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Introduction
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There is a particular category of trademark case that should, in theory, never reach the courts. It involves no infringer, no passing off, no dispute over similarity or goodwill. It involves only one party, one registered mark, and one government authority that failed to do what the statute told it to do.
The Delhi High Court's decision in Rajinder Singh v. Registrar of Trade Marks [W.P.(C)-IPD 4/2026] is that kind of case. At its core, the facts are simple: the Trade Marks Registry issued a statutory renewal notice to an address it knew, from its own records, was no longer functional. The mark was treated as lapsed. The proprietor had to go to court to restore it.
These cases reach courts with depressing regularity. The Trade Marks Act, 1999 places a mandatory obligation on the Registrar under Section 25(3) to issue renewal notices to registered proprietors before a mark can be removed from the register. That obligation is not contingent on the proprietor doing anything beyond maintaining a valid registration. It is, in the language used by courts interpreting this provision, a protective mechanism. Its purpose is to ensure that a proprietor who has invested in registration does not lose rights through an administrative failure he had no reason to anticipate.
When that mechanism fails, as it did here, the question for the court is not whether the proprietor should have been more vigilant. The question is whether the Registry can rely on its own procedural shortcoming to extinguish the rights it was required to protect.
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Background of the Mark
Rajinder Singh claimed adoption and use of the trademark "B.P.R." since April 1, 1979, in relation to electric motors, grinders, pump sets and allied goods in Class 7. He filed an application for registration on August 11, 1999. The Registry raised objections, his agent filed a reply in 2002, the application was accepted and published in the Trade Marks Journal in 2003, and opposition proceedings followed.
During those proceedings, Rajinder Singh's agent filed a fresh Power of Attorney on Form-48, disclosing a new address for communication. From that point forward, the Registry consistently used that updated address. Hearing notices between 2015 and 2017 went to the new address. The opposition was eventually dismissed for non-appearance of the opponent, and the mark was registered. The registration certificate issued in 2018 was sent to the new address. When the petitioner thereafter filed a renewal application, the Registry issued its confirmation of renewal also to the new address.
Then came the problem. In May 2019, a notice regarding the mark's expiry and impending renewal requirement was issued to the old address of the petitioner's former agent. Online records later revealed that the notice had been returned marked "no such firm." Neither Rajinder Singh nor his authorised agent received it. The mark was treated by the system as having lapsed.
In 2025, when the petitioner's newly appointed agent attempted to file a fresh renewal application, the online portal refused to permit it. With no administrative avenue remaining, Rajinder Singh filed a writ petition before the Delhi High Court.
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The Registry's Defence
The Registrar of Trade Marks took a technical position. The petitioner, it argued, had not formally updated the address for service through the prescribed statutory form under the Trade Marks Rules. The Power of Attorney filed on Form-48 merely authorised an agent. It did not, the Registry contended, substitute the prescribed procedure for a formal change-of-address entry in the Registry's records. Notices were, the Registry explained, system-generated and automatically dispatched to whatever address remained recorded in the database from the original application.
Since the petitioner had not filed the appropriate form for changing the address for service, the Registry's position was that the notice was correctly sent to the original address, and the resulting lapse was the petitioner's own problem.
This is a position that sounds cleaner on paper than it does in the context of the actual record.
The Court's Analysis
The Delhi High Court examined the factual record in detail, and what it found made the Registry's technical defence difficult to sustain.
The Registry had, over a period of several years, issued hearing notices to the updated address. It sent the registration certificate to the updated address. It confirmed the renewal communication to the updated address. In short, the Registry had recognised and acted upon the changed address in every material respect for the better part of a decade. To then turn around and say that the same address was not formally updated on record, and that the renewal notice was therefore correctly sent to an address the Registry itself knew had been superseded, was not a defensible position.
The Court found it, in its words, unfathomable that the Registry would revert to the old address while issuing the crucial renewal notice, given its own conduct throughout the proceedings.
The Court also examined Section 25(3) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, which reads as a clear statutory command: the Registrar shall send notice to the registered proprietor of the date of expiration, along with the conditions for renewal. That word "shall" carries legal weight. The Court confirmed, following its earlier decision in Coldsmiths Retail Services Private Limited v. Registrar of Trade Marks (Writ Petition (C) IPD No. 37 of 2025), that Section 25(3) imposes a mandatory obligation on the Registrar, not a discretionary one. The duty to serve proper notice sits with the Registry. It does not transfer to the proprietor because the Registry failed to update its own internal records.
The Court also rejected the Registry's argument that the proprietor should have independently ensured timely renewal regardless of whether he received the notice. That argument, if accepted, would render Section 25(3) meaningless. The statute does not say the proprietor shall renew whether or not he receives notice. It says the Registrar shall give notice. The obligation and its consequences flow in one direction.
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Result
The Delhi High Court allowed the writ petition. The Registrar was directed to process the renewal of the mark "B.P.R." notwithstanding the six-year lapse in renewal proceedings. The mark, in use since 1979 and registered since 2018, survives.
A Note on the O-3 Notice
Some context on what an O-3 notice (also referred to as Form RG-3 under the Trade Marks Rules, 2017) is, for those unfamiliar with the procedural side of trademark prosecution.
Under the renewal framework in India, a mark registered for ten years may be renewed indefinitely on payment of renewal fees. Before the Registry removes a mark for non-renewal, it is required to issue an advance notice alerting the proprietor that the registration is approaching expiry. This is the O-3 notice: a statutory warning that renewal is due, sent to the address on record. The O-3 is the mechanism by which the Registry discharges its obligation under Section 25(3).
The significance of the O-3 is not academic. It is the last line of administrative protection before a long-standing registration can be wiped off the register. If it does not reach the proprietor because the Registry has sent it to the wrong address, the proprietor has no way of knowing that action is required. The mark lapses in silence.
That is precisely what happened here.
The Larger Problem
The Rajinder Singh judgment sits within a growing body of Delhi High Court decisions on Registry address failures in renewal proceedings. The Coldsmiths case, decided just four months earlier in February 2026, involved eight trademarks lapsed after renewal notices were sent to a revoked agent. Before that, there have been cases involving backdated O-3 notices, notices sent to outdated postal addresses, and notices that simply never appeared on the Registry's own online portal despite supposedly being issued.
What connects these cases is not complexity but preventability. None of them involve a proprietor who decided not to renew. Each involves a proprietor who was not given a functioning opportunity to do so because the Registry failed in a basic administrative task.
The Court in Coldsmiths went so far as to observe that the removal of a trademark due to defective service of renewal notices exposes the mark to adoption by third parties and generates entirely avoidable litigation. That observation, framed as a consequence, is also a description of the actual harm these procedural failures cause: a lapsed mark can be squatted on while litigation to restore it proceeds. The proprietor ends up fighting on two fronts over a registration they never intended to abandon.
Conclusion
The principle at work in Rajinder Singh v. Registrar of Trade Marks is not novel. It is administrative fairness applied to trademark law: an authority cannot rely on its own procedural failure to deny relief to the party that failure affected.
What makes the case worth examining is the Registry's conduct on the facts. This was not a case where the address had been changed secretly, or where no record existed. The Registry had the updated address. It had used the updated address consistently, for hearing notices, for the registration certificate, for renewal confirmation. The decision to then send the O-3 to the old address was, at best, a system error that the Registry did not bother to explain coherently.
Courts should not need to intervene in cases like this. The Trade Marks Registry has statutory obligations under Section 25(3). It maintains electronic records. Checking whether the address in the renewal queue matches the address on the current authorisation file is not an onerous task. It is administrative hygiene.
My view is that the frequency of these cases reflects something more than occasional error. It reflects a culture within the Registry that treats notice-giving as a formality to be discharged rather than a statutory obligation with real consequences for real proprietors. Until that changes at the institutional level, courts will keep having to do what the Court did here: look at the facts, apply the statute, and direct the Registry to do what it should have done without being asked.
The mark in this case had been in use since 1979. Forty-six years of commercial history should not turn on whether a notice went to an address the Registry knew was defunct.
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~ Adv. Koushik Chittella
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Disclaimer: None of the contents of this post constitute legal advice.