In April 2013, the Supreme Court of India rejected Novartis’s patent claim on Glivec in the most consequential pharmaceutical intellectual property ruling in the country’s history. The decision shaped an entire industry. What happened next , that Novartis did not leave , is the less-told and more interesting story.
On 1 April 2013, a bench of the Supreme Court of India handed down its judgment in Civil Appeal Nos. 2706–2716 of 2013. The case concerned imatinib mesylate, marketed by Novartis as Glivec, a revolutionary treatment for chronic myeloid leukaemia. Novartis had applied for a patent on the beta-crystalline form of the compound. The Court said no. Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act, the judges ruled, required that a new form of a known substance demonstrate significantly enhanced therapeutic efficacy , not merely different physical properties. A crystal structure, however clever its engineering, was not enough.
The ruling did more than deny one patent. It drew a line in the global pharmaceutical sand. India would not grant patents on incremental modifications of existing drugs , the practice known as evergreening. For India’s generic manufacturers, this was validation of the legal architecture that allowed them to produce affordable copies. For multinational pharmaceutical companies, it was a warning that the world’s largest democracy would not automatically extend the patent protections they relied on elsewhere. Legal scholars called it the most important pharmaceutical IP decision since the TRIPS Agreement.
The conventional expectation was that Novartis would scale back. A rational company, having lost its most visible legal battle in the world’s most complex pharmaceutical market, would redirect resources to friendlier jurisdictions. That is not what happened.
To understand the scale of what Novartis invested in Indian intellectual property, consider this: in 2008, the company filed 254 patent applications with the Indian Patent Office. Two hundred and fifty-four. In a single year. That was five years before the Glivec ruling, at a moment when Novartis apparently believed that the Indian patent system would eventually accommodate its innovation model.
The number is striking not because it is large in absolute terms , a company with Novartis AG’s global R&D budget files thousands of patents worldwide each year , but because of what it reveals about ambition. In 2007, the year before the peak, Novartis filed 189 applications. In 2006, it was 94. The trajectory was steep, deliberate, and expensive. Between 2005 and 2010, Novartis filed 884 patent applications in India alone, an average of 147 per year.
Then came the decline. After the Supreme Court ruling in 2013, filings dropped: 117 in 2014, 115 in 2015, then a sharp fall to 68 in 2016 and 33 in 2017. By 2019, annual filings had fallen to 24 , less than a tenth of the 2008 peak. The patent data is, in this sense, a seismograph: it records the exact moment when Novartis recalibrated its expectations of what the Indian IP system would protect.
Of the 1,816 total applications filed between 1998 and 2026, just 123 were granted , a grant rate of 6.8%. This is not a failure of the applications so much as a reflection of Section 3(d)’s stringency. The Indian Patent Office applies a higher bar for pharmaceutical patents than most jurisdictions, and Novartis’s filing portfolio, weighted toward formulation and crystallography innovations, ran directly into that bar.
Novartis AG reported global revenue of approximately $50 billion in recent fiscal years, with a workforce that has fluctuated between 78,000 and over 100,000 employees depending on the year and the scope of its restructurings. Novartis India Limited, its BSE-listed subsidiary, reported revenue of $40.21 million in FY2023–24. That is less than 0.1% of the parent’s global sales.
This ratio , a subsidiary generating a fraction of a percent of the parent’s revenue , tells you something important about the nature of multinational pharmaceutical operations in India. Novartis India is not a growth engine for Basel. It is a presence: a legal entity, a distribution network, a regulatory interface, and an employer. Its product portfolio centres on established brands , Voveran for pain, Tegrital for epilepsy, Sandimmun and Neoral for organ transplant patients, Methergine for obstetric care , medicines that have been on the Indian market for decades.
The revenue trajectory itself is a quiet narrative. In FY2014–15, Novartis India reported $104.81 million in revenue. By FY2020–21, that had fallen to $45.76 million. By FY2023–24, it was $40.21 million. Over nine years, the Indian subsidiary lost more than 60% of its revenue. Part of this reflects strategic choices , Novartis divested its consumer health and generics businesses globally, spinning off Sandoz in 2023 , and part reflects the competitive reality of a market where Indian generics companies can manufacture at costs that no Swiss multinational can match.
The workforce numbers mirror this contraction. The Indian subsidiary reported 1,000 employees in FY2014–15 and 3,500 in FY2015–16. By FY2024–25, the figure was 150. This is a company that has been deliberately shrinking its India footprint , not abandoning it, but concentrating it.
Here is the detail that complicates the narrative of retreat. In 2021 , eight years after the Glivec ruling, in a market where its subsidiary’s revenue had halved , Novartis filed 53 patent applications in India. That was more than double the 21 it had filed in 2020, and it represented the sharpest year-over-year increase since 2014. In 2022, it filed 36. In 2023, another 34. In 2024, 19. Even in the first months of 2026, 4 more applications appeared in the Indian Patent Office records.
These are not the actions of a company that has written off India. Patent applications cost money , not just filing fees, but the legal work, the translation, the prosecution, the maintenance. Each application is a bet that the Indian market will eventually matter enough to justify the protection. Novartis, having lost the single most famous patent case in Indian history, continues to make that bet.
The 2021 spike is particularly telling. It coincided with Novartis AG’s global pivot toward innovative medicines , the same period in which the parent company was preparing to spin off Sandoz, its generics division, to focus entirely on patented therapies. The increased Indian filings suggest that even as the Indian subsidiary shrank, the global R&D organisation saw India as a jurisdiction where future patent protection mattered. The molecules being filed are not the old Glivec-era reformulations. They are the next generation: Entresto for heart failure, Cosentyx for autoimmune disease, Kisqali for breast cancer.
Whether those patents will survive Section 3(d) scrutiny is an open question. But the filing itself is an act of institutional persistence , or, perhaps, institutional memory. Novartis remembers what it costs to be absent from a market of 1.4 billion people.
The products that Novartis India sells tell their own story. Voveran, a diclofenac formulation, has been a staple of the Indian pain management market for decades. Tegrital, carbamazepine for epilepsy, is prescribed across neurological practices nationwide. Sandimmun and Neoral , both cyclosporine formulations , remain critical for transplant patients. Certican and Simulect serve the same transplant population. Exelon treats Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s dementia. Femara is used in breast cancer and fertility treatment. And Glivec itself, the drug at the centre of the Supreme Court case, still appears in the product list , sold in India under the brand name, though generic imatinib is widely available at a fraction of the price.
These are not blockbuster drugs by global standards. They are workhorse medicines: reliable, well-understood, and medically necessary. The fact that Novartis continues to manufacture and distribute them in India, at revenue levels that are immaterial to the parent company’s financial statements, suggests something beyond pure commercial calculation. There is a reputational dimension , a multinational pharmaceutical company does not easily abandon a market where its name is synonymous with a Supreme Court case , and there is a strategic one. The 150 employees who remain at Novartis India maintain the regulatory licences, the distribution relationships, and the institutional presence that would cost far more to rebuild than to maintain.
Sources: Novartis India Limited Annual Reports FY2014–15 through FY2024–25. Indian Patent Office (patent filing and grant data). BSE India (listed entity filings). Supreme Court of India, Civil Appeal Nos. 2706–2716 of 2013 (Novartis AG v. Union of India). Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India (OPPI).