Student innovation not taken seriously in India
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 25 January 2010, 15:44 IST   |    1245 Comments
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Student innovation not taken seriously in India
Ahmedabad: Technical institutes in India churn out around six lakh students every year but none of their innovative projects are considered worthy of patent. Projects like the 'black box' system installed in cars in U.S. and UK to detect a genuine accident is also done by a group of students from Latur-based Women Polytechnic Institute in Maharashtra but was not recognized, reports Times of India. "Did these Latur students not deserve recognition for their idea? This project was not considered worthy enough for an auto show here," said Anil Gupta, IIM-A professor and founder of National Innovation Foundation (NIF) and Sristi. Along with Gupta, 12 other experts gathered at the annual intellectual property rights (IPR) workshop at Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA) and deliberated on various issues that affect patenting in our country. Patent attorney of Klarquist Sparkman, Gregory Maurer, said that patent examiner offices in our country should be armed with large research databases to protect rights of individual inventors. "This is important as people may steal processes or technologies from public domain in one area and then apply for patents in another country." Technical member of intellectual property appellate board (IPAB) S Chandrashekhar, added, "We have managed to upload almost two lakh innovations on our website for access for the public. Today one of our prime concerns is the process of 'evergreening' where major pharmaceutical companies by making minor changes in their present products apply for patents." However, Gupta believed that a major shift in mindset would be required to bring about the change. "Imagine in terms of castor seeds or physillium seeds, which has thousands of uses in traditional medicines, drug industry and herbal market, India has just two patents in physillium while the US has 328 and in comparison to five patents in castor seeds with India, there are 399 patents with individuals and other countries. Is this not shameful?" Speaking of innovations, Gupta said the poor may be at the bottom of the economic pyramid but are top of the "innovation" pyramid. "The grass-root innovations are frugal in technology, hence they are affordable, energy efficient and accessible - where else can you find this talent pool. In fact, UGC and AICTE should ban educational institutions those borrow agricultural innovations of poor farmers and label them as their innovations." To trigger innovation spirit of students in India, SiliconIndia has launched All India Engineering Project Innovation Contest (AIEPIC, pronounced as eye-pic) which aims to identify, promote and reward outstanding engineering talent across India. 30 thousand students have already registered for AIEPIC. This contest is expected to bring together more than six lakh students from 3000+ colleges across India to showcase their projects. Next week onwards we will bring you one innovative project every day as we start a new series to recognize various innovation project done by Indian students. You can check more information about this unique platform at https://www.siliconindia.com/aiepic/

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