Sanjeev Sanyal is an author and a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. (Photo: his Twitter account)
The government is also considering legislative changes to set time limits for granting/rejecting patents, said Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and Cabinet Secretary.
The government is revamping the functioning of the patent office to reduce the huge backlog in granting official recognition to innovations by adding manpower and changing the legislative framework, said a senior government official on Friday.
The government is speeding up the hiring process and the promotions of certain existing agents (already 340 examiners were promoted to controllers at the beginning of the week).
The government is also considering legislative changes to set time limits for granting/rejecting patents, said Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and Cabinet Secretary.
Supporting more manpower at the patent office, he said it was a revenue-generating office unlike most of its peers in government and so it made sense to have more staff and make the process easier.
“What we are looking at is allowing opposition before issuance, say for six months like in the US, before final approval is granted/rejected, so that those who wish to object to demand can do so,” he said at a seminar on intellectual property rights organized by the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry here.
Sanyal said that he personally plans to draft the necessary legislative amendments as a matter of urgency, because what is of crucial importance is to reform the process itself, and also to correct the provisions relating to legal metrology, which is now a very cumbersome process, and “I’m personally working on it now”. He said that over the past few years the efficiency of the system at the reviewer level has increased very high, at the most critical level of the controller it gets stuck resulting in a massive wait of requests which is d around 1.7 lakh now.
Giving comparative figures, he said that China, which is the world leader in filing and granting patents, has more than 13,700 people in its patent office, and the United States, which is the second largest , have more than 8,140, while India has about 858. as of 2022.
“But we are massively increasing staff numbers now and by FY26 we will have 963 examiners and 998 controllers. In FY22, these numbers were 663 and 773 and in FY20 were 263 and 673, respectively. requests came from domestic companies and 39,472 from foreign companies operating here. The national share was 37% in FY20 and 44.4% in FY22.
Data on the number of patents granted in FY23 is not available. In FY22, the number of patents granted was 34,153 out of 82,805 filings and 30,074 the previous year out of 66,400 filings. By contrast, the figures in China were 6.95 lakh and 15.85 lakh for FY22 and 3.27 lakh and 6.95 lakh in the United States.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)
