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Department of Pharmaceuticals Secretary Arunish Chawla has said that the domestic pharmaceutical industry has the potential to grow by 4-5 times to around $200 billion in value terms by scaling up manufacturing and enhancing exports. He noted that to reach a size of $200 billion by 2030 from around $50 billion currently, the industry needs to grow in double digits year-on-year while reducing dependence on imports and focussing on expanding exports. 

Chawla said ‘the new therapies that will come to the fore in the next 20 to 30 years would deliver smart therapies virtually for every difficult illness that we know of today. We have to be ready for that age. We have to prepare for that age’. He also said ‘we need to select and target a few sectors where we are still import dependent. We need to redesign policy framework and do it in such a way that, in ten years, we will become exporters in all these segments.’ He added that the government is helping the industry with various policy initiatives, including production-linked incentives.

He further said ‘we are already exporting in most sectors, and we hope, the way new technologies are coming up and the way our academic institutions, our laboratories and our industries are working together in the research and development sector, we hope that we will be an exporter of nearly all most major medical technology products.’ He said a shift is required from publications to patents and a mechanism for research-oriented sponsored degrees from industry is the need of the hour to foster innovation. He added that the country must utilise its technical resources, demographic dividend, skilled manpower, forward-looking government policies and economies of scale to become a world leader in pharmaceuticals.