Hi, late to the party, but some updates on the Right to Information requests we filed in July.
Background
The Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks [CGPDTM] held a public consultation for the Draft guidelines for Examinations of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs), 2025, the consultation for the first draft started in March, concluded in April. In May they also held in-person consultations. At the end of it, the CGPDTM hadn’t published the comments it received from the public on the first draft nor the details from the in-person consultations.
Subsequently it released a Version 2 of the Draft CRI Guidelines 2025 on June 26, 2025. It was open for public comments till July 7, 2025.
Since the CGPDTM hadn’t published the comments it received for the first draft, neither the details from the details from the in-person consultations, we decided to file RTI requests.
Timeline:
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July 17th: We filed 3 RTI requests with the CGPDTM. One each requesting responses/comments from everyone on both the drafts, and all internal communications/emails/etc within the ministry with regards to the drafts. The third one asked about exhaustive list of private/public meetings and consultations around these drafts.
Questions_CGPDT_R_E_25_00631.pdf (50.9 KB)
Questions_CGPDT_R_E_25_00630.pdf (51.2 KB)
Questions_CGPDT_R_E_25_00629.pdf (51.9 KB) -
July 29th: CGPDTM published the NEW GUIDELINES FOR EXAMINATION OF COMPUTER RELATED INVENTIONS (CRIs) – 2025 and along with it the comments/responses it received on both the drafts and details of in-person consultations on their website.
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August 12th: The CGPDTM disposed off the RTI requests, with a blanket response directing to the same link on its website while disregarding the rest of the queries in the requests.
response_CGPDT_R_E_25_00631.pdf (444.9 KB)
response_CGPDT_R_E_25_00630.pdf (444.6 KB)
response_CGPDT_R_E_25_00629.pdf (444.6 KB)
You can check out the public comments on both the drafts and the in-person consultation details here.