Strengthening Intellectual Property Rights for Knowledge Sector Growth

Ideas, inventions, songs, software code, molecules that cure disease – the modern economy runs on intangibles. Whoever creates them needs a legal system that recognises their ownership, protects their rights, and rewards their effort. That is precisely what Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) do. For knowledge-intensive sectors like pharmaceuticals, information technology, biotechnology, and creative industries, a well-designed IPR regime is not a bureaucratic luxury – it is the foundation on which innovation, investment, and economic growth stand. Over the last two decades, India has quietly but decisively overhauled its IPR architecture to support this knowledge economy.

Why intellectual property matters for the knowledge economy 🔗

Knowledge-driven sectors depend on long gestation periods, heavy research spending, and uncertain returns. A pharmaceutical company may spend a decade and billions of dollars developing a single molecule. A software firm may invest years designing an algorithm. Without protection, a competitor could copy the output the day it launches, making the original investment commercially unviable. IPR solves this problem by giving creators a time-bound exclusive right to use, license, or sell their innovation.

This protection produces three economic effects that matter deeply for a country like India. It encourages domestic research and development, because firms know their investment can be recouped. It attracts foreign direct investment into technology-intensive sectors, because investors trust that their assets will not be expropriated. And it ensures creators – whether a pharmaceutical scientist in Hyderabad, a software developer in Bengaluru, or a weaver registering a Geographical Indication in Varanasi – receive fair recognition for their work.

India’s IPR journey: from protectionism to integration 🔗

India’s intellectual property framework has travelled a long distance. The Patents Act, 1970 replaced the colonial-era Indian Patents and Designs Act, 1911, and marked a conscious pivot towards national development priorities. It permitted only process patents – not product patents – in pharmaceuticals and food, which allowed Indian firms to legally reverse-engineer patented drugs and manufacture them through alternative processes. This single policy choice gave birth to India’s generic pharmaceutical industry, which today supplies affordable medicines to dozens of countries.

The next major inflection point came with globalisation. When India joined the World Trade Organization in 1995, it accepted the obligations under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). This required a fundamental restructuring of the patent regime.

Recognising product and process patents 🔗

The most significant shift came through the Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005. India used its full ten-year TRIPS transition period and began granting product patents for pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, and food from 1 January 2005. Earlier, only the process of making a drug could be patented; now the drug molecule itself enjoys twenty-year protection.

Importantly, Indian policymakers did not simply copy Western patent law. They built in safeguards to balance innovation with public health. Section 3(d) of the amended Act prevents the patenting of minor modifications to known substances unless they demonstrate enhanced therapeutic efficacy, a provision designed to block “evergreening.” Compulsory licensing provisions allow the government to authorise generic production during emergencies or when a patented drug is priced unaffordably. The Supreme Court’s 2013 judgment in the Novartis case, which denied a patent for a variant of the cancer drug Glivec, gave Section 3(d) real teeth.

The Intellectual Property Appellate Board and its evolution 🔗

A robust IPR regime needs not just good laws but efficient adjudication. The Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) was constituted on 15 September 2003 to hear appeals against decisions of the Registrar of Trade Marks and Patents. Its jurisdiction was later extended to cover patents in 2007 and copyright in 2017. The idea was to create a specialised tribunal staffed with technical experts who could decide complex IP disputes faster than general courts.

In practice, the IPAB struggled with long vacancies, delays in appointments, and case backlogs. The Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021, enacted on 13 August 2021, dismantled the IPAB and transferred its jurisdiction back to the High Courts. In response, the Delhi High Court established a dedicated Intellectual Property Division, followed by similar divisions at the Madras and Calcutta High Courts. Three benches of the Delhi High Court now hear IPR matters exclusively, and IP cases are treated as commercial cases with strict procedural timelines, which has made jurisprudence more streamlined and consistent.

Computerisation of IP administration 🔗

Modern IP administration depends on digital infrastructure. The Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks has been steadily digitising its operations. Since 2016, all Indian Patent Office branches have been upgraded with IT infrastructure to speed up application processes, reduce delays, and enable data sharing with applicants and the public. In 2018, the Patent Office integrated the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Digital Access Services and Centralised Access to Search and Examination platforms. E-filing, online status tracking, and digital registers for designs have drastically reduced paperwork and pendency. Examination pendency for new design applications, for instance, has been brought down to a single month.

The National IPR Policy and its impact 🔗

The single most comprehensive governance initiative has been the National Intellectual Property Rights Policy, launched in 2016 under the slogan “Creative India; Innovative India”. Prior to 2016, India’s IPR regime was fragmented across multiple government departments, and the country ranked 81st in the Global Innovation Index in 2015. The new policy consolidated administrative responsibility under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and articulated seven strategic objectives covering awareness, legal framework, administration, commercialisation, enforcement, human capital, and international engagement.

Concrete gains since 2016 🔗

The numbers show that institutional reform can deliver. The Indian Patent Office crossed a historic milestone in 2024 by granting over one lakh patents in a single year for the first time, while patent applications grew by 180%, design applications by 266%, and Geographical Indications applications surged by 380% between 2020-21 and 2024-25. As of 2024-25, 697 Geographical Indications have been registered, protecting products ranging from Darjeeling tea to Banarasi sarees to Kanchipuram silk.

India’s rise in the Global Innovation Index – from 81st in 2015 to 39th in recent years – partly reflects this administrative transformation. Since 2023, patent filings grew by 15.7%, which is higher than any other top twenty economy, marking five consecutive years of double-digit growth.

Supporting startups and small innovators 🔗

Patent filing fees and legal costs historically deterred individual inventors and small firms. The Scheme for Facilitating Startups Intellectual Property Protection (SIPP) addresses this gap. Under this flagship DPIIT scheme, the Central Government bears the entire facilitator fees for any number of patents, trademarks, or designs that a recognised startup may file, with startups paying only statutory fees; the scheme has been extended until 2026. Trademark filing fees were also reduced by fifty percent for startups through amendments to the Trademark Rules in 2017.

Complementing SIPP, Technology and Innovation Support Centres (TISCs) have been set up through a cooperative agreement with the World Intellectual Property Organization. These centres give Indian innovators, especially those outside metros, access to quality technology information and help them manage their IP assets professionally.

Awareness and capacity building 🔗

Laws and portals mean little if creators do not know they exist. Government schemes such as the Scheme for Pedagogy and Research in IPRs for Holistic Education and Academia (SPRIHA) and the National Intellectual Property Awareness Mission (NIPAM) are spreading IP literacy, with SPRIHA establishing IPR Chairs in over 35 universities. The Atal Innovation Mission has supported incubators that have generated thousands of entrepreneurs and created tens of thousands of jobs, many of whom now use IPR as a strategic business tool.

Why this matters for pharmaceuticals and IT 🔗

The pharmaceutical sector is perhaps the clearest test case. Stronger patent protection after 2005 was expected to encourage more domestic research into new drugs. The picture is mixed. Major Indian firms like Sun Pharma, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, and Cipla have substantially expanded their R&D budgets and filed patents globally. At the same time, compulsory licensing flexibility and Section 3(d) have kept essential medicines affordable. India continues to be the pharmacy of the developing world, supplying affordable generics for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria.

For the IT and software industry, copyright protection, trade secrets law, and patent protection for software-related inventions have enabled India to become a global hub for software services and, increasingly, for product innovation. Startups in fintech, edtech, and deeptech rely on trademarks to build brands and on patents to protect algorithms and hardware designs.

Persistent challenges 🔗

The reform story is far from complete. Patent examination backlogs, while reduced, remain significant. Enforcement against piracy and counterfeiting is uneven across states. India continues to appear on the United States Trade Representative’s Priority Watch List because of disagreements over patent standards, data exclusivity, and copyright enforcement. Cultural factors in academia, where publication is valued over patenting, and limited industry-university collaboration still constrain the commercialisation of research. Judicial capacity at High Courts handling IP matters will need to be expanded further as case volumes grow.

Policymakers also face the perennial balancing act: protecting innovation incentives without pricing life-saving medicines out of reach, welcoming foreign investment without ceding policy space on public health, and harmonising with global standards without surrendering the flexibilities TRIPS explicitly allows.

Governance as the real engine 🔗

Behind every statistic lies an administrative decision: to digitise a registry, to recruit technical members, to train a judge, to subsidise a startup’s filing fees. The Indian IPR story is ultimately a story about governance – about how a complex state machine reoriented itself over two decades to support a knowledge economy. The partnership between the Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry, DPIIT, the Controller General’s office, High Courts, state governments, and international bodies like WIPO shows what coordinated institutional reform can deliver. It is a reminder that laws on paper are only the beginning; what turns them into engines of prosperity is the unglamorous, daily work of administration.

What do you think? Has India struck the right balance between rewarding innovation through stronger patent protection and protecting public access to essential medicines and affordable technology? And as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and digital platforms reshape what can even be owned, is the current IPR framework ready for the next wave of knowledge-economy questions?

References

1. https://advance.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.31124/advance.174884616.69325471/v1
2. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-8102-7_11
3. https://www.tinnitusjournal.com/articles/harmonizing-access-to-medicine-exploring-indias-process-patent-in-intellectual-property-rights-amid-global-pressures-30127.html
4. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f6cd591c-8cc7-4f82-be70-730b486e9c15
5. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4314293
6. https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/positive-developments-reforming-ip-regime-india-2024-05-06_en
7. https://cplan.in/indias-national-intellectual-property-rights-policy-a-comprehensive-framework-for-innovation-and-development/
8. https://www.thegeostrata.com/post/strengthening-india-s-intellectual-property-rights-regime-legal-safeguards-for-innovation
9. https://www.investindia.gov.in/blogs/safeguarding-innovation-governments-focus-startups-intellectual-property-protection