National Wastage: How 77 Su-Kam Patents Went to Zero

Su-Kam Power Systems spent fourteen years filing 77 patent applications at the Indian Patent Office — one of the largest patent portfolios ever built by an Indian power-electronics company. The names of the inventors — engineers from our R&D unit at Gurugram, and my name as the driving force behind each filing — are on the public record. The technologies we filed on are real: DSP-controlled inverters, MPPT solar charge controllers, battery management systems, remote monitoring architecture, and the grid-tied solar inverter platforms that were ahead of their time.

Today, Su-Kam Power Systems holds zero active patents. Not one. Every granted patent has ceased. Every pending application was abandoned. Every provisional application lapsed without a complete specification being filed. Fourteen years of original engineering, and the count is zero.

This blog sets out exactly what happened — using the complete record of all 77 applications, which I have reproduced below from the IPO data.

What “Ceased” means — and why it matters

An Indian patent has a statutory term of 20 years from its filing date under Section 53 of the Patents Act, 1970. When a patent runs its full term, the IPO record shows Legal Status: Term Expired — a normal end of life. Ceased is different. Under Section 142, annual renewal fees are due on the anniversary of each patent’s filing date. If those fees are not paid — including the six-month grace period — the patent is administratively abandoned before its natural term. It is cut short. Section 60 allows a restoration application within 18 months of cessation. Once that window closes, the patent is permanently gone. Forever. No appeal, no recovery.

Every granted Su-Kam patent has Ceased. None were restored.

The five days that destroyed a solar patent

The most important single fact in this entire account is what happened to Patent 292773 — the MPPT-based solar charge controller, the technological foundation for Solarcon, the product that made Su-Kam the pioneer of solar hybrid power systems in India.

This patent took nearly ten years to be examined and granted by the Indian Patent Office. It was granted on 9 February 2018. Its first post-grant renewal was due on 10 April 2018 — five days after the NCLT ordered the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process to begin, and five days after management control of Su-Kam was taken away from its founders. The Insolvency Resolution Professional was appointed. Nobody paid the annual fee. The patent lapsed.

Two other patents were granted in January–February 2018 with first renewals falling in April 2018: Patent 292452 (Battery Protection Device, renewal due 8 April 2018 — three days after CIRP) and Patent 292505 (User Settable Power Backup System, renewal due 29 April 2018). All three granted just before insolvency. All three lapsed within weeks of the IRP taking charge.

The IBC timeline against the cascade of cessations

The inventors lost their names on living patents

When a patent is active and in force, being a named inventor means something enforceable. The names of the engineers who created these technologies — who designed the MPPT circuitry, who built the DSP inverter firmware, who engineered the GSM-connected UPS systems, who constructed the manufacturing automation that no competitor had attempted — their names are on each application at the Indian Patent Office. My name is on the foundational filings. I was the inventor or co-inventor on applications covering the core platform technologies that defined Su-Kam’s competitive position.

When a patent ceases, the inventor’s name does not disappear from the historical register. But it ceases to carry legal force. The engineers at our Gurugram R&D unit who invented these technologies — their inventions are now in the public domain. Any company in India or anywhere in the world can manufacture products based on those 77 inventions. No licence. No royalty. No acknowledgment of the inventors. The technology is free to take, and the people who created it have no recourse.

A national loss — India’s Solar Mission and 77 patents gone

This is not only a loss for Su-Kam or for the inventors. It is a loss for India.

India’s National Solar Mission was launched in 2010. The technology required to execute it — MPPT solar charge controllers, solar-grid hybrid subsystems, solar power conditioning units with dynamic discharge control and prepaid metering, grid-tied inverters, remote monitoring systems for renewable energy — is exactly what Su-Kam was filing patents on in the same years. The solar patents in this portfolio were not theoretical. They were the architecture behind Solarcon, India’s first solar hybrid system that could convert any existing inverter-battery setup into a solar system. They were behind Brainy Touch — India’s first touchscreen solar PCU. They were the documented engineering plan for the next generation of grid-integrated solar products, filed in September–October 2017, that this country needed.

Every one of those patents is gone. The technology is now in the public domain, unprotected, available for any company — including Chinese manufacturers who have entered the Indian solar inverter market at scale — to use freely, without reference to the Indian engineers who invented it, without paying the Indian government a licensing rupee, without contributing to India’s stated goals of building domestic capability in solar power systems.

The inventors on record

Under Section 6 of the Patents Act, 1970, every patent application must be filed by, or with the written consent of, the true and first inventor. The named applicant on all 77 Su-Kam applications is Su-Kam Communication Systems Ltd. (early filings) and Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. / Su-Kam Power Systems Limited (from 2007 onwards). The founder and driving force behind the entire R&D programme, responsible for the vision, the filing strategy, and the technology direction across all 77 applications, is:

Each application also lists the engineers from Su-Kam’s R&D unit at Gurugram who developed the specific technology and are named as inventors on the individual filings. Their names are on the public IPO record, searchable by application number at iprsearch.ipindia.gov.in. Every one of those engineers — the people who designed the circuits, wrote the firmware, built the prototypes, and validated the technology in the field — invested years of their professional lives in this portfolio. Their names remain in the historical register. The protection they worked to create does not.

The complete record: all 77 applications

The table below is the full patent record as maintained at the Indian Patent Office. Every application Su-Kam ever filed. Every status. The complete picture of what was built and what was lost.

Source: Indian Patent Office eRegistration Portal, iprsearch.ipindia.gov.in. Status data as recorded at IPO. All 77 applications. Su-Kam Power Systems Limited (CIN U64201DL1998PLC096685), now in liquidation.

What the public record says

The table above is not an allegation. It is not a complaint. It is a public record. Every application number in it is searchable today at the Indian Patent Office portal. The cessation dates are official government data. The sequence of events — CIRP commencement, annuity dates, provisional deadlines — is a matter of NCLT orders and IPO records that anyone can verify.

Fourteen years. Seventy-seven applications. Twelve granted patents. R&D engineers who gave the best years of their careers to building technologies that no Indian competitor was building. My name, and their names, on a public register. And a count, today, of zero.

The next post in this series will address what reform of the IBC framework would look like to prevent this from happening to the next Indian technology company that enters insolvency.

Verify everything at: iprsearch.ipindia.gov.in