If the folks at Forbes were to ever come up with a rich list for professional services, you can expect Intellectual Property (IP) services to prominently figure in it.

They haven’t done that, yet. But they did educate us on the cost involved in getting IP in India. Forbes tell us that “Filing a patent in India involves a pre-filing cost priced between $920 and $1530, a first-action cost of up to $2300 followed by a patent maintenance cost of another $2300.”

That’s about ₹60,000 to ₹1,00,000 as pre-filing costs which an applicant will incur before filing a patent. If you are a startup gearing up to file a patent application, the minimum official fee will be a paltry ₹1600 ($25).

But your major expense will be the pre-filing cost, as Forbes puts it, that goes towards professional fees charged by the service providers. It will be hard to find another jurisdiction with such a disparity in the pre-filing costs and the official fees.

Yet, Forbes reports that India’s startups are filing more patents than ever. If you were worried about the rising cost of acquiring IP and didn’t know where to go for some healthy advice on IP, check into our IP Clinic, which is now open.

Posted by Feroz Ali, who is the Director of the IP Clinic.