Government today said many steps, including hiring of more examiners, have been taken to reduce pendency of intellectual property applications, besides renaming the main office as 'Controller General of IPR'.
All issues related to IP are handled by the office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks (CGPDTM).
Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha said that a number of decisions have been taken to reducing the time of patent application examinations.
He said that lot of posts which were lying vacant in the patent offices have now been filled up.
"Time taken has been now considerably reduced by making certain activities parallel and not sequential. It will take some time before it actually translates into reality," he said at a CII function here.
Speaking at the event, DIPP Secretary Ramesh Abhishek said that 459 new patent examiners have been appointed and their training would start in seven days.
"Number of examinations have been doubled in the last four months and we have given patent office a deadline and in 18 months time we should be able to matching the best global standards in examination and all the IPR issues," he said.
He said that India is one of the unique countries where all the IPR related issues are now under one umbrella.
Many developed countries like the US are still struggling to bring copyrights under the patent office.
"We have done that. The Semi-conductor Act of Department of Electronics and Information Technology and Copyrights Act of the HRD Ministry have been brought under one umbrella and we are renaming the CGPDTM as the Controller General of IPR now," he said.
He added that lots of work has been done "but the frustration is natural because there has been huge pendency in the past for so many reasons".
Lot of those issues have been addressed "so industry and business will see an enormous improvement in disposal of all this IPR issues in the next few months," he said.
The DIPP Secretary used the word "frustration" because one of the participants in the function vociferously raised the issue of pendency of applications.
As many as 2.37 lakh patent and 5.44 lakh trademark applications were pending with the government as on February 1, mainly due to a shortage of manpower.
