Patents crucial for India to bridge tech gap with US and China

In the world of innovation, India has an old reputation: it remains a minnow when it comes to patents. If over 600,000 applications were filed in the US and more than twice that number in China in 2017, in India, there were only 46,600 — and patent grants came to just over 12,000 in a country of 1.37 billion people. In a nondescript building on a narrow, congested lane in central Mumbai, the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks is bent on changing this. It wants to make filing patents cheaper and granting patents faster, which, it hopes will result in more applications.