- Considering the ramifications of both two-tier filing fee structures and maintenance fees designed to limit the ability of underused patents to impede progress.

- Examining the institutional governance issues surrounding the incorporation of profit-driven analyses into India’s research institutions or the transfer of direct management of public sector patent portfolios to patent licensing corporations.

- Promoting patenting and patent exploitation among individual inventors and SMEs, and considering government-sponsored or -subsidized loan programs and patent prosecution clinics to facilitate foreign applications.

- Reviewing institutional governance at India’s leading research institutions.

- Drafting legislation requiring all government agencies issuing research grants to motivate universities, research institutes, and their individual researchers to seek and exploit patents, and to engage in technology transfer programs with industrial concerns.

- Studying several variants of a new category of IPRs that would motivate the appropriate sharing of traditional knowledge.

# **8 Conclusion**

This study has outlined the next steps in a journey on which India embarked a bit more than a decade ago. Almost immediately upon WTO accession, and impelled at least in part by the rules of TRIPS, India started transforming its thinking away from its previous opposition to patenting as a giveaway to wealthy foreign corporations toward a more liberal recognition that IPRs can promote innovation and development.

India’s new statutory framework appears to have achieved TRIPS compliance—at least on all major points. Its provisions for challenging patents and for forcing licenses promise to eliminate the most egregious anecdotes that fueled the previous antipathy to patenting. Its remaining policy and legislative debates will round out the compromises needed to promote domestic innovation in drug-related industries without impeding the government’s commitment to public health.

The recommendations outlined in this study will take the process the rest of the way. Clear guidelines, better training, a single appellate path, and professional enforcement will promote coherence and consistency throughout the patent system. Improved public awareness of revenuegenerating mechanisms and subsidies on filing fees will enhance incentives for individual and SME participation in the patent system. Formalization of guidelines for patents derived through government research funds—if coupled with necessary changes in institutional governance—will enhance the prospects for technology transfer from laboratories to commercial markets. Traditional knowledge compensation schemes will extend the benefits of IPRs to the poorest members of society—those for whom participation in the existing patenting system is both impractical and inappropriate. And perhaps most important, a new think tank, focused on IP policy, will provide the Government of India with independent guidance and analysis as it tries to understand the best ways to leverage IPRs to meet the challenges facing India’s development.

This inquiry into India’s IP system was prepared as part of the World Bank’s broader study of India’s innovation system. The purpose of the broader study is to derive concrete action items 89