THSTI gets South African Patent granted for HIV-1 Indian clade C stabilized, engineered trimeric envelope glycoprotein which discloses methods of eliciting the immune response using this engineered protein. HIV-1 subtype C is the most prevalent subtype circulating in India and accounts for over 50% of global infection. HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein spike is the target of neutralizing antibodies which makes it a most relevant antigen for an antibody-based vaccine design. The present invention relates to an engineered HIV-1 trimeric Envelope protein (1PGE-THIVC gp140 SOSIP) developed based on a primary HIV-1 subtype C envelope sequence isolated from an Indian elite neutralizer (Patil, S. et al. J. Virol., 2016, 90: 3446-3457) which demonstrated favourable antigenic and immunogenic properties when assessed in a small animal model (Kumar, R. et al., 2021 PLOS Pathogens 17: e1008977).