Govt mulls making Indian Patent Act more research friendly, private sector urged to spend on R&D
New Delhi, May 2, 2023
The government on Tuesday said it was mulling over making the Indian Patent Act more simplified and research friendly for product-oriented results.
Currently, India grants an average of 23,000 patents per annum, despite having over 1,000 universities in the country, whereas China grants 5 lakh patents annually. Similarly, the time duration of patents filing and grant of patents is three years in India against the global average of two years.
The patent issues and roadblocks, whatsoever, behind it were discussed by senior science ministry officials at the the Global Science, Research and Innovation Summit, organized by CII, at IIT Delhi.
Underlining that India lacks the culture of patents filing and taking it to its logical conclusion, Akhilesh Gupta, senior adviser at the Department of Science and Technology (DST), appealed to the private sector to pitch in with higher research allocation to match and support the government for a win-win proposition.
Addressing the Summit, Gupta, who is also secretary of the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), flagged that currently only less than 1% (around 0.69%) of the budget is being spent on R&D in India.
Another scientist, Parvinder Maini, scientific secretary in the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the government, pointed out that the the main reason and the huge gap of the low R&D budget of India is due to almost non-participation of private sector to take big risks in emerging and cutting-edge technologies.
She said that government, industry, academia and start-ups should join hands to co-produce and co-develop world class products and solutions, as the era of working in silos is over now.
Referring to how only 12,000 out of 90,000 start-ups in India are technology-based with merely 3,000 of them being deep tech start-ups, Maini said if industry will not lend funding support to innovative and bright ideas, India will miss the bus, which is now on its way to full bloom.
[The Times of India]
