It is another David vs Goliath in the making. A small-town engineer from Madurai in Tamil Nadu, S. Ramkumar (36), who holds the Indian patent (No 214388) for dual SIM cards in a single mobile handset, is battling established cellphone manufacturers and retailers.
Ramkumar has dragged the manufacturers to court for not paying royalty for every phone manufactured or sold in India with dual SIM technology. There are 13 parties involved in the suit, including Samsung Electronics, Onida Mobile, Spice Mobile and Essar Telecom Retail.
According to Ramkumar, by changing the entire circuitry of a mobile phone, multiple SIM sockets and Bluetooth devices can be fitted into them, which would enable the handset to communicate simultaneously in different networks, with the time of switching networks reduced to nanoseconds.
The patent, which was filed in 2002, was granted in February 2008. Since then, Ramkumar has been busy trying to get importers and manufacturers to pay up a royalty fee. India has a demand for 80,000 such units per month, according to newspaper reports.
His opponents, however, contend that Ramkumar’s invention is “prior art”. Samsung Electronics says the patent itself should be revoked and that its imported consignment is different from Ramkumar’s patented product.
Lawyers of both sides (Ramkumar and Samsung) refused to comment as the matter was subjudice. “The right that Ramkumar claims is for a generic class of products over which he has no patent rights,” points out an importer, involved in battling it out with the customs.
For now, there is an interim injunction from the Madras High Court restraining some manufacturers from manufacturing the phone till the issue is resolved.Phones that Ramkumar claims come under his patent
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—Nitya Varadarajan
