India will promptly cooperate with countries like Hong Kong and United Kingdom for IP Exchange, where individuals and commercial entities both in India and overseas will be able to buy and sell intellectual property rights across various sectors. The ministry of science and technology will be developed this IP Exchange through the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC).

IP rights allow a person or company to have exclusive rights to use their own plans, ideas, or other intangible assets exclusively at least for a specific period of time.

NRDC chairman and managing director H. Purushotham said that they have been mandated with the task of creation of the proposed IP exchange and the process will take around 8-9 months for collecting data and setting up the exchange and they are already undertaking exercise of collecting necessary data and information on patents filed worldwide on multiple technologies, predominantly on agriculture and allied sectors. And also he said that the idea is to exploit the commercial viability of patents in India which usually get expired as they don’t get platform to sell.

According to annual report of 2015-16, India witnessed about 30% increase in filing of intellectual property applications compared with previous year. According to report, the India’s research and development spend is estimated to reach $71.5 billion by 2016 from $66.49 billion in 2015. Number of multinational corporations with R&D centers in India has grown during 2010-16, the workforce in MNC R&D centers increased at a CAGR of 10.08% and reached 363,000, which is estimated to further increase to 387,000 by 2017 in India.

The Author is a Patent Specialist from MR Technollect Solutions (www.MRTechnollect.com)