A major revamp of India’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) ecosystem is underway. Efforts are being made on all fronts — making the application process smoother, digital infrastructure upgradation, expansion of manpower, and so on.
India recently signed the Riyadh Design Law Treaty aimed at global harmonisation in industrial design protection. Discussions for several other treaties are also ongoing. However, as we shall discuss here, we now have a problem.
In the last few years, the patent ecosystem has seen a significant expansion — from 42,951 patent applications and 4,227 patents granted in 2013-14 to 92,168 applications filed and 1,03,057 patents granted in 2023-24. A large part of the applications granted last year was on account of clearing the backlog of applications. Furthermore, most of the applications are now from resident Indians. Patents were earlier dominated by multinational companies and foreign applicants. The share of residents in total patent applications has more than doubled in the last decade — from 25.5 per cent in 2013-14 to 56 per cent in 2023-24.
In terms of trademarks filings, India was at the fourth position as per the World Intellectual Property Indicators report 2023, after the US, China and Russia. The number of trademarks filed did increase from 2 lakh in 2016-17 to 4.8 lakh in 2023-24, however the increase was marginal in the last few years. Notably, even with the increased filings, the registrations have plateaued in recent years — ranging between 2.5 lakh and 3 lakh since 2016-17.
Manpower shortage
One of the key issues that we had identified in our EAC-PM Working Paper from 2022, ‘Why India needs to invest in its IPR ecosystem?’ (accessible at was the shortage of manpower. India had only about 272 people in 2014-15.
Even with increase in manpower, Indian patent office now has 956 personnel, compared with 13,704 in China and 8,132 in the US. This is a major roadblock and a cause of delay in processing of applications.
In order to add permanent capacity, manpower is being added now: 553 examiners will join the patent office, taking the working manpower of patent office to 1,386 by the end of 2025. They were hired over the last year and are undergoing training in Nagpur and Hyderabad.
In addition, approval for additional hiring of 525 over the next 3 years is in place. Similarly, 200 posts have been created at various levels in the Trade Marks Registry Office in January 2025, which will take the manpower from 163 to 363 by the end of next year.
This means that we will have a capacity to process far more applications. On an ongoing basis, out of the total patent applications, Request for Examination (RQ) is filed on average 80 per cent of the time, after which the actual processing of applications starts.
After accounting for applications that are withdrawn/abandoned/refused, on an average around 45 per cent of original applications are eventually granted. Therefore, in order to grant one lakh patents each year on a steady state basis, the number of applications has to be at least 2-2.25 lakhs. As discussed, we are building the capacity to do this. However, the inflow of applications currently is much lower.
In 2023-24, India granted 1,03,057 patents, but had received only 92,168 applications.
This was possible because of an existing backlog. So far in 2024-25 (up to December), 78,264 patent applications were filed and 26,083 patents granted. Going by this pace, we will get slightly more than one lakh applications in this fiscal year. Even with some push, this would result in only 45,000 patent grants, significantly below last year’s levels.
Lack of R&D
Till a few years ago, the bottleneck of the IPR sector was the patent office’s throughput capacity. However, with new capacity being put in place, the new problem is lack of research and development (R&D) in the country. In the next 24 months, with the bolstered manpower, the patent office will be able to do more than two lakh applications — double the current level.
In our view, the single biggest reason for this is that the scale of R&D in India’s private sector is simply not enough. R&D spending in India is around 0.65 per cent of GDP, much lower than in countries like the US (3.6 per cent), China (2.4 per cent), Singapore (2.2 per cent). Out of this, only about 36 per cent is by private institutions. Contrast this with about 79 per cent share of the private sector in the US and Japan, 77 per cent in China, 63 per cent in Singapore.
There are now many Indian companies with global scale, but they simply do not pull their weight on R&D. In recent years, more resources have been poured into research by the government, but the private sector needs to up its game. The patent office is waiting for your applications.
Sanyal and Arora are Member and Joint Director, Economic Advisory Council to PM. Views are personal
