Pharmaceuticals Industry:
Ans. The Pharmaceutical Industry in India is one of the few sectors whose revenues grew during 2009-10 in spite of the global recession. Robust domestic demand, increased preference for generics worldwide and the favourable rupee-dollar exchange rate aided the Pharmaceutical sector in India. The turnover of this industry has expanded from a meagre value of US$ 0.32 billion in 1980 to around US$ 21.26 billion in 2009-10. India ranks 3rd in terms of the value of production (10 per cent of global share) and is the 14th largest by value. In fact, Indian pharmaceutical industry has come a long way since 1970s. It traditionally was against Intellectual Property Rights in general in the 70's and 80's. The domestic sector was pro-non-branded generics, anti-trademarks and anti-patents. The advent of WTO and TRIPS regime has done wonders for the Indian pharmaceutical industry. Under the protected pre-1995 regime, Indian pharmaceutical industry had been floating complacently without direction and with no sense of urgency. Only after the emergence of TRIPS on the horizon, Indian pharmace.utical industry woke up to the challenges of new intellectual property regin...d became part of the knowledge industry. The Indian pharmaceutical industry which had commenced export of bulk drugs (active ingredients) and formulations to least developed countries in the late-7os'and 8os' has now emerged as a major global player, post-TRIPS. The direction of India's pharmaceutical exports has substantially changed its course to the developed countries such as US and Europe in the post-TRIPS era. During the post-TRIPS regime, there have been extreme concerns about misappropriation of traditional knowledge. The cases involving Neem, Turmeric, Basmati, including Geographical Indications in the latter case and many other alerted the law makers to include extreme safety measures to prevent misappropriation of traditional knowledge. Consequently, a reasonable good number of Indian pharmaceutical corporations have set up research facilities of global standard and have initiated research programme for New Drug Delivery Systems and also in some cases for Drug Discovery Programme. This has led to the reverse brain drain of the pharma professionals of Indian origin. Almost all the major leading global generic pharmaceutical corporations have set up research facilities in India and have also made major mergers and acquisitions, thereby making India the single largest pharma player in the world, post-TRIPS. However, at the domestic front, the industry faces the challenge of higher retail price charged by companies than the maximum price regulated.
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