The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : “Awareness of patenting inventions still low”

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Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

“Awareness of patenting inventions still low”

Special Correspondent

The number of patents being filed by Indians is on the rise

CHENNAI: The Intellectual Property (IP) regime is important to a developing country to leverage its knowledge power into economic might, speakers at the World IP day function said here on Monday.

K.M.Vishwanathan, deputy controller of patents and designs, Chennai Patent Office, said that the number of patents being filed by Indians was increasing over the last few years.

However, awareness was still low, especially among academics, he said.

The government was conducting awareness programmes and had also introduced e-filing of patents to make the process easy for entrepreneurs.

The e-filing application had met with a good response until now, Mr. Vishwanathan said.

R. K. Gupta, head, IP Management Division, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), gave the keynote address at the function.

Talking on “IP Management: Issues and Challenges,” Mr. Gupta said that the new slogan for success in industry and academia was “Patent, publish and prosper.”

Intangible assets

He said that “intangible assets” accounted for nearly 80 per cent of total assets since the IP regime came into force, according to a study. In this situation, he added that Indian Patent Office data suggested that research and development institutions and academia contributed only to a small proportion of the patent applications filed in the country.

This state of affairs would not help research in the new regime, he said. Mr. Gupta talked about some of the success stories of patenting including IMTECH’s “clot-specific streptokinase” which had been licensed to a U.S.-based pharma company for Rs.28-crore.

Active encouragement

CSIR was actively encouraging both patenting and the protection of traditional knowledge, he said, pointing to cases like the opposition to U.S. patenting of turmeric for wound healing. But the Council had also decided to deliberately focus only on “commercially and strategically important inventions,” he said.

Some of the focus areas were bio-informatics, nanotechnology, leather and bio-enhancers, he said.

A.B. Mandal, director, CLRI, delivered the welcome address and talked about some of the issues including the protection of products where national interest was involved.

Subhendu Chakrabarti, IP co-ordinator, CLRI, talked about the significance of the World IP Day, celebrated on April 26 each year.

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