The 2014 Rules doubled official fees for large entities and raised them 60% for individuals. In exchange, stakeholders got something they had asked for: a middle tier for smaller businesses, which had previously been paying the same fees as multinationals.
What the Rules did
The Patent (Amendment) Rules, 2014 came into effect at the end of February 2014. The public notice from the Controller General summarised them as dealing with a revised official fee structure and the inclusion of a new applicant category, the “small entity”.
The consultation
Draft rules had been published for comment on 12 June 2013. Those drafts proposed a fee hike but did not include the small entity category. Stakeholders suggested separate and subsidised fees for applicants falling within medium and small scale industries, and reduced fees for individual applicants. It was pleasant to see some of those suggestions taken up.
The three tiers
The Rules created three categories: individuals, small entities, and entities other than small entities.
- Individuals faced a 60% hike.
- The fees previously payable by “applicants other than individuals” became the fees for the small entity.
- Legal entities other than small entities faced a 100% increase — double what they had been paying.
The biotechnology problem
The worst affected were applicants for biotechnology inventions, particularly those submitting voluminous gene sequences.
Unlike many jurisdictions, Indian patent law provided no cap on official fees for sequence listings. Although a sequence listing is ideally submitted in .txt format, it is treated as part of the specification, so every page beyond the statutory 30-page limit attracted a fee.
This was fixed two years later. The Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2016 capped the maximum fee for sequence listings, limiting payment to roughly 150 pages — a substantial relief for biotech filers.
Defining a small entity
The Rules referred to the classification of enterprises under the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Act, 2006, classifying a small entity as a “medium enterprise” under that Act.
To qualify, an applicant’s investment in plant and machinery had to be between ₹5 crore and ₹10 crore for the production or manufacture of goods, or investment in equipment between ₹2 crore and ₹5 crore for a service provider.
The Rules were strict about what counts: the cost of pollution control, safety devices, and research and development is excluded when calculating investment in plant and machinery.
Beyond the regular forms, an applicant claiming small entity status had to submit Form 28, and an Indian applicant had to provide evidence of registration under the MSME Act.
Since changed: the MSME definition was revised in 2020 to a composite criterion combining investment and turnover, replacing the investment-only thresholds above. A separate startup category was also added by the 2016 Rules, with startups treated on par with natural persons — the lowest fee tier. Verify current eligibility before claiming any concession.
The foreign applicant question
For foreign applicants, no specific documents were mandated to accompany Form 28. It was therefore unclear how the Patent Office would verify that a foreign applicant genuinely qualified as a small entity — an ambiguity that took some time to settle in practice.
Going paperless
In a further push towards paperless filing, the government levied an additional 10% fee where applications and forms were submitted on paper. Given the scale of the general fee increase, that surcharge was a meaningful nudge toward electronic filing.
It worked. Electronic filing is now the norm, and the differential pricing between electronic and physical filing has been carried through every subsequent revision of the Rules.
The takeaways
- 60% hike for individuals, 100% for large entities — from February 2014.
- The small entity tier was created after stakeholder consultation.
- Sequence listing fees were uncapped — fixed by the 2016 Rules.
- The MSME definition changed in 2020, and startups were added as a category in 2016.
Frequently asked questions
What fee categories apply to Indian patent applications? Individuals and startups, small entities, and other entities — with startups treated on par with natural persons at the lowest tier.
How is a small entity defined? By reference to the MSME Act, whose definition was revised in 2020 to a composite criterion combining investment and turnover.
Is there a cap on sequence listing fees? Yes, introduced by the Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2016 — before that, per-page fees applied without limit.
Is paper filing more expensive? Yes — an additional charge applies to physical filing, which has been carried through successive amendments to the Rules.