India Improves Examination Time for Trade Mark and Patent Applications

Intellectual Property (IP) intensive industry is not defined. However, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade has taken various initiatives to strengthen Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Regime in India like, legislative improvements, modernisation of IP offices, manpower augmentation, use of IT and technology in e-filing of applications, acceptance of email in all Indian Patent Office (IPO) transactions, online delivery of certificates of grant/registration of patent, trademark and designs in digital format, use of video-conferencing for hearing of IP applications, SMS alert to give updates, expedited examination of IP applications, spreading awareness in IPR, India’s accession to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) administered treaties and signing of pilot Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) project with Japan in the month of December 2019.

Impacts of the initiatives taken during last 5 years are as under:

· Period of examination of new Trademarks applications has been reduced from 13 months to less than 30 days.

· Trademark is registered in less than 7 months, if there are no objections or opposition filed, as compared to 3-5 years required earlier.

· 11.25 lakh trademark registrations in just four and half years (2015 to 2019) as compared to 11 lakh registrations during 75 Years (1940-2015).

· Patent examination increased from 22,631 in 2014-15 to 85,426 in 2018-19.

· Time required for patent examination reduced from average 72 months in 2014-2015 to average around 36 months in 2019.

· 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 fact that India has been consistently moving up on global ranking in past few years. India’s ranking has improved from 81 in 2015 to 52 in 2019 in GII.

This information was given by the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal, in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha on 20 March 2020.