India now holds the 12th position in the world for the number of patents filed.
In 2004, the patent office in India received around 20,000 patent filings, which included resident and non-resident patent applications, according to a report released by the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
Japan and the US saw the highest filing of patent applications, followed by Europe, the Republic of Korea and China. These five offices accounted for 75 per cent of the patents filed in 2004.
In India, there has been a significant increase in the number of patent applications by residents. Such filings increased by 365 per cent between 1995 and 2004, while filings by non-residents increased by 105 per cent.
Interestingly, though Indians filed a large number of patents in India, they filed very few patent applications as non-residents in other countries. India also has a very low rate of resident patent applications vis-a-vis its population, which currently stands at 7 per million inhabitants.
The average number of patent applications per billion dollars of the GDP in India stands at 2.3. In contrast, the Republic of Korea and Japan have figures of 116.2 and 107.3, respectively, per billion dollars of GDP.
Overall, the number of patent applications filed worldwide has almost doubled to 1,599,000 in 2004 from 884,400 in 1985. The average annual rate of increase in patent applications has been 4.75 per cent since 1995. This is in line with the average annual growth of approximately 5.6 per cent in the world's GDP.
"The increase in the number of patent applications is not unexpected, given the general increase in economic activity in the same period," the report added.
