Karnataka plans to tap the Central government’s Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme to aggressively push for investments in the bio-pharmaceuticals and medical devices sector.

Currently, the two sectors account for nearly 35 percent of the State’s bioeconomy valued at $22.6 billion.

Through the PLI, the State government is planning to attract investments in bio-agriculture (agriculture and animal husbandry) and bio-industrial (enzymes, bio-fuels, biomass, and green chemicals) industries as well to increase the share of bioeconomy.

Karnataka, to measure the impact of the biotech industry, products and services on its economy, has come out with a ‘Karnataka BioEconomy Report (KBER) 2020’ on Friday.

Releasing the report, CN Ashwathanarayan, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister who also holds the IT/BT Ministry, said: “We are aiming higher and our government has set a task of more than doubling the value of bioeconomy in the next five years. Our target is to raise Karnataka’s bioeconomy share to 50 per cent of the national bioeconomy revenue target of $100 billion by the year 2025.”

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Growth areas

With the PLI scheme, the State government has set a target to achieve $50 billion by 2025. Highlighting the State’s potential, the report stated that with a key broad plan can see revenues in each sector going up.

Biopharma can be scaled up to increase its contribution from $4.2 billion in FY2020 to $9.5 billion in FY2025. Similarly, the medical devices and diagnostics sector has the potential to move from $3.9 billion in bioeconomy value to $8.7 billion by FY2020.

Bioagri is a key segment, and efforts towards removing hurdles and infusion of new-age technologies will boost the entire value chain. Similarly, the Bioindustrial segment comprising biorenewables, bioenergy, biofuels, and green chemicals is throwing up huge potential.

Though this segment always had potential, it didn’t take off in a big way in India. This segment has the potential to quadruple its contribution to the bioeconomy of Karnataka from $1.4 billion to $5.7 billion.

The others sectors that are likely to see growth are the research and development services, marine biotech and BioIT and informatics services.

The report has made a host of recommendations aimed at doubling State’s bioeconomy like: To establish a vaccine hub, biomanufacturing hub, to enable agri-tech ecosystem by supporting application of agri-biotech tools like CRISPR cas9 (gene editing), molecular breeding, more value addition in marine biotech, setting up of a biomedical cluster to make important diagnostic and medical devices, setting up of an integrated bio-refineries cluster to use available biomass and value-added agriculture systems in Hassan, Dharwad and Belagavi areas.

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