How losing one case made me India’s biggest patent filer

It began with a defeat. A competitor copied the CHIC in inferior plastic, and their units caught fire in the market. We sued — and we lost, because I had filed the design protection after the launch instead of before. That single loss changed me forever. From then on I filed first and filed relentlessly: 77 patents at Su-Kam alone, at times close to two a month.

Across Su-Kam and later Su-Vastika I have filed 102 patents, with 23 already granted by the Indian Patent Office. That is, by my count, the highest — and the only fully verifiable — single-founder patent record in India’s power-backup and solar industry, larger than Luminous, Microtek, V-Guard or Exide. And unlike counts others merely claim, I’ve published every one of my filings with its application number, so anyone can check it on the Indian Patent Office register or on my own verified patent record.

That obsession took me to Geneva, where WIPO, the United Nations’ intellectual-property body, invited me to share India’s innovation story on their official platform. My message was simple: jugaad does not scale; original, protected technology does. R&D without protection is toothless.

“Jugaad doesn’t scale. Original, protected technology does. If your IP is genuinely strong, you don’t chase the money — the money runs after you.”