With ₹3,502 crore allotted , India’s Department of Biotechnology saw considerable increase in 2021-2022 budget. Last year, it was budgeted ₹2,786 crore and spent ₹2,300 crore.
Biotechnology industry, with it’s sectors including bio pharmaceuticals, bio services, bio agriculture, bio informatics amongst others, has emerged as one of the fastest growing Industry, supplemented with desired government focus, evidenced from increase in yearly budget allocations of recent times. Thus, benefitting research and development, industrial and entrepreneurship development and assistance to autonomous institutions.
The main government body responsible for strengthening the system and promoting innovation in biotechnology in India, has been the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) under the Ministry of Science and Technology. To ensure a shift in the ecosystem from being a generic drug manufacturer to innovation driven research has been a challenge.
Looking back, it was the year 1970, with enactment of new Patent Law putting restrictions on pharmaceutical product patent, that eventually with the aid of reverse engineering the Indian drug industry became a prominent generic drug manufacturer and exporter. The downside of this scenario was the exit of many multinational pharmaceutical companies from India which preferred leaving India when faced with loss in product patent royalties, capping of rates of some medicines by the government and limiting of foreign holding in Indian enterprise.
The definitive step towards pushing India to step out of the tag of major generic drug producer and focus on innovation can be traced back to the year 1991 which saw India stride towards economic liberalisation and eventually becoming a part of World Trade Organisation in 1995 and a signatory to the TRIPS Agreement, thereby re-implementing product patent. But by then although India was a well-established generic drug manufacturer, the primary focus had shifted away from innovation, which led to a situation of major brain drain in the field of research, scarcity of skill, lack of adequate facility and investment in research and development and absence of qualitative interaction between industry and academia and public research institution.
Faced with such non favourable scenario India had to take steps, to promote biotechnology industry and take initiatives for accelerated commercial development of Biotechnology. DBT recognised the need for creating a connection between national laboratories, start-ups, university and academic researchers. It facilitated integrated Human Resource development program with training of students towards acquiring skill in biotechnology. One such initiative being, Skill Vigyan Program, a partnership initiation between state governments for providing skill training for students, technician training, faculty training and entrepreneurship.
DBT has also been instrumental in various international collaborative programs in different areas of biotechnology. The Indo-US Genome Engineering / Editing Technology Initiative, being a collaborative research project between Indian Institute and Premier US University. Another such program amongst several others is Newton Bhabha PhD placement programme, a partnership between UK and Indian Institution.
To increase the amount of research and innovation, effort of DBT over the years, from establishing biotech parks to facilitating incubator technology management units and setting up Bio clusters across the country, and implementing various schemes to help the entrepreneurs and startup companies, has helped and strengthened the Indian biotech system.
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Recent times have witnessed multinational and bio-pharma companies showing interest and initiating research and manufacturing operations in India. With government’s sincere efforts to promote biotechnology activities and biotech start-up companies by way of Public Private Partnerships, India’s biotechnology industry surely seems to move towards a promising future.
Vidhik-Vishleshan (Decoding The Law & More) 