India must go for the jugular, the IP-5

Just like asserting our stakes in the Security Council, India must enlarge its patent office to penetrate the IP-5 club.

India has successfully managed the COVID-19 global pandemic domestically and helped numerous countries worldwide. Having developed strong socio-economic credentials in the comity of nations, India is now in a position to endorse traditional medicine and prevent the stoppable patent wars as India did for turmeric. To that end, India has now established the World Health Organization’s Global Centre for Traditional Medicine and thereby have made ourselves indispensable in this domain. This practice of setting important nodal intergovernmental bodies in India and making India central to various global pursuits needs replication in many domains, especially where India can take global leadership.

Generating and protecting intellectual property, without doubt, is a cornerstone of our Aatmanirbhar Bharat ambition. But, there are systemic issues at hand waiting to be solved. "Why India Needs to Urgently Invest in its Patent Ecosystem", a white paper published by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, has aptly articulated one systemic issue: the necessity to expand the Indian Patent Office and make it more efficient. Things have progressed in India’s favour but there is a long way to go and we will have to keep preparing for the longer marathon.

In the recently released Global Innovation Index 2022 (GII-2022), India has steeply climbed from 81st position in 2015 to now 40th position in 2022. The GII is curated by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialised agency of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UN-ECOSOC), one of the six principal organs of the UN. In 2022, India has ranked first in patent applications in lower-middle-income countries and tops in Central and South Asia. India’s excellent performance has been made possible due to favourable governmental policies for R&D and manufacturing. Keeping with this upward march, the Indian Government now is endeavouring to make it into GII’s top 25.

However, aspiring to enter the top-25 cannot be of interest only to the Ministry of Commerce. A whole-of-government approach is must. Why so? Firstly, India is aiming to become an upper-middle income economy by 2047, and merely topping among the low-income economies should not gratify us. Becoming upper-middle income economy and topping GII in that category needs comprehensive governmental strategy. Secondly, many countries in South and Central Asia are under economic stress and, with due respect to their aptitudes, they have yet not been globally competitive in terms of innovations. So, we must not again be pleased for doing better than them.

India's patent filing statistics had several chronic issues. The foremost of it was the higher number of patents applied by non-Indian entities in Indian office than domestic applicants. 2022 saw a pleasant reversal of this situation, when the Office noted that Indian applicants grew over their non-Indian counterparts for the first time in 11 years. The number of patents filed has increased by more than 50% - from 42763 in 2014-15 to 66440 in 2021-22. During the same period, the number of patents granted has grown nearly five times, from 5978 in 2014-15 to 30,474 in 2021-22. These are positive trends. But we must apprehend that our statistics are far behind the world’s top 5 IP applicants.

This gap must give us sleepless nights because we cannot face Abhimanyu’s fate, who during the 18-day war was able to pierce through the Chakra Vyuha but could not come out of it. We will positively enter the top-3 economies of the world in the next 10 years, but should do all that it takes to prevent coming out of these top rankings. And what would it take? Knowing how to generate intellectual property, protect it, and reigning over its global governance.

India aims to become a USD 10 trillion national economy by 2034 and a USD 1-trillion digital economy by 2026. Indian states, some more than others, will have to overcome the habit of giving doles for myopic electoral goals and begin contributing to these national targets. To that end, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh are striving to generate USD 0.5 to 1 trillion gross state domestic product during the 2025-2035 phase. These contributions will happen only by bettering ease-of-doing-business parameters and encouraging domestic IP-generating entities. And, coming back to the reforms, a patent office that does not carry out geopolitical and geoeconomic analyses of the global IP governance landscape will only under-deliver. 

India's security planners now realize that they cannot merely view the present-day national security needs in the milieu of military security. National security also entails dominance over technological capabilities and their security, dextrous foreign policy, and on the alert homeland and economic security. To that end, India must not only set its sight on the Security Council, which it deserves, but also on another lesser-known group of five. 

In 2007, these five – the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA), the European Patent Office, and the United States Patent and Trade Mark Office (USPTO) - together formed a combine known as the ‘IP-5’. These five contribute to more than 80% of all global patent applications and 95% of applications filed under the 1970 Patent Cooperation Treaty. In the past 15 years, the IP-5 has harmonized the patents filed among themselves and promoted a cost-effective, user-friendly, and efficient patent application and granting mechanism. In doing so, this influential but recluse body has governed the global IP landscape.

So how did these five end up joining hands in IP-5? These five patent offices have been post-World War II champions of Industry 3.0 technologies, medical instruments, precision instruments, computers, digital communications, audio-visual devices, electrical and electronic gadgets, transportation systems, and energy technologies. Except for China, the rest four of the IP-5 are US' strategic partners, many from NATO; therefore, their hand-in-hand partnership has benefited them collectively. China cannot be seen in isolation. Its economic growth and manufacturing capacities have transpired with wilful investments from the other four. 

India will not supersede China’s locus as a global manufacturing hub thoughtlessly. We will be dexterous with our innovations to bypass resources that are inaccessible to us. To put it simply, we will focus more on sodium-ion over lithium-ion when it comes to energy storage, solar over fossil fuels, and so on. India's growth will happen from our innate worldviews and comprehension. We will champion technologies that will have constructive consequences. To that end, a bigger Indian patent office must also become India's global IP governance patrol that will directly contribute to our geostrategic decision-making. This thought has not been put across by Indian opinion shapers.

The United Nations, which has had a long presence in India, never established a WIPO external office. Outside its main headquarters in Geneva, WIPO has been running external offices in Singapore, Russia, Nigeria, Japan, China, Brazil, and Algeria. An India aiming to enter the top 25 of the GII rankings should invite WIPO set up an external office. Not only a futuristic step, but a WIPO office in India will also have historical significance.

The first president of ECOSOC, the parent organization of WIPO, was Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar. Mudaliar was a brilliant technocrat, the last Diwan of Kingdom of Mysore, and a Viceroy's Executive Council of India member with commerce and supplies portfolio. He was instrumental in instituting the Council on Industrial and Scientific Research in 1942, which today ranks consistently among India's top patent applicants. Despite a exceptional relation with a then new ECOSOC, India could not capitalize on this early lead. Chinmaya Gharekhan, a well-known diplomat, was the only Indian presiding over ECOSOC in 1990. In contrast, next-door Pakistan chaired ECOSOC six times but could not reap any socio-economic benefit from it. India's apathetic outlook and its ignorance or unwillingness to make an impact on global IP governance kept our socio-economic progress sluggish. Only time will tell what we have lost all this while. At times, it is important to accept that we have been disoriented only to get rid of it.

Even a larger and efficient patent office will not help India’s cause if it cannot join global IP governance bodies and make India’s impact felt. The expanded office must strive to become a platform for economic and technology diplomacy and a sentinel feeding into our national geostrategic decision-making. A true Vishwaguru knows how to generate, protect and regulate knowledge.

This blog was published in the September 2022 edition of Science India magazine published by Vijnana Bharati.