Record patent filings in recent years suggest an expanding research ecosystem. Yet with only a fraction granted and even fewer commercially worked, scale may be outpacing substance.
A robodog made by the Chinese firm Unitree. A claim related to the origins of the robot recently sparked a furore at the India AI Summit. Nuță Lucian/CC BY-SA 2.0
Record patent filings in recent years suggest an expanding research ecosystem. Yet with only a fraction granted and even fewer commercially worked, scale may be outpacing substance.
India’s patent filings have almost doubled in four years, rising from 58,503 in 2020–21 to 110,375 in 2024–25 — an annualised increase of 17.2 percent. Much of this growth is concentrated in a small group of institutions. Between 2020-23, Lovely Professional University filed 7,096 patent applications. Galgotias University, lately in the news for displaying a Made-in ChinaAI robot dog at the India AI Summit, filed 1,752 applications in 2020-22. They outpaced the combined filings of all the Indian Institutes of Technology, which submitted 2,333 applications in 2020-25.
The surge in filings has not been matched by grants. In 2024–25, only 33,504 patents were granted, about one-third of new applications. The year before, 103,057 patents were granted, largely because the patent office cleared older backlogs. Once that catch-up phase ended, grants fell back even as filings continued to rise.
