Restoring weighted tax deductions and adopting a petty patents regime can foster firm-level innovative activity critical for competitiveness, points out Nagesh Kumar.
Research and development (R&D) spending by BSE 100 companies has grown steadily, rising from 0.89 per cent of revenue in FY20 to 1.32 per cent in FY24, averaging around 1 per cent over the period in-between, according to data compiled from Bloomberg and company annual reports. Also, these companies more than doubled their R&D spending in absolute terms over these five years: From Rs 25,041 crore to Rs 63,072 crore. While this reflects a prioritisation of innovation, corporate R&D investment remains relatively conservative.
India has become the third most innovative lower middle-income economy in the world.
Leading Internet firm rediff.com India has won a cyber-squatting case against a Latin American entity for unauthorised use of a "confusingly similar" domain name.
India would join the World Intellectual Property Organization's Madrid System for the International Registration of Marks this year.
The data for 2009 reveals that Indian firms and scientists filed one-tenth of patent applications filed by their Chinese counterparts during the same period.
China, for example, filed 7,946 patent applications last year, compared to 761 by India.
Francis Gurry is expected to be the new head of the World Intellectual Property Organization. Gurry, who is now a deputy director-general at WIPO from Australia, is understood to have won a nail-biting election on Tuesday to replace the agency's controversial head, Kamil Idris.
Sitharaman also highlighted the steps taken by the government to achieve ease of doing business by digitisation of approvals and making more stable policies to make India a favourable destination for investors.
India was the second largest filer of international trademark applications among the BRICS nations in 2014.
China has consistently spent more than 2% of GDP on R&D while India's expenditure on R&D has stagnated around 0.7% of GDP. Can our government shore up resources so that we hit the R&D expenditure target of 2% of GDP set out by the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy of 2013, asks Chidambaran G Iyer, Senior Fellow, Pahle India Foundation.
India had been engaged in a contentious battle with the US over the issue, especially in the pharmaceutical sector.
A certain segment of the US pharma industry have become vocal about Indian policies on domestic content requirements and IPR.
India in the last five-seven years did not do as well as it could to push progress.
Ajit Balakrishnan recalls some lessons from the last time people talked of 'convergence' -- the mid-1990s.
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