Expediting Patent Grant ? A long Pending issue
Since the Indian Patent act was amended in the year 2005 to comply with international law and for making international filing easy, the number of patent filed in India started rising gradually. As on date around 50-60 thousand patents are filed collectively in all four office in India. Before 2013 recruitment of examiners, the number of examiners and controllers collectively in all four offices were not more then hundred. Around 250 examiners were recruited in the year 2013.
Most of these examiners have left the job after been trained by using government fund due to attractive packages offered by companies and patent firms. Therefore, the deadlock which was for about 1lakh patents has risen to 2.46lakh and more as on date. We try to look around to see how patents are been proceeded in other countries in such a short time. What we found was that in most of the countries the examiners are in thousands, where we have still in hundreds.
Adding to the existing burden, in 15 October, 2013 Indian Patent Office starts functioning as International Searching Authority and International Preliminary Examining Authority. The same bunch of examiners is used for conducting PCT Searches and Examination. No separate recruitment is made. This has further burdened the examiners and numbers of patents in the deadlock is rising. Still patents applied in 2010 are not been examined.
Recently an advertisement by the Indian patent for the recruitment of patent 493 examiners July 2015 consequently after intervene by our Mr. Primer Minister second consequent advertisement was published on 12th Oct. 2015 for the post of 263 examiner. So far the recruitment procedure is still on and no one is still on board.Countries like China, USA and the like have more than 8,000 to 10,000 examiners. This is a reason why they get patent granted in the maximum 1.5 year from the date of filing. These efforts made by the Indian Patent Office still seems to be a shortfall. Keeping the hopes alive and with huge expectation from these examiner, we expect some lesser delay for the grant.