India, as a member of the World Trade Organization and signatory to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is obliged to align its intellectual property rights laws with the TRIPS agreement. The challenge comes not only from creating the laws but also their implementation considering the Indian government has to strike a balance between the needs of the country's citizens and the rights of patent holders. The issue has become all the more sensitive considering a bulk of patent applications in India are filed by foreign companies. As an example, the data provided by the Indian IP office in its annual report of 2017-2018 shows the applications filed by foreign applicants were more than double (32,304) compared to those by Indian residents (15,550).
