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Qualified workforce & successful global plant audits to propel confidence of Indian pharma to do business without China
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Nandita Vijay, Bengaluru
June 20 , 2020
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Even as India eyes doing business without China, Indian pharma industry is now keen to capitalise and take advantage of the situation. The acceleration of Make in India programme, according to the industry, would enable the country to become a pharma manufacturing hub. The pool of qualified workforce and the successful global plant audits will propel the confidence of the industry.
In 2019, for a period of nine months between April and December India imported $2.6 billion chemicals of which $1.8 billion were active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Most of the life saving APIs, antipyretics (paracetamol), antibiotics like chloramphenicol, erythromycin, clarithromycin, metronidazole, amoxycillin, and vitamins like A,B,E,C and E, hormones like progesterone, steroids, anti-diabetic and antihypertensive medications are imported from China.
Price of paracetamol is up from Rs. 250-300 per kg to Rs. 400-450 a kg. Price of mintelucast sodium, an anti-asthma drug, was increased from Rs. 33,000 a kg to between Rs. 52,000 and Rs. 58,000 per kg. Prices of vitamins and penicillin have also increased by 40 to 50% and price of azhithromycin was up by 70 per cent.
“The talk about curb on China products has taken momentum because of high tension at borders. We sincerely hope that suitable solution emerges from the bilateral talks. Indian pharma’s dependence on China is a well known fact. It is the economies-of-scale and competitive pricing by China, which eventually led Indian companies to stall their local production and import from the dragon land. Government has come out with production linked incentive schemes and proposals for bulk drug parks. It has also identified the products required to be made locally to reduce the import dependence. However, the blockage of Chinese products will have an adverse impact on entire healthcare system. Hence this should be done in stages with short term and long term measures in place to mitigate the challenges. Industry should submit their action plan to substitute the drug imports. It needs close monitoring and coordination with concerned Ministries and a task force to be in place to ensure execution of schemes in a time bound manner,” said Kaushik Desai, pharma consultant.
According to Suresh Khanna, designated partner, Dossier Solutions and pharma veteran, our pharma industry in the 1980s was manufacturing paracetamol from basic stages and now all intermediates for this is imported. With so much of capacity available it would be far more prudent for Indian pharma to maximise this opportunity to spur domestic production of all other products too that it was dependent on China from basic stages. Now in order to motivate the industry, the government’s recent incentive proposal should also be extended to these products also. While the setting up of Pharma Parks is laudable, the implementation will take time. We need to come out of this stranglehold of depending on China and move as faster pace to embark on being self-reliant.
Dr Suresh Saravdekar, vice chairman, hospital pharmacy division, Indian Pharmaceutical Association and honorary consultant, Medication Management, Institute of Medical Sciences, Benares Hindu University, noted that only China could afford pricing medicines at a lower rate because its government offered the required capital to invest, with relatively low labour cost and least export duty. Even if our industry resorts to manufacture all the APIs, the process is both time consuming and expensive. This will have a detrimental effect on prices of essential medicine for domestic market and exports.
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