Education Ministry Looks Forward to Launch National IP Literacy Initiative

The union ministry of education will soon be launching a national IP literacy initiative and is in talks with some other ministries in this regard, a top official said in an ASSOCHAM webinar on Wednesday.

“When we looked at our higher educational institutes, more than 95-97 per cent of our institutes have never filed IP (intellectual property) ever, so we felt that if we have to create a culture of IP creation in these institutes we really need to ensure that we make them literate, train, hand-hold them within these institutes,” said Abhay Jere, chief innovation officer, Ministry of Education at ASSOCHAM’s 2nd IP Conclave & IPTSE Awards 2020 - Nurturing the Next Generation of Innovators through IP.

He blamed the lack of an ecosystem for logically bringing forward ideas and filing them as IPs. "We in the Ministry of Education work with a large number of higher education institutions of more than 45.000, in this country we have more than 10,000 technical institutes and 80 lakh students who do technology, but unfortunately, if you look at the IP filings that happen, it is far below par with our demographic dividend and what our competing countries achieve."

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Talking about IP filings in other parts of the world, he said that in China about 14 lakh IPs are filed on an annual basis followed by the US, where they file about seven lakh IPs, and in India between 45,000-50,000 are filed, of which about 30 per cent are Indians and the remaining NRIs (non-resident Indians).

"This needs to change, as we have 80 lakh students who are just studying technology, and as a whole, we have about 4 core students who are pursuing higher education, but if you look at the IP that comes from educational institutions, there are no more than 2,000-2,500 and these are being generated in only the top-tier I organizations," added Dr Jere.

Noting that the New Education Policy is making some radical changes, he said, "We are now setting up a National Research Foundation in line with the National Science Foundation in the US to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in the right way in our educational institutions."

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The National Startup Policy for Faculty and Students is another important initiative, he said, which the government has taken and is currently hammering a lot on a large number of educational institutions.

“We have conceptualised this national innovation and startup policy because what we realised is that we have no clear incentivisation for faculties and students who get into IP filing, entrepreneurship, converting those IPs into ventures, conversion of knowledge into wealth was not there, so we thought we really need to come up with policy and we unveiled that policy last year and now we are working very-very closely with large number of universities and higher education institutes so that they can adopt these policies,” he said.

Jere further informed, "Last week we trained about 1,500 faculties because in order to maintain IPs, we need to make sure that the monetisation of IP is high, which gives the faculties and students an intrinsic motivation to go ahead and pursue this path, so we made important recommendations in this regard. One of the recommendations is that the institute or university must have a heavy budget for filing IP.'

Talking about another Ministry of Education initiative he said they are training faculties as ambassadors for innovation to ensure IP filing goes up. "We have trained about 6,000 faculties so far and one of the modules of this training is IP filing, management and how we can get it monetised when we are training them."

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The Ministry of Education will ask the Prime Minister to address the ambassadors of innovation, he said. "We believe that if we need to evolve as a knowledge-based society and economy, our higher education institutions will evolve as innovation islands for which we need to ensure that the innovation entrepreneurship ecosystem flourishes in these institutions, and IP filing will be one of the key criteria for us."

O P Gupta, general controller of patents, designs and trademarks, spoke of the need to nurture the next generation of innovators. He urged industry and academia to come up with some sort of scholarship scheme for meritorious students from the lower middle and poor backgrounds, as they generally do not consider taking a risk associated with pure science and R&D activities and instead take up a job opportunity immediately after graduation.

"A long-term perspective where industry supports the program and some scholarships can be instituted for top-level innovators, although the government is already granting PhD students this is a kind of subsistence grant, but some kind of scholarship can be considered where innovators get these scholarships to support themselves until their innovation becomes marketable and enabled products.

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This will motivate a lot of young students and minds to take up activities and risks of this kind in their future lives. He also said that while it used to take six-seven years to examine patent applications in India until about three years ago, and the entire process could take up to about 8-10 years, but after the National IPR Policy was declared in 2016, the government took steps and made efforts to speed up the entire process.

"Today we are already examining applications that were filed as part of natural que in some technology fields in late 2019. We have made a whole aspect of expedited available for people who really need to protect their innovations very quickly, which includes entities like startups because their entire system relies on IP that needs to be protected in a quick time, "Gupta said.