761 Ayurveda patents filed in 3 years, only 86 granted

New Delhi, July 22

The Ayurveda drug industry has been slow to show novelty of new products over the past three years, with only 86 patents being granted against 761 applications filed.

That is a patent application approval rate of only 11.30 per cent.

The Minister of Ayush Sarbanand Sonowal on Friday informed the Parliament that the Office of Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks exclusively deals with processing and grant of patents in different fields of various technological aspects of Ayurvedic medicine.

“The patent applications filed before the office of CGPDTM having Ayurvedic background must ascertain whether the claimed invention is novel, inventive and industrially applicable and should not fall under the known prior domain knowledge of Ayurveda. Prior existing knowledge on Ayurveda is not a patentable subject matter as per section 3 of the Patents Act, 1970 (as amended), Sonowal said.

As per the information received from the Office of Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks, the number of patent applications filed and number of granted patents having Ayurveda-related proprietary knowledge during the year 2019 to 2022 were 761 and 86 patents were granted.

In 2019, 178 applications were filed seeking patents for products with Ayurveda-related proprietary knowledge and 36 were granted; of the 256 patent applications filed in 2020, 48 were approved. In 2021 and 2022, respectively, only one patent each was approved as against 242 and 185 applications, respectively, that were filed.