Nearly 8 out of every 10 patent applications filed in India in more than a decade have been by foreigners residing abroad. A majority are by foreign firms, even as the number of Indian applications is slowly increasing.
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More than 5.1 lakh patent applications were filed in the country between 2005-2006 and 2017-18 according to the data compiled by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) as part of the latest Science & Technology Indicators (STI 2019-20) released last month.
And, an analysis of the data shows that more than 76% of these applications were filed by “foreigners resident abroad”, as the government classifies them and the rest were by “Indians.”
Among the patents filed by foreigners, most are individuals or companies from the US, Japan and Germany, accounting for more than 45% of the patents in the said period, while the UK, France, Switzerland, Russia, Netherlands and Italy also had hundreds of applications filed.
With nearly 1.4 lakh applications, patents filed by those from the US alone accounted for more than 27% of total applications filed in the said period.