The continuing hunt for CSIR’s royalties: A look at the ‘Statements of Working’ filed by CSIR with the patent office

Over a period of six months last year, I had filed a series of RTI applications and appeals with the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), the government’s primary civil scientific establishment asking for details of the royalties earned through licensing of its patents. In its initial reply, the CSIR refused to share these details with me on the grounds of commercial confidence. Later on, after I won an appeal with the First Appellate Authority at the Department of Science & Technology (DST), CSIR was required to give me details of all the patents that it had licensed. Shortly thereafter, it did give me a list of patents that it claimed to have licensed, but in blatant disregard of the orders passed by the DST it refused to provide the details of the royalties that it had earned through the licensing of its patents.

By any measure, the attitude of CSIR towards the RTI Act is appalling but not a real surprise given the organisation’s general attitude towards transparency and accountability. Thankfully not all government institutions share CSIR’s approach to transparency. Earlier this year, the Patent Office made available all of the Form 27s or ‘statements of working’ filed by all patentees in pursuance of Section 146 of the Patents Act. This was the first time the Patent Office published all these statements on its website and the Controller General Chaitanya Prasad certainly deserves a round of applause for making this information publicly available.

I conducted a small study on the ‘statements of working’ filed by CSIR for the last year. I looked at a sample of around 50 statements, where CSIR had claimed to have worked the patents in question. You can access all 50 statements on this file over here.

Not a single of the 50 statements that I examined, met the requirements of Form 27. The Form 27 normally requires a patentee to confirm whether a patent has been worked and then provide details of just how much the patent has been worked i.e. both quantum of sales and the revenues earned through the sale. The standard Form 27 filed by CSIR – is like the Form 27 in this link – where CSIR has neatly ticked the box to indicate that the patent has been worked and then provides no details on revenues earned, quantum sold or the licensees to whom the patents have been licensed.

In a smaller subset of statements, CSIR was generous enough to share the names of the licenses but without providing any details of the revenues earned. In this link, is one such Form 27 where CSIR merely states that the patent has been licensed to GE (which I presume is General Electric). Here is another patent licensed to Cadila Pharmaceuticals and one more patent licensed to IPCA. Another patent for the preservation of sugarcane juice was licensed to one Mr. Premchand of Hyderabad. Here’s another patent licensed to Strides Arcolab. As you can see, none of the statements provide any details on revenues or quantum of sales. To be fair a couple of Form 27s, such as this one and this one do declare revenues earned but even these forms do not do full justice to the requirements of Form 27.

The purpose of this little exercise is four-fold: The first is to demonstrate that CSIR was wrong to deny me the information on revenues earned through patent licensing on the grounds that it was confidential; the second is to highlight the fact that CSIR needs to get CSIR-Tech to start working on technology transfers with industry; third, was to demonstrate how public-funded inventions are being licensed to private industry – I’m still in the dark about the actual process adopted by CSIR to licence these patents – are they auctioned or is it on a first come first serve basis? As a public institution CSIR has an obligation to treat all private entities fairly & Fourth and final, was to expose the cavalier manner in which the CSIR handles its obligations to the patent office – if this is the manner in which CSIR handles relatively simple paper work, how do they handle the more complicated part of ensuring accountability within their organisation?

As is usual with posts like this on the CSIR, I’m sure this post will attract more than its share of abusive comments from the staff at CSIR but that in itself reveals a deeper systemic issue with CSIR – the reluctance to be subject to any external scrutiny – the problem starts with the head of the organisation – the Director General, who on one occasion threatened to complain to the boss of a New York Times reporter for a story that she was doing on the arbitrary dismissal of an American-Indian scientist from CSIR.