To address the growing pressure from the increasing number of patent applications filed in the country, the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks recently issued an order to appoint 150 examiners of patents. The appointment and posting orders of the patent examiners were initiated with an aim to expedite the process of patent scrutiny and its disposal at the earliest.

According to P H Kurian, Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trademarks, the patent office has already completed the appointment of 98 patent examiners earlier, who have already been assigned post in the patent office. At the same time, the office has also initiated the second phase of recruitment by issuing orders to appoint another 150 examiners to fill up the slot to reduce the work pressure.

At present, there are only 150 patent examiners in the country who examine the patent applications and various other processes from across the country. Seeing shortage of patent examiners, the government had decided to recruit 257 patent examiners out of which the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR's) Recruitment and Assessment Board (RAB) recommended to recruit 248 candidates for the post of patent examiners.

The order to appoint 150 patent examiners was issued by the patents office in the last week of January this year as a follow up to the recruitment drive issued by the government in 2010.

“The only way to deliver quality service in a limited time span was by increasing qualified manpower, especially, considering the increased number of request for patent examinations that we are facing now. The selected officers will join the office once they clear required formalities after which they will be undergoing three months training at the National Institute of Intellectual Property Management (NIIPM), Nagpur,” informed Kurian.

He added that once newly appointed examiners too join the office, they would be able to help in reducing the huge burden of new and pending patent applications without compromising on the quality of work. According to sources, each patent officers examine almost 10 to 15 patent cases in a month, whereas, they get request to examine around 25,000 to 30,000 patent applications in a year.

Under the current capacity 15,000 applications can be processed per annum but with the combined manpower, they expect to do processing of 30,000 patents per annum.