of challenges to India's global aspirations."

He rued the fact that Indian universities failed to make it to the toppers list.
"According to an international survey of universities, not a single Indian university figures in the list of top 200 universities in the world. While in the global list we did not figure at all, we had only 11 institutes in the best 300 Asian universities," he said.