For India to match up with the other countries developing their technology, the central and state governments need to invest more in research and development sector. In fact, the private sector should also invest more, said assistant director general and Chief of Staff, Office of the Director General at World Intellectual Property Organisation, Naresh Prasad. He was speaking at the one day roving seminar on the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) at CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum here on Thursday.
Prasad further said, “Intellectual property is all about innovating and protecting. Most of the properties that are ours are being patented by other countries, which is basically theft but they are getting profit out of it. Our Basmati, Litchi and even different type of herbs are patentable, but lack of knowledge is pulling us down. We need to develop industries at local level.”
He added, “According the WIPO global innovation index, India had 81st rank in 2015. However, last year India reached at 57th rank, which in itself is an achievement. Our biggest USP is human resource, 65 per cent of our filings in the international system is from Asia.”
Expressing his views, the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks, OP Gupta said, “The important thing is that earlier it used to take 72 months for the patent procedure to complete, but in the present the time period has come down to three years and we are planning to reduce it to 18 months by the end of this financial year. IP is a tool of democrats. Since the government of India has aligned IP laws with global laws the number of filings has rapidly increased.”
He added, “In the past couple of years we worked on timeliness, cost and quality. If you got a patent from us, rest assured that it will be patentable in every other jurisdiction of the world. For the cost we have the minimal charges of $150 whereas in Europe one has to pay a minimum of $ 2,000. To make our work more efficient we have 450 dedicated employees working and 220 soon to join.”
Director General of Uttarakhand State Council for Science and Technology, Rajendra Dobhal said, “We have conducted more than 100 workshops in the districts for the financial awareness. As of last year we had sent a record number of 192 filings from Uttarakhand to IPO.”
