Patents Are Not Paperwork: Why India’s Innovation Story Needs People Like Abhijit Bhand

India files hundreds of thousands of patents every year. And yet, by most measures of innovation-led economic growth, the country remains significantly underweight. The filings are rising. The returns are not keeping pace. The gap between inventing and benefiting from invention is where most Indian innovators quietly lose.

Abhijit Bhand has spent the better part of a decade working inside that gap.

At 30, he is one of India’s sharpest voices at the intersection of patents, innovation strategy, and economic development. A registered Indian Patent Agent, a double international master’s degree holder, a WIPO Scholar, and the founder of Kanadlab Institute of Intellectual Property and Research, Abhijit does not talk about patents as legal formalities. He talks about them as instruments of power, and more specifically, as instruments that most Indian innovators do not yet know how to wield.

His entry into this world was neither planned nor academic. As a production engineering student at Pune University, he was told by a professor that his project work might be patentable. He tried to find out what that meant. What followed was a weeks-long search through confusion, inaccessible processes, and the realisation that the system was simply not built for people like him. He filed nothing. But he never forgot the feeling.

“If it is this difficult for a student to secure an idea, how many innovations must be slipping away unnoticed?” he thought. That question did not leave him.

In 2017, rather than entering manufacturing or design like most of his peers, he founded Kanadlab in Nashik with a focused mission: to build a practice that treats every patent not as a filing to be completed, but as a business decision to be made well. The early years were lean. The conviction was not. Today, Kanadlab has facilitated over 1,200 successful IP registrations and served more than 1,500 clients across India, from solo inventors and deep-tech startups to MSMEs and research institutions.

What separates Abhijit’s approach from conventional IP practice is visible in the questions he asks before any drafting begins. Not “what is your invention?” but “what is your market?” Not “how does it work?” but “where are your competitors moving, and what do you need to hold?” A poorly drafted patent, he will tell you, does not protect an inventor. It gives a competitor a road map. An incomplete freedom-to-operate study does not save a startup time. It exposes it to litigation it never saw coming. His work across patent drafting, prosecution, invalidity analyses, freedom-to-operate studies, and technology landscaping is built around one hard-earned truth: IP that does not serve the innovator’s business has missed its purpose entirely.

To understand patents at the level of policy, not just practice, Abhijit pursued two postgraduate degrees abroad. He earned a Magister in Intellectual Property and New Technologies from Jagiellonian University in Poland, one of Europe’s oldest institutions, and followed it with a Master’s in Intellectual Property and Development Policy from KDI School of Public Policy and Management in South Korea. At KDI, he received the MIPD Scholarship, jointly conferred by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a specialised United Nations agency, and KDI School. Awarded to only a small number of candidates globally each year, the scholarship recognised his potential to contribute to IP-led development at a national and international scale. He earned the Dean’s List Academic Excellence Award for two consecutive semesters.

These experiences gave him a dimension that most patent practitioners in India do not carry: an understanding of how patent systems shape economies. Having travelled across more than fifteen countries, attending conferences, studying innovation ecosystems, and consulting on international projects, he returned to India with a sharper diagnosis of what is actually holding back the country’s patent potential. The problem is not the number of filings. It is the quality of intent behind them.

That diagnosis was tested at scale during his appointment as Principal Research Scientist at the Centre of Excellence on Intellectual Property at IIT Jodhpur, one of India’s foremost technical institutions. Brought in with a specific mandate to lead IP activities and drive patent filings across the institute, he delivered results that went beyond targets. By the end of his tenure, IIT Jodhpur had recorded its highest-ever patent filings. The milestone mattered not as a statistic, but as proof that when researchers are guided with purpose and rigour, the culture of protection follows.

He has carried that proof into more than 300 sessions across universities, IITs, NLUs, FICCI, ICAR, and a TEDx stage, reaching over 50,000 students, researchers, and entrepreneurs. His argument is consistent: India will not unlock the full value of its innovation until its inventors understand that a patent is not the end of the process. It is the beginning of a strategy.

“Ideas built in Nashik deserve the same protection as those built in New York,” he says. “That is what I am here to change.”

India’s patent story is still being written. Abhijit Bhand intends to be a significant part of the pen.