To the common man, biotech industry conjures up an image of a mysterious and unknown business sector in India. This cannot be farther from the truth. Biotech in India has no doubt a long way to go but the rapid stride it has made in the past decade is creditable. Thus while India made rapid strides in reverse engineering and gained from strength to strength in chemistry / pharmaceutical / Active Pharma Ingredient (API) sector, a quiet revolution was also brewing -called biotech.

Today, we appear to be fast reaching critical mass and analysts are of the view that by 2020 the Indian biotech sector would mature as an industry. Every company is ramping up operations with increased footprint in India by way of:
● Setting or expanding manufacturing operations
● Outsourcing and off shoring critical functions.
● Research and development establishments.
● Testing and trial facilities.

We have global companies like Monsanto, Novozymes , DuPont , Bayer Crop and Life Technologies on one side and home grown powerhouses like Biocon , Avesthagen and Serum Institute on the other. An extremely strong IT workforce which makes for firms like Accenture, Wipro and Infosys as leading bioinformatics companies add a further layer to this mix.

How does this translate into employment opportunity?
Traditionally, India has been strong in chemistry / synthesis areas. However, over the last few decades universities and institutions alike have laid stress on streams like microbiology, biotechnology and bioinformatics. Although this has met demand at the entry level to a large extent, key positions and senior leadership roles still go vacant for want of appropriate talent. We need the government to lay further stress on quality education in the bio tech sector to bridge the gap between academics and corporate. Capital investment without an effort to strengthen our talent pool will be insufficient.

Our advantage lies in a strong English speaking population, and a strong focus towards higher education. In addition, we tend to look at science, technology and engineering as the best possible career avenues for our children. Lastly, there are enough people in India motivated by intellectual work than crass capitalism.

Future prospects
The biotech sector will move up to employing over 2.4 lakh persons by 2012 and over 5 lakh people by 2015. While this sector will work on a “ bottom heavy “ sector it will still be a challenge to get people at the top and functional head level for the simple reason that this is still a nascent industry with talent hard to come by. Growth will come in primarily from within, although companies will do their best to ensure lateral leadership hires for difficult positions or niche jobs. We shall see more and more inflow of not only Indians working abroad but also expatriates with requisite knowledge base to take part in the India bio tech growth story. This sector shows humungous promise also because of the fact that it is getting increasingly difficult for innovator companies to churn out block buster drugs and hence the need for bio similiars. More and more drug firms will get increasingly involved in investing vast sums of money for research work on how biologics could be used as a therapeutic.

A combination of ever increasing high growth healthcare business, pharmaceutical firms trying to come to terms in the post TRIPS regime and never before focus on increasing life expectancy, the ever increasing biotech / life science industry augurs well for India in time to come.

Talent insights
Indian biotech industry is at the same cross roads where the IT industry was 15 years ago. While there shall be challenges, governments will have to be cajoled and pushed towards greater incentivisation programmes; perhaps naysayers will still predict a downtrend.

The general opinion though is this industry is here to stay, availability of talent at the managerial and leadership level shall be a challenge. This can be met by importing people of Indian origin or otherwise in this decade. Hopefully a sufficiently large talent pool would have been ready from the crop of home grown, young generation biotech professionals by end of this decade to carry on the baton.

Wise companies are those who have incorporated this into their talent strategy and evaluated a clear plan to meet, or rather anticipate their leadership needs as part of their fast growth plans. This could be the critical difference between the wannabes and the successful biotech companies.

It is ultimately the human mind which enables success.

-The author is Associate Director, Stanton Chase International