The Central Government has announced allocation of the annual drug R&D fund of Rs 150 crore in place of the existing Rs 150 crore corpus fund for the Pharmaceuticals Research and Development Support Fund (PRDSF).

Under the new allocation, Rs 150 crore will be available every year to the industry either as grant or loan for supporting drug research programme. Earlier, under the corpus funding system, the industry was effectively getting only the interest part of the Rs 150 crore corpus every year.

Announcing this at a press conference here today, Kabil Sibal, minister of state for science and technology, said that the changes were effected in the Union Budget 2005-06.

However, the existing corpus of Rs 150 crore, which was recommended in the Mashelkar Committee for pharmaceutical R&D funding, will be scrapped as the annual funding proposal is in effect from now onwards.

The minister said that the Budget was extremely considerate towards scientific research and development.

However, there was lack of clarity with regard to the Budgetary allocation among the media necessitating a press briefing, the minister added.

In addition to this, the government has also promised that the annual funding will be gradually increased. The Union Budget has recommended 37 per cent increase in financial allocation for Science and Technology segment.

The increase was 13.6 per cent in 2004-05 and 6 per cent in 2003-04. But, the increase in budgetary allocation for DST in Union Budget 2005-06 is 39 per cent than the previous year. The increase in budgetary allocation to Department of Biotechnology was 43 per cent and 30 per cent in case of Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR).

The minister said that the pharma industry would be extremely benefited by the new funding proposal. While the effective fund that was available for the industry through the existing pharma research fund was about Rs 12 crore, it is going to be Rs 150 crore from this year.

The minister said the government has considered nanotechnology as one of the sunrise area in science and technology sector. There is Rs 200 crore allocation for nanotechnology in the current budget. Similarly, Rs 20 crore has been allotted to DBT to be utilised in the in the area of public private partnership programme. The minister felt that the government has taken due note of the Mashelkar Committee recommendation made in 1999 while announcing the special budgetary support for the science and technology.