Application Error

Private universities are filing weak patent applications to improve their rankings. The government should change the rules.

The S&P 500 is one of the world’s best-known stock market indexes. The companies in it are worth about $70 trillion altogether. But here is something interesting: about 92% of their value now comes not from things such as buildings, factories and machines, but from intangibles — things you cannot easily touch, such as inventions, brands and data.

This is a big change from 1975, when 83% of their value came from physical things. Experts call this an “economic inversion”. The lesson for India is simple: in the 21st century, a country’s economic strength will depend more and more on its intellectual property (IP) — its inventions, ideas and other original creations.

That makes a recent report about Indian universities worrying. Universities are supposed to be places where people learn, do research and create new things. But some seem to be playing a numbers game with patents.

At first glance, India’s patent numbers look very good. Indian universities filed 7,405 patent applications in 2020-21. By 2024-25, that number had jumped to 37,681, or about 34% of all patent applications filed in India that year.

But there is a catch: many of these applications are not serious. Most never become actual patents. In fact, many are abandoned soon after they are filed.

So why are universities doing this?

One reason is India’s National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), which ranks colleges and universities. NIRF gives points for both patent applications and actual patents. An actual patent gets twice as many points as an application.

That sounds reasonable. But there is a strange loophole. A university that files 50 applications and gets zero patents can still score more points than one that files 10 applications and successfully gets four patents.

This encourages universities to file lots of applications, even if the inventions are not very useful or original.

The numbers show how serious the problem may be. Nine of India’s top 10 patent-filing educational institutions are private universities. The IITs together rank third. But there is an important difference: the IITs have a success rate of more than 60%, while many private institutions have success rates of just 0-2%.

This practice is harmful in two ways. First, it makes university rankings less meaningful. Second, it creates extra work for India’s already understaffed patent office.

Consider the difference in manpower. In 2023, the US had more than 8,000 patent examiners. India had only 221.

India certainly needs more patents. But universities should file them only when they have genuine research and useful new ideas behind them. An umbrella with a small LED light attached to it may be clever, but inventions like this are unlikely to make India richer in the way important new technologies can.

There is an easy way to discourage this numbers game: NIRF should give points only for patents, not for simply filing applications.

India recently showed that it can take action against fake or poor-quality research papers. It should now do the same with patents.

The goal should not be to file the most patent applications. It should be to create the best inventions.

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