The Union Cabinet on November 20, 2019 approved the proposal for adoption of Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) programme by the Indian Patent Office (IPO) under the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks, India (CGPDTM) with patent offices of various other interest countries or regions.
Objective
The said programme will initially commence between Japan Patent Office (JPO) and Indian Patent Office on pilot basis for a period of three years only.
Under this Pilot programme, Indian Patent Office may receive patent applications and certain specified technical fields only, namely, Electrical, Electronics, Computer Science, Information Technology, Physics, Civil, Mechanical, Textiles, Automobiles and Metallurgy while JPO may receive applications in all fields of technology.
PPH programme would lead to the following benefits for the Indian IP office:
- Reduction in time to dispose patent applications.
- Reduction in pendency of patent applications.
- Improvement in quality of search and examination of patent applications.
- An opportunity for Indian inventors including MSMEs and Start ups of India to get accelerated examination of their patent applications in Japan.
The ambit of the programme may be extended in future, as decided by the Commerce & Industry Minister. The patent offices will frame their own guidelines for implementation of the programme.
What is Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) ?
A number of bilateral agreements have been signed between patent Offices of different countries to promote worksharing and enable patent applicants to request accelerated processing in the national phase, where patent examiners can make use of the work products from the other Office(s).
In fact, it is a cooperative program between the participating foreign patent offices to expedite the allowance of patent applications that previously received favorable rulings.
