 "Pharma, Laboratory, Lab, Drugs, Testing")
Two-thirds of all greenfield plants planned under the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for bulk drugs and medical devices have been completed so far, said a senior government official.
Arunish Chawla, secretary, department of pharmaceuticals, told Business Standard that two-thirds of the greenfield plants planned under the scheme for bulk drugs and medical devices have now been inaugurated, and the rest will be completed in the next two years. “The 40 plants inaugurated today have come up in three years since the scheme’s launch, and another 30 to 40 plants are scheduled to start manufacturing in the next two years”, he added.
Union Minister of Chemical and Fertilisers Mansukh Mandaviya on Saturday inaugurated 40 greenfield facilities to manufacture bulk drugs and medical devices under the PLI scheme. These include 27 bulk drug parks and 13 medical device manufacturing plants across the country. Mandaviya said that the PLI scheme is a result of wide-ranging discussions around the dangers of supply chain getting affected, the risks of being highly dependent on imports of critical resources like bulk drugs and medical devices and its potential effects on India’s pharma and MedTech sector.
The PLI-1 scheme of the Union Government had identified 41 critical bulk drugs for manufacturing locally. “The success of the inaugural scheme led the government to launch the Rs 15,000 crore PLI-II scheme, which envisages to increase cost competitiveness for medicines and medical products in the international market”, Mandaviya said.
While manufacturing of 22 bulk drugs has been commissioned under the 27 new projects inaugurated on Saturday, another 11 bulk drugs will be manufactured within one year. This includes Penicilin G, which has not been produced in India since the last three decades.
Highlighting the importance of local manufacture of bulk drugs, Chawla said that India will now begin to manufacture bulk drugs for which we were 90 to 100 per cent import dependent until five years ago. “These bulk drugs are important as active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) for various drug formulations”, he said.
Chawla also highlighted that under the PLI scheme, as many as 1800 pharmaceutical products and formulations will be manufactured in India.
Similarly, 26 projects for manufacturing of medical devices have been approved for 138 products under the PLI scheme with total financial outlay of Rs 3,420 crore for the period 2020-21 to 2027-28. Of these, 13 projects were inaugurated on Saturday and will manufacture 39 commissioned medical devices.
Commenting on the reasons behind the delay in PLI projects coming to fruition, Chawla said that these projects, especially those associated with medical devices, have a high gestation period. “Medical Devices plants take two to three years to construct, then it takes time to enter transfer of technology (ToT) agreements and tie-ups with global value chains”.
