Beyond Procedural Technicalities: The Delhi High Court's Approach to Trademark Renewal under Section 25(3)

Introduction

Trademark registrations rarely lapse due to deliberate abandonment. More often they are lost quietly, because a renewal notice went to the wrong desk and nobody was left to answer it. That is essentially what happened to the mark “B.P.R.”, used since 1979 and registered in 1999, and it eventually brought Rajinder Singh to the Delhi High Court, more than six years after his registration lapsed for want of a notice that never reached him. The judgment is barely a dozen pages long, but its reasoning reaches well beyond this one mark. It confirms that Section 25(3) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 places a real, non-negotiable obligation on the Registrar, and clarifies that a proprietor should not lose valuable rights in the absence of effective statutory notice. 

Background and Facts

The Petitioner had used the mark “B.P.R.” for electric motors, pumps and compressors since 1979, and applied to register it in August 1999. The Registry raised objections, accepted the application after a reply, and published it in 2003; at that point his agent, Super Trade Mark Co., was on record at an address in Paschim Vihar. When Phillips Brake Rubber Company opposed the application in 2004, the agent filed a fresh Power of Attorney in Form TM-48 along with the counter-statement, this time giving a different address. A decade later, another TM-48 recorded that the same agency had simply renamed itself, keeping the same address. Every Hearing Notice issued during the opposition, four of them, spanning 2015 to 2017, went to that address, and so did the registration certificate once the opposition was dismissed for want of prosecution in 2018.

Months later, the Petitioner applied to renew the registration, filing yet another TM-48 with a further updated address; the Registry’s confirmation of a ten-year renewal, issued that September, also reached the agent without incident. Then, when the Registry generated the statutory notice under Form RG-3 (O-3)- the notice Section 25(3) requires before a mark can be treated as due for removal- it went not to any of these updated addresses but to the very first one on file, an office abandoned some fifteen years earlier. It came back marked “no such firm” in May 2019 and sat unremarked in the Registry’s database for years. The Petitioner learned of it only in December 2025, after appointing a new agent who discovered the undelivered notice while reviewing the file. When that agent tried to file a fresh renewal, the online system refused it, and the present writ petition followed.

Analysis of the Judgment

What makes this judgment more than a routine condonation-of-delay order is how it deals with the Registry’s central defence. The Registry’s argument was formal: none of those addresses had ever been recorded through Form TM-16 (now TM-M), the prescribed mechanism for changing an address for service, so the Registry was under no obligation to use them, however consistently it had already done exactly that. The judge’s response is worth pausing on. Rather than treating the TM-16 requirement as decisive, the Court asked what the Registry’s own conduct actually showed, and found it “unfathomable” that a Registry which had sent hearing notices, and even the registration certificate, to one address for years would suddenly revert to one abandoned since 2004 the one time it mattered.^[1] Having established that consistent knowledge, the Court held it did not “lie in the mouth of the respondent” to invoke a procedural default it had itself been ignoring all along.

That reasoning does real work. It stops the Registry from treating Form TM-16 as an escape hatch, a technicality it can invoke only when convenient. Public authorities are not generally permitted to act consistently on one footing and then retreat to another once the earlier footing turns against them, and this judgment applies that basic fairness principle to a fairly ordinary but high-stakes corner of trademark administration. Section 25(3), the Court reiterates, places the burden of ensuring a valid renewal notice squarely on the Registrar; a proprietor is not expected to keep independently checking whether the Registry has done its job. Given what non-renewal actually costs, a mark used continuously since 1979 becoming free for anyone else to adopt- that allocation of burden seems the only sensible one.

A second point deserves more attention than it has probably received. Even where the Registry claimed to have also sent the notice to the Petitioner’s own correct address, the Court refused to presume delivery, noting that no proof of delivery appeared on record. That is a meaningfully higher standard than the loose presumption of postal service that usually carries administrative correspondence, and it is hard to fault: a notice whose entire function is to extinguish a registered right ought to demand more than an assumption that it probably arrived.

None of this is doctrinally novel on its own. The judgment leans heavily on Coldsmiths Retail Services, which had already described the Section 25(3) obligation as “sacrosanct” and held that notice to an unauthorised recipient cannot satisfy the statute,^[2] and on the Division Bench’s willingness in Charanjiv Kumar Taneja to condone delay running to sixteen years where the Registry’s own default was to blame.^[3] What the present case adds is sharper: a direct answer to the specific defence- no TM-16 filed, therefore no obligation- that the Registry seems likeliest to keep raising, and a fairly emphatic rejection of it.

Where the judgment stops short is in its remedy. Relief here is entirely individual: permission to refile Form TM-R within a fixed window, nothing more. On a private writ petition, the Court had no real occasion to direct any reconciliation between the Registry’s automated address-for-service field and the addresses its own correspondence had actually been using the precise disjunction that caused this entire dispute. Until something closes that gap, the same problem remains entirely capable of catching the next proprietor unlucky enough to run into it.

Conclusion

This case’s value lies in closing a narrow but recurring gap between what the Trade Marks Registry’s own correspondence shows it knew and what its computer-generated notices actually did. By refusing to let a missing TM-16 excuse a demonstrably known address, and by declining to presume delivery of a notice nobody could prove was delivered, the Court has made it harder for the Registry to treat renewal notices as a formality rather than a duty. Agents would still be well advised to file the correct forms rather than count on a court to excuse them later. But proprietors now have something more concrete than sympathy to point to if their mark disappears through the Registry’s own carelessness and that, more than the six and a half years it took to get there, is what this judgment is really about.

^[1]Rajinder Singh v. The Registrar of Trade Marks, W.P.(C)-IPD 4/2026, ¶¶ 24–26 (Delhi HC, 12 May 2026).

^[2]Coldsmiths Retail Services Pvt. Ltd. v. Registrar of Trade Marks, W.P.(C)-IPD 37/2025, ¶ 18 (Delhi HC, 17 Feb 2026).

^[3]Charanjiv Kumar Taneja Trading as Chirag Enterprises v. Registrar of Trade Marks, LPA 461/2023 (Delhi HC, 25 Jul 2023) (Division Bench), as noted in Rajinder Singh, ¶ 28.

Niharika Puri

Associate

niharika.puri@iprattorneys.com