EduAsiaNews, New Delhi — India’s higher education innovation ecosystem is gripped by a troubling paradox. On one hand, patent application figures are surging sharply; on the other, the quality and commercial viability of those patents remain far from satisfactory. According to data from the Indian Patent Office, total patent filings nearly doubled in four years, rising from 58,503 in 2020–2021 to 110,375 in 2024–2025, at an annual growth rate of 17.2 percent.
Government incentives and the National Institutional Ranking Framework’s (NIRF) emphasis on research output have placed India among the world’s top six countries in patent activity. Yet this surge in numbers has sparked a fundamental question among academics and policymakers: are Indian universities genuinely innovating, or merely chasing figures for the sake of institutional rankings?
The most striking phenomenon is the dominance of several private universities at the top of patent filing lists, outpacing even India’s most prestigious engineering institutions. Between 2020 and 2023, Lovely Professional University filed 7,096 patent applications, while Galgotias University filed 1,752 applications between 2020 and 2022, figures that surpass the combined total of all Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which filed only 2,333 applications throughout 2020–2025.
Galgotias University later came under intense scrutiny after a Chinese-made robot dog displayed at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 was claimed as its own innovation, leading to the removal of the university’s booth and a public apology from the institution. Ironically, internal sources revealed that filing large numbers of patents, however costly, is the most effective way to game the NIRF scoring system, which measures only one metric: the number of patents filed.
Behind the filing boom, patent approval rates remain strikingly low. In 2024–2025, of all applications received, only 33,504 patents were granted — roughly one-third of new applications submitted. Of those, only 10,682 were awarded to Indian applicants; the majority went to foreign companies, many of them entering through the Patent Cooperation Treaty route. Even among granted patents, only 1.59 percent were actually commercialised as of 1 April 2025. Indian Research Watch bluntly described the trend as a “mindless race” in which applications deemed “non-meritorious” are still sufficient to satisfy evaluation criteria. These figures suggest that the current system incentivises filing over real-world application.
Analysts point to the national ranking system as the root of the problem. Kartikeya Srivastava, a final-year LL.B. student at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) Bangalore and a former freelance patent research analyst, argued that the NIRF has created a ranking system that inadvertently drives institutions to flood the Patent Office with low-quality applications in pursuit of higher publication scores. “This formula represents a structural failure that has turned India’s patent system into a weapon against its own innovation objectives,” he wrote in an analysis published by SpicyIP on 20 February 2026.
A 2025 KPMG India report on NIRF also acknowledged that the quantity of research output frequently overshadows quality, and that perception-based metrics within the ranking framework remain subjective. India’s research and development investment currently stands at just 0.64 percent of GDP, well below the global average of 2.67 percent and lagging behind the United States (3.59 percent), China (2.56 percent), and South Korea (5.21 percent). Although India now ranks fourth among the most-represented countries in the QS World University Rankings 2026 with 54 institutions, a fivefold increase since 2015, that global ranking achievement does not automatically reflect the true depth of innovation. Without comprehensive structural reform, from revising NIRF incentive schemes and strengthening patent examiner capacity to building more robust commercialisation pathways, India’s patent surge risks becoming a misleading illusion of progress. (**)
( Sources: The Diplomat, SpicyIP (spicyip.com), Down to Earth, Indian Research Watch, KPMG India 2025 Report on NIRF, ANI News, and the Indian Patent Office (ipindia.gov.in )
