The ayurvedic drug manufacturers in the country are facing a strange problem of not having the right type of machinery required for production of various types of ayurvedic preparations. Production and packaging machineries currently available in the market are more suitable to make allopathic drugs and not to the requirements of ayurveda industry.

As of now the ayurveda medicines are manufactured through standard machineries specified for allopathic medicines. Owing to the hard texture or properties of the ayurvedic herbs the allopathic medicine manufacturing machineries are wearing off soon.

"The ayurvedic herbs appear to be soft and easy to handle, but they are in fact very strong and the amount of herbs that goes into the production of a medicine is also large. Many times while processing the ayurvedic medicines, the machinery gets spoilt. There is a nee therefore to have specifically designed machinery for the manufacture and processing of ayurvedic drugs," said T S Murali chief of R&D Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala.

According to him, even though the batch size was small in the ayurveda medicine production, the production size was very large. And different varieties of medicines were being produced by the companies in large numbers. This calls for appropriate machinery which can bear the heavy load of production in ayurveda units.

When asked what kind of support was expected from the government, Murali said that it should act as a link between the technology and the ayurvedic industry for manufacturing ayurveda specific machinery. He said, that no pharmaceutical machinery fabricator had come forward to design machinery as per the requirements of Ayurvedic drug processing.

"One important fact to be considered in this context is that the Indian Ayurvedic market is just about Rs. 2,000 crore, which may include the herbal market as well. Vast majority of the manufacturers are small-time operators who cannot go in for costly machinery. It is only a small fraction of large manufacturers who can afford such high investments," said Murali.

Stating that there are good chances for the ayurveda industry to expand its tentacles far and wide, he said that to support such growth technological support was essential.