The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) has cleared the way for the much awaited Rs 150 crore annual allocation of pharma R&D fund by approving the dissolution of the existing Pharmaceutical Research and Development Support Fund (PRDSF) Corpus of Rs 150 crore in the Department of Science and Technology.

The dissolution of the existing corpus would enable DST to utilise the entire amount and disburse the interest accrued so far (app: Rs 160 crore) to eligible companies and institutions for already approved proposals. The department will now have to make a fresh request to streamline the annual allocations for the coming years.

It should be noted that DST has been implementing the Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Research Programme (DPRP) since 1994-95 to support industry institutional collaborative R&D projects and infrastructure development. From 2004-05, DST has been extending soft loans to pharma industries for R&D projects. Considering the importance of R&D in the drugs and pharma sector in the present global scenario, a need was felt to give a fresh impetus to the drugs and pharma R&D so as to be globally competitive in this knowledge intensive sector of national importance.

The Planning Commission while approving an outlay of Rs 1250 crore for Annual Plan 2005-06 of DST keeping in view the goals and objectives outlined in the National Common Minimum Programme of the government and the priorities emerging from the mid-term appraisal process. It allocated an outlay of Rs 150 crore for drugs and pharmaceutical research with the specific condition that the outlay should be operated only after the existing corpus for PRSDF is dissolved.

With the CCEA approval, the whole amount has now been allocated for this programme for the year 2005-06 and can be utilised to fund a number of collaborative pharmaceutical R&D projects with institutions and industry.