Kunwer Sachdev’s TOI Blogs essay on why patenting matters for India’s EV moment — and why the country’s inventors need to stop treating IP as an afterthought.
Kunwer Sachdev’s TOI Blogs essay opens with Mark Twain: “A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can’t travel any way but sideways and backways.” He argues India has come a long way on the patenting process — but not far enough for the electric-vehicle decade it is now walking into.
Why the myth about patents needs to go
Sachdev pushes back on a common misconception: that a patent is only worth filing when you have a ‘great new product’. In India, he writes, people innovate constantly to solve everyday problems — retrofit fixes, small design tweaks, process improvements — and most of that never gets protected. Every unfiled patent is a bit of national IP quietly walking out the door.
Why EVs raise the stakes
EVs are the wave where India can either become a manufacturer of intellectual property or a manufacturer of somebody else’s components. Battery chemistry, BMS design, charging protocols, thermal management, motor efficiency — every one of these is patentable, and every one of them is being locked down globally right now. Indian firms that do not file lose their seat at that table before it even sits down.
“A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can’t travel any way but sideways and backways.”— Mark Twain, quoted by Kunwer Sachdev in TOI Blogs (6 February 2022)
Sachdev’s own record on IP
The argument is made with authority. Sachdev’s own Su-Kam filed over 120 patents during his tenure — a record in Indian power electronics — and Su-vastika has filed roughly 60 more in its first four years. He is not urging Indian founders to file more patents in the abstract; he is telling them what he actually did, and why it protected the businesses he built.
Patenting in India and EVs — Times of India Blogs →