E-filing, the government’s ambitious project for filing patent applications through the Internet was launched in July 2007 with much fanfare to help the Indian Patent Office to function as a paperless office but an embarrassingly poor response seems to be bringing into question the entire endeavour. Of the 35,000 patent applications filed in the previous year only 410 i.e. 1.17 percent were filed through Internet. According to a news report, the government, as a corrective measure, conducted a programme to orient the Patent Attorneys and the results have started to show already. In the two months of the current financial year, online applications for patents have improved significantly. Online applications constituted 4.9 percent of the 6,000 patent applications filed so far in this financial year. But patent lawyers are of the view that though the e-filing system is a major improvement over the previous one, it is not free of its limitations. The newspapers report that inadequacy was pointed out in context of the memory of the e-filing system that a small memory is not capable to hold the details of the huge number of applications and the limitation of fee upto Rs. 50,000 entails thicker patent applications such as in sectors like biotechnology and pharmaceutical be left out of the system.

The e-filing programme is thought to establish a correlation between intellectual property, innovation, productivity and competitiveness and an effective on-line filing system is understood to take the intellectual property regime to the bottom of the industrial pyramid and invigorate the proprietary rights culture in the country.

While the infrastructure developments continue at their pace, there is a rush to seek Patents in India. A host of global and Indian generic drug companies, who have traditionally focused on manufacturing off-patent drugs, are in the process of claiming exclusivity for a large number of drugs. According to a patent expert, most of these patent applications are for process and composition patents. According to a study of the mail-box application, the Indian Patent Office has received about 10,000 drug patent applications from global and Indian drug companies.

Along with this the innovation mode appears to have caught with the manufacturing conglomerates also, which are at present ruling the roost leaving way behind the IT companies, traditionally known as innovators. An analysis, by an economic daily, of the latest intellectual property rights (IPR) data revel that Hindustan Unilever, Ranbaxy, Cipla, Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL) and Steel Authority of India (SAIL) filed maximum number of patents. The number of patent applications in FY08 is 21 percent more than FY07. An interesting fact is that most of the Tata Motor’s 40 patents are connected to its Rs.1-lakh car ‘Nano’.

The corporate India’s growing interest in filing patents indeed reflects the country’s increasing R&D activities and the realization that new products are to be IPR-protected. The innovation sensitivity has set in the Public Sector Units (PSU) also. According to the analysis two PSUs figure in the top ten companies that filed maximum number of patens during 2006-07 and 2007-08. But the field is still retained by the education and research organizations. The number of patents filed by prominent education and research organizations far exceeds that of the corporate India. According to the news report, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research tops the list with 1,741 patents filed during FY07 and FY08, Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) stands second with 90 patents followed by Indian Council of Agriculture Research’s (ICAR) 27 patents.

The Indian Patent landscape with so much of patenting activity going on appears to be emerging on the horizon and along with all the proactive campaign going on to develop the infrastructure is surely going to make India a force to reckon with in IP world.