India will soon have the capability to issue 1,00,000 patents in a year, says Sanjeev Sanyal, Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. Till 2016, India used to issue only 9,000 patents a year, but this will change in the next 18 months.
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India is currently issuing about 35,000 patents. “That's a huge improvement – 9,000 to 35,000. But let me put it in context. America does 350,000 patents a year. And China does about half a million patents a year. Even if you discount the fact that many of the Chinese patents are of poor quality, they're still doing at least 100,000 worth of good-quality patents. In that context, we also need to be doing at least 100,000 patents a year, but we need the capacity of our patent office to do it,” he says.
Based on Sanyal’s working paper documenting the challenges, “processes are not only being changed but there is also hiring of around 500 new patent officers,” he says.
In the working paper, Sanyal spoke about process reforms. Most of the time, people like talking about structural reforms, Sanyal says, where the frameworks are changed altogether. This includes reforms such as getting rid of licensing, introducing inflation targeting framework and GST. In these reforms, there is a clear framework for functioning, but Sanyal says that there is a need to look at process reforms – a class of reforms that only improves functioning and efficiency, under the same framework. “They are usually rather boring reforms – nuts and bolts reforms, changing a rule here, changing a process there, but cumulatively, they are at least as important, if not more important, in the long run,” he says.
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What is happening now, he says, is that they are paying a lot of attention to these types of reforms. The working paper is about legal metrology. Legal metrology laws in India, Sanyal says, relate to “laws relating to weights, measures, labelling and so on”. The problem with these laws, he explains, is that they are “unclear” and “there is unnecessary criminalisation”. “The case we make is that we can make it a lot better while balancing consumer interests as well. We can make the whole system much better,” he says.
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