A few years back, Kolkata’s renowned homeopathy clinic – Paramesh Banerji’s Life Sciences – decided to cater to the USA market with its range of proprietary and classic medicines. It planned to set up a manufacturing unit there.

In 2014, it set up the Paramesh Banerji Life Sciences (PBLS) LLC, for pharmaceutical manufacturing, at New Jersey. It took the help of the “SelectUSA” programme of the federal.

US operations

“The US unit has gone on-stream some two to three months back. It manufactures 180 proprietary medicines and 150-odd classical homeopathy ones,” says Uddalak Chakrabarty, Vice-President (Global Projects), PBLS.

The company, currently, caters to patients across 30 States in the US through tele-medicine set-up.

The homeopathic pharma market in the USA is pegged at around $3.9 billion and the Kolkata-based player hopes to break into this market.

“In future, we intend to sell our homeopathy medicines through the pharmacies there too,” he added.

PBLS is one of the two companies from Kolkata to have recently taken advantage of this SelectUSA programme, which seeks to draw investments there.

‘Sweets’ venture

The other one is traditional Bengali sweet-maker “Banchharam”.

California, followed by New York and Washington are amongst its initial forays, according to Subhajit Ghosh, Director, Banchharam Foods.

The company will start exporting packaged offerings to the USA after its new facility at Sankrail – a few kilometres west of Kolkata – comes up. It’ll start with shop-in-shop formats there before looking to scale up to have its own retail chain, including manufacturing.

“By end of December, the Sankhrail unit should be operational. So by next year (2016), we are hopeful of being able to export to the US,” he maintains.

But these aren’t isolated cases in the country. India, according to Paul Frost, Commercial Attache, US Embassy (New Delhi), is amongst the fourth fastest growing source of FDI (into the USA). The “total stock” of FDI from India to US stood at a little over $11 billion.

“With improved relations, we expect more investments to come into the US from India,” he said. Accordingly, a ‘SelectUSA’ road show will be organised in three cities – Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai – on October 13, 14, 15, this year.

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