A burgeoning IP landscape

India is bucking the global trend in IP filings and is well placed in key innovation areas, say Ashwin Julka and Bisman Kaur of Remfry & Sagar.

Over the past decade, IP filings at the Indian IP Office have more than doubled. According to WIPO’s World IP Indicators 2024, India now ranks fourth globally for trademark applications, sixth for patent filings, and 11th for design applications.

While global trademark filings fell by 1.3% in 2023, India saw a 5% increase.

Patent applications in India rose 17.2%, making it a key contributor to the 2.7% global growth in patent filings.

The Indian IP Office’s new ‘IP Dashboard’ confirms these trends. In 2024–25, India recorded a nearly 20% rise in patent filings to reach a new high of 1,10,372 applications and a 16% increase in trademark filings to reach 5,52,409 filings.

Design filings saw the sharpest growth—up 34% in 2022–23 and 42% in 2024–25.

This surge is largely driven by domestic applicants, reflecting India’s growing innovation capacity. Now the third largest startup ecosystem, India has moved from 81st in the Global Innovation Index (2015) to 39th in 2024.

Additionally, according to WIPO’s recent Patent Landscape Report on Generative Artificial Intelligence, India ranks fifth globally in generative AI patents published between 2014 and 2023, behind only China, the US, South Korea, and Japan.

IP and business

IP assets are integral to the value, strategy, and competitiveness of modern businesses, and filing trends can be instructive in understanding the interconnectedness of economies.

Figures related to India show that in 2023, nearly 69% of all Indian overseas patent filings went to the US (India’s top export market).

The European Patent Office, South Africa and China (India’s second largest trading partner) followed at 6%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively.

The US was also the most preferred market for Indian brands looking to expand overseas, with 8.3% of foreign trademark applications filed at the USPTO in 2023.

By contrast, only 3% of outbound US trademark filings came to India. China and the UK received a 4.2% share of foreign Indian filings each.

Notably, nearly 70% of such filing activity sought to protect brands connected with goods and services had a minority share.

Today’s prevailing political and business landscape make it worthwhile to note that despite accounting for just 2.2% of India’s GDP, the US remains a key innovation and consumption hub for Indian companies—an important market to protect and monetise ideas.

Shifts in trade ties on account of tariffs could reshape IP filing trends, making this a space to watch.

Transformative trends in enforcement

The establishment of specialised IP divisions at the Delhi High Court and Madras High Court, and more recently at the Calcutta and Himachal Pradesh High Courts, has streamlined judicial processes, reducing the time taken to resolve disputes.

The impact is measurable from the fact that, at the Delhi High Court, interim injunctions are now granted within one to two months, compared to the three to six months taken previously.

Similarly, final orders are issued within three years instead of five.

Further proof is had from the Delhi High Court Intellectual Property Division Second Annual Report 2023-24.

From January 2023 to June 2024, the Delhi High Court IP Division disposed of 2,026 fresh cases, surpassing the 1,917 new cases instituted during the same period, reducing overall pendency of IP cases to 3,742 cases by the end of June 2024.

Judicial backlogs are a big pain point in India and the trend of disposal of suits surpassing the institution of suits is extremely encouraging.

Stricter enforcement of IP rights is also visible in the fact that not only is granting damages and monetary awards in IP suits becoming regular practice, but the imposition of high penalties is also becoming more frequent.

In April 2024, damages of $29 million were granted by the Delhi High Court to Ericsson in its SEP dispute with Lava followed by the May 2024 ruling in a patent infringement suit— Communication Components Antenna v Mobi Antenna Technologies, wherein damages of $26 million were awarded to the plaintiff.

In February this year, damages of $39 million were imposed on Amazon in a trademark infringement dispute.

The trends discussed above, supported ably by legislative reforms and government policy, including its Start-Up India, Digital India, Make in India, IndiaAI Mission, and the Atal Innovation Mission campaigns, bode well for transforming India into a global innovation leader in the days ahead.

Ashwin Julka is managing partner and Bisman Kaur is of counsel at Remfry & Sagar. They can be contacted at ashwin.julka@remfry.com and bisman.kaur@remfry.com