Trading under a name for years is not the same as owning it
A great many Delhi businesses operate under a name that customers, suppliers and the whole market recognises, and assume that history alone protects them. It does not, in the way most people think.
Unregistered use gives you a passing-off claim, not an infringement claim. To succeed in passing off you have to prove reputation, misrepresentation and damage - three separate evidentiary burdens, each of which costs money and time to discharge. A registered proprietor sues for infringement directly and carries none of them.
There is a sharper version of the problem. Nothing stops a third party from filing for your name tomorrow. If they get there first and you have no registration, you are the one arguing prior use, and you are arguing it with invoices and advertisements rather than a certificate.
If you have genuine prior use, that is an asset - but only if you evidence it. Under the Trade Marks Rules, 2017, claiming a use date earlier than your filing date requires a mandatory affidavit of use with supporting evidence: dated invoices, advertisements, packaging, catalogues, price lists. Businesses with twenty years of trade behind them often cannot produce clean documentation for the earliest years, and the claimed use date has to be one you can actually stand behind.
Which Trade Marks Registry office handles a Delhi filing
A Delhi applicant files at the New Delhi office of the Trade Marks Registry. The Registry's territorial jurisdiction is set by the applicant's principal place of business in India, or, where there is none, by the address for service in India. It is not set by where your agent or attorney sits.
New Delhi's territory is wide: Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh. So a Gurugram company, a Noida manufacturer and a Chandigarh firm all land in the same office as a Delhi applicant, even though each of them files its company documents with a different Registrar of Companies.
There are five Registry locations in all. The Trade Marks Registry itself is at Mumbai, and its branches are at Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad and New Delhi. In practice the office of record decides three things: which office issues your examination report, which office lists a show cause hearing, and which office you correspond with on every later form, including renewal every ten years. Filing and fee payment are online, so being in the New Delhi territory is an administrative fact rather than a travel requirement.
What Delhi costs a business around the filing
Professional tax: none. Delhi does not levy professional tax at all. There is no enrolment certificate to take, no employer registration, and no professional tax return to file. An employer running the same payroll in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Hyderabad or Ahmedabad has all three. If you have been quoted a Delhi professional tax registration, it does not exist.
Shops and establishments. A Delhi establishment registers under the Delhi Shops and Establishments Act, 1954 with the Labour Department of the NCT of Delhi at labour.delhi.gov.in, filed online. We confirm the current fee with the Department before we quote it.
Municipal licence. Delhi does not run a general trade licence. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi issues a Health Trade Licence for specified trades only, grouped as eating establishments, boarding and lodging, manufacturing, storage and sale, hawking, entertainment and recreation, and miscellaneous. The current fee structure runs under Office Order No. PA/MHO/MCD/2025/D-193 dated 28 March 2025, effective from 1 April 2025 for the financial years 2025 to 2028, with a 15% increase in the annual licence fee every three financial years. Applications go through etl.mcdonline.nic.in. Most offices and service businesses need no MCD licence at all, and being told otherwise is a common way to be oversold.
If you are incorporating alongside the trademark. Delhi's stamp duty on incorporation is published: ₹10 on INC-32, ₹200 on the memorandum and 0.15% of authorised capital on the articles, capped at ₹25,00,000. Your registered office then falls under ROC Delhi-I (South, South West, New Delhi, South East and East Delhi) or ROC Delhi-II (Central, West, North, North West and North East Delhi and Shahdara), by district, since the Registrars were re-notified with effect from 1 January 2026 and the new offices became operational on 16 February 2026. Regional Director work for Delhi goes to RD (NR-I) at New Delhi, which also covers Uttar Pradesh.
What a Delhi business usually files alongside
Most Delhi applicants come to us with two or three of these at once. A Udyam registration is worth doing before the trademark, not after, because holding it as a small enterprise is what entitles you to the ₹4,500 fee slab rather than ₹9,000. GST registration is separate and unrelated to the mark. If your trade is on the MCD list you will also need the health trade licence, and every Delhi establishment needs its shops and establishment registration.
How we work with you in Delhi
Regikart has a branch office in Delhi at 04, Malook Singh Marg, Arjun Nagar, Krishan Nagar Metro Gate-1, Delhi 110051. You can drop documents in, or send them on WhatsApp or by email at +91 70444 94804 and [email protected]. The head office is in Kolkata and there is a third office in Bengaluru.
Word mark first, for a trading business
For a trading or distribution business the word mark is almost always the filing that matters. It protects the name in every font, colour and layout, which is what you actually need when the same name appears on invoices, signage, packaging, catalogues and a dozen marketplace listings, each treated differently.
A device mark ties protection to one graphic representation. Rebrand the logo, which trading houses do periodically, and the registration protects the old artwork while the new one goes unprotected.
Multi-product businesses and class selection
A Delhi trading house rarely sells one category. The specification and class selection are where the money is either well spent or wasted, because registration is class-specific under the Nice Classification's 45 classes.
File in the classes covering what you sell now and what you will sell within the next few years. Adding a class later means a fresh application carrying that application's priority date, so anyone who filed in the interim sits ahead of you.