NAGPUR, SEPT 28: There is an urgent need to focus more on patents research to be able to protect the country's resources, said Dr J D Dhake, Director, Laxminarayan Institute of Technology.Delivering the key note address at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Foundation Day, organised at the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Sunday, Dr Dhake said, in the last five years CSIR has no doubt concentrated on patents research, but there is a need to maintain this progress.What is needed at the moment is to inculcate patents by harbouring intellectual property rights culture in the country. The country needs a dedicated team of researchers. The 42 CSIR research laboratories in the country must be able to co-ordinate with international labs to improve its research activities, he said.Praising the efforts of the Director General of CSIR, R A Mahashelkar in exhorting the CSIR research workers to go for more work on patents research, Dhake said in the last fiveyears ever since the new DG took over, CSIR has been able to boost patents research.Earlier, the Indian scientists were only happy with getting their research papers published. `Publish or perish' was the motto then. This was a mindset and no worthwhile research was being carried out in the country. As such there was no effort to train scientists to write patents. What's worse, in most of the universities and educational institutes, research works were only being duplicated. This was also a great drain on the country's scarce capital resources.Mahashelkar, however, changed all that by focusing on patents research and showed how money could be generated from this. He proved the dictum,`patent, publish and prosper'. The number of patents filed in the country in '94 was just 10. This increased to 58 in 1995-96 when Mahashelkar took over. In '97-98 as many as 97 patents were filed and last year there were as many as 110. The patents filed in the country is still inadequate considering its size andpopulation and great number of scientific talent present.According to Dhake, CSIR had set up a target of filing around 500 patents by the year 2001. The progress is still slow though, as only 350 patents have been filed so far. The foreign exchange revenue target planned through the patents for the year 2001 was 40 million dollars. Till last year, only 4 million dollars have been earned, which is a great setback, but the CSIR is trying its level best to achieve the target, he said.
