Intellectual Property Campaign

Apencil is a common tool used by every student during the time of studies in school and college. It is one item that has not changed much in the last many decades. However, the use of lead rods inside the wooden pencil is considered harmful to children. Waste is also generated while sharpening a pencil. Chewing a pencil can also prove harmful to a child’s health. Keeping these drawbacks in mind, researchers at the Karnavati University, Gandhinagar, Gujarat developed a sustainable and environment-friendly pencil, which is handmade and the main ingredient is paper mache, made out of waste papers. The design of the pencil has been applied for a patent. The university has developed many other concepts and products too. Indeed, there were 295 Intellectual Property applications filed by the university in a single day on April 26, 2023. All the applications were filled out on an online official website of

Intellectual Property India. The initiative earned the university a record under the India Book of Records and Asia Book of Records.

Ritesh Hada, President of Karnavati University, said that the institution is on a mission to contribute to society through academic excellence and diverse knowledge in a broad range of disciplines, from design and arts to health and environment, and business to humanities. The university has six constituent institutes, namely - the Unitedworld Institute of Design, Unitedworld School of Business, United School of Liberal Arts and Mass Communication, Unitedworld School of Law, Unitedworld School of Computational Intelligence, and Karnavati School of Dentistry. The university conducted an IP Drive 1.0 in the year 2022, where around 250 applications were filed, most of which have already been granted. When the IP Drive major challenge was the IT resource management and Internet connectivity, since the applications were to be filed online on the Government website, we were under constant alarm that proper internet connectivity, bandwidth, and speed is available at all times.

The record for the ‘maximum intellectual property protection applied by a university in a single day’ was set by Karnavati University, Gandhinagar. The students and faculties filled out 295 IP applications of Intellectual Property.

2.0 began, we had charted out certain plan in order to make the IP filed in both the drives - commercially viable and holding economic value for the creators.

Priyanshi Gupta, Senior Legal Executive of the university told the India Book of Records magazine that a total of 144 copyrights and 151 design applications were filed for IP protection. The university keeps conducting IP drives and workshops for its students and faculties for developing more IPs and generating awareness amongst them with respect to the protection of their creation. There were multiple challenges while proceeding with the filing of IP as a University, in terms of resources both financial and infrastructural. One of the major challenges we faced was to shortlist the applications based on their eligibility to be filed as Designs and Copyrights. The next

“Upon finalising the number of applications to be filed, and while doing the scrutiny of the applications, it came to our knowledge that there is a major chunk of applications which were filed by female students and faculties. International Intellectual Property Day was approaching and its theme wasWomen and IP: Accelerating Innovation and Creativity. We saw this as an opportunity to motivate and encourage our students and faculties to innovate and create more IP. Making a record attempt was one of the ways to encourage achieving better results from the students and faculties,” added Priyanshi.