IPO displays Month & year of RFE that are being examined

Indian Patent Office (IPO) makes available a dynamic grid shown below:

IPO will make the month and year for the Request for Examination (RFE) filed that are currently being examined and the First Examination Report (FER) being issued, for each of the Groups, as displayed hereinabove.

IPO also states that if FER is not received for the RFE which is filed 3 months prior to the currently displayed month and year, the grieved Applicant/Agent can submit the grievance by pressing the below link:

The following table appears when the above button is pressed:

Remarks

The availability of this display is likely to at least produce some streamlined time of expectation of the issuance of FER. At present, there is great elasticity in the time of issuance of FER. As we can see from the above grid, the issuance of FER is delayed to a great extent as compared to the statutory timeline of issuance of FER which is “ordinarily 6 months from the date of RFE or date of publication whichever is later”. Currently, most of the applications being examined and FER being issued are the ones for which FER was filed in 2008,09, a gap of 3-4 years from the date of filing of RFE! We hope that the current ongoing recruitment of the patent examiners may expedite and streamline the issuance of FER vis-a-vis filing an RFE.

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