Speaking at The Global BioIndia 2021, Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu said that India’s biotechnology industry is built on the 4 core beliefs of entrepreneurship, innovation, development of local talent and demonstrating high value-based care. He acknowledged that the field has emerged as the backbone of several areas in recent times. With its strong tech and industrial capabilities, India is in a unique position to transition from the biotech industry to a bio-economy.
The Vice President exhorted upon scientists and researchers to be prepared to combat new and emerging diseases. He stressed the need to leverage the huge potential of the biotechnology sector to create and generate new interventions to address the challenges faced by agriculture and allied sectors. The current pandemic has reinforced the need to be ever vigilant to tackle an outbreak of sudden and unforeseen epidemics and pandemics.
In fact, in large part, the pandemic was a catalyst and accelerator of development in the sector. Major disruptions of supply chains including imports of critical products and raw material further concretised the resolve for the nation to become atmanirbhar (self-reliant).
The Department of Biotechnology deserves recognition for working relentlessly to mitigate the COVID-19-induced crisis through the development of high-tech diagnostics, innovative protection equipment and vaccines. It scaled up production capacity and streamlined regulatory response to ensure the rapid and safe rollout of necessary measures.
With the immense potential the biotech sector presents, the government has eased compliance and approvals for the ecopreneurs. The proactive initiatives have resulted in a multifold impact reflected in the number of innovators, technologies and products, incubation space and IPs generated in the last year.
Citing the attractiveness of India’s value proposition and comparative advantage in the bio-economy, the ‘Make in India’ initiative and Atmanirbhar Bharat ideology will help to achieve the paradigm shift from biotech to bio-economy.
Dr Harsh Vardhan, Minister of Science & Technology, Earth Sciences and Health & Family Welfare, emphasised that the global impact of COVID-19 has brought greater recognition of the biotech sector’s influence on innovation and technology adoption in pharma, medtech, agriculture and allied areas, clean solutions, and industrial bio-manufacturing.
The industry is divided into five major segments: bio-pharma, bio-services, bio-Agri, bio-industrial and bioinformatics. The biotechnology sector in India has been growing at 14.7% year-on-year, with it being evaluated to about US$ 51 bn in 2018. While it may account for only 2% of the global market share, it is 3rd in the Asia Pacific region in terms of the number of companies.
About 40% of these are in the biopharma segment and the rest are in agribiotech, bioinformatics, industrial biotechnology and bioservices. India has the tremendous potential to become a global player in the biotechnology sector because of its cost-effective products and services.
The Global BioIndia 2021 showcased India’s strength in the biotechnology sector. India’s biotech sector has the ambitious target of US$ 100 billion bio-manufacturing hub and becoming a US$ 150 billion industry by 2025.
As the nation strives to become a knowledge- and innovation-driven economy, it is imperative its development is holistic – academia and industry must collaborate. India needs to focus on developing skilled manpower – all stakeholders must actively look at training and upskilling the workforce. In addition, the country must address infrastructure, quality compliance, venture funding and regulatory and IPR issues.