Govt striving to reduce pharma sector's regulatory compliance: Sadananda Gowda

The pharma industry is capable of achieving the ambitious annual target of $130 billion by 2030, which it set for itself and the medical devices industry has the potential to grow to $50 billion by 2025, Minister for Chemicals and Fertilisers DV Sadananda Gowda said on Thursday.

Inaugurating the 6th international conference on pharmaceutical and medical devices sector called India Pharma 2021 and India Medical Devices 2021, organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) along with others here, Gowda said the government continues to strive to improve the ease of doing business and a rigorous effort is on to reduce regulatory compliance burden on the industry.

He said the pharma bureau, set up in the Ministry last year, has started actively engaging with the industry and investors and is taking up issues relating to investments with various Central government departments as well as State governments.

PLI scheme

As the pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of the global supply chain in the pharmaceutical sector, the government launched the production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes for bulk drugs as well as medical devices with an outlay of ₹6,940 crore and ₹3,420 crore respectively. The government has been able to approve investments up to ₹6,564 crore already, the Minister said.

The government has announced yet another PLI scheme worth ₹15,000 crore on Wednesday for making the pharma industry global champions by adopting cutting-edge technologies and penetrating the global value chain. “We also want Indian MSMEs to play a key role in the pharma sector and hence want them to participate in the PLI scheme. For this, we have relaxed the minimum threshold investment for MSMEs. Instead of the government telling them, MSMEs are allowed to voluntarily commit to a minimum investment in their applications,” he said.

Piyush Goyal, Minister for Commerce, Railways and Consumer Affairs, who participated virtually at the inaugural session, urged the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors to adopt best practices in terms of quality, facility and commitment to maintain high standards.

Good manufacturing practices

He said there is a need for collectively ensuring that the nation will have good manufacturing practices. The entire health ecosystem should provide confidence to the world that India is the place one should look at for anything to do with health and is the one stop solution.

Goyal said quality does not come at a price, rather quality reduces the price. He said that regulatory and good manufacturing practices, systems and certifications, approvals, will always help the country grow in scale and bring down the price.

India has seen a golden period for healthcare in the last few years, he said adding that next decade should be made the decade of India where the entire world following Indian standards.

Observing that India is well on the path to come out of the Covid pandemic, Goyal credited the pharmaceutical industry for providing 3 Vs — ventilators, vaccines, V-shaped recovery — and said thethree Vs are reflective of the strength of the industry.