IP intensive sectors record spike in activity

Driven by the initiatives of the Government of India to sensitise stakeholders about Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and encourage investments around it, the nation has emerged as a leading international source of innovations. This has led to future-ready economic activities that have sought to secure India’s economy. New IP creation and related R&D and manufacturing activities being core to the building of a US$5 trillion economy, the Government has taken several parallel measures to boost innovation. This is being achieved with legislative improvements, digitisation of IPR processes, capacity building in future technologies, skill development, an expedited examination of IP applications, among others.

Developments such as India’s accession to World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) administered treaties, signing of the pilot Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) project with Japan in December 2019 have also given an impetus to India’s IP intensive sectors. This has been a critical achievement at a time when India’s foreign partnerships have steadily moved from operational support to more premium end-to-end R&D solutions. The innovation and manufacturing of products from industries spanning healthcare and pharma to defence and aerospace are being carried out in India for both the local and exports market. The growing capabilities have strengthened MNCs as well as grassroots enterprises, creating new jobs. 

Impacts of the IP initiatives taken during the last five years are as under:

1. Period of examination of new Trademarks applications has been reduced from 13 months to less than 30 days
2. Trademarks are registered in less than 7 months, if there are no objections filed, as compared to 3-5 years required earlier
3. Over 1.1 million trademark registrations from 2015 to 2019, compared to 1.1 million registrations from 1940 to 2015
4. Patent examination increased from 22,631 in 2014-15 to 85,426 in 2018-19.
5. The time required for patent examination reduced from an average of 72 months in 2014- 2015 to average around 36 months in 2019.
6. Grant of patents has increased from 5,978 in 2014-15 to 15,283 in 2018-19.

The Government of India has been working steadily to improve India’s ranking in Global Innovation Index (GII) and this is evident from the improvement in India’s ranking from 81 in 2015 to 52 in 2019 in GII. This is sure to create opportunities for partnerships around innovation and investments in the near future.