A surge in patent applications doesn’t mean India has suddenly turned innovative

Data from the Indian patent office shows that patent filings have risen in India from about 40,000 in 2013 to about 60,000 in 2023, driven mainly by Indian entities upping their contribution from 20% of the total to 60%. The Indian patent office has improved its throughput, with the average time taken to grant an approval falling from eight years in 2013 to less than one by 2023.

The overall growth in patent filings was led chiefly by educational institutions, which went from 20% of all filings in 2013 to about 42% in 2023. Filings by individual inventors also show a large increase, while the share of companies dropped from 40% to under 20%.

To get a patent, an invention needs to meet the criteria of possessing novelty, having an inventive step (to exclude straightforward modifications of existing technology) and being of industrial use (having a practical application). These criteria would only be met by serious researchers solving commercially-relevant problems that require substantial spending on research and development (R&D), including capital equipment, salaries and benefits for those involved.

There is no evidence that university R&D expenditure has gone up or that universities have become more effective at research over the past decade, a period during which they doubled their share of patent filings.

Consider this: Lovely Professional University filed 1,418 patents in 2023-24, ahead of the IITs (1,106) and NITs (417). For comparison, the highest number of patents a US university received in 2024 was 540 (for the entire University of California system). MIT was next with 295 patents, while other top universities such as Harvard, Stanford and University of Michigan got under 200 each.

Patents are not subject to blind peer reviews or critical reviews by experts, a process followed by academic publications. There is no measure of intrinsic quality, impact or scientific merit. Since the legal test is all that must be met, a surge in filings need not reflect a wave of genuine innovation.

Many readers might recall seeing advertisements of private universities that highlighted their patent counts and research rankings. Over the past decade, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) has been used to determine such ranks. The formula includes patent data.

The emergence of this formula has created an incentive for universities to file patent applications for publicity purposes with the quality of the underlying research often just a minor consideration. Filing a patent application in India is cheap and at least some universities appear to be taking advantage of it to improve their rankings.

Another indication of this is the lack of success of Indian universities in generating licensing revenues from their patents, despite their dedicated intellectual property (IP) cells and legal support units.

The core mission of universities is to teach and research. Ideally, with appropriate linkages with industry, their patent-protected technological advancements should lead to commercial products and a portion of these earnings should go back to them as royalty. Globally, few universities have succeeded in monetizing their patents consistently.

In the US, university researchers have formed strong links with industry. Transfers of know-how take place through faculty consulting agreements, students from university labs joining the R&D divisions of American companies and professionals moving between academia and industry. This is a big reason why leading US universities have relatively low patent counts while their academic publications tend to be impactful.

In India, it is a cause for concern that patent filings by companies are declining in terms of both their share and absolute numbers, even as total patent filings rise. Perhaps this is not a surprise, given that Indian companies spend little on inhouse R&D. Over the past decade, startups in India have raised billions of dollars, but very little of it has translated to IP-worthy research, as seen in the patent data.

Another indication of our poor innovation scenario is the low number of global patent filings that originate in India, although legal protection in the US, Europe and Japan, which have evolved patent ecosystems—or a filing under the Patent Cooperation Treaty that eases filings in multiple signatory jurisdictions—can help prevent IP infringement abroad. These patents cost more, but the low count of Indian entities with global patent filings shows that we are a long way from globally competitive innovation, regardless of a high local patent count.

The government’s efforts to increase patent office staffing, train examiners and streamline processes have improved process efficiency. However, it would be a mistake to confuse this and other state-led efforts— such as India’s National Intellectual Property Rights policy, Atal Innovation Mission and Kapila—with ‘an innovation-friendly environment’ that encourages innovators to think big and protect their ideas.

The true test of innovation is a thriving IP ecosystem of commercially successful innovative products enabled by patents and an active patent licensing marketplace to go with reliable enforcement and global entities treating India as a key patent-filing jurisdiction. Sadly, India fails on all of these.

The authors are, respectively, a researcher and a research analyst in the high-tech geopolitics programme at The Takshashila Institution.