The government is planning to spend around Rs 1000-1500 crore towards bettering the infrastructure for the pharmaceutical research to encourage new drug discovery during the next 15 years as part of the ambitious Pharma Infrastructure and Innovation Development Initiative (PIDI), expected to take off in another one year.

The Centre will be putting this money as the corpus fund for the initiative which will be run by a venture capital fund with the participation of the private sector. The initiative is aimed at making the domestic industry globally competitive through medium and long term development plans. The expression of interest for selecting the global advisor to prepare the detailed project report on the fund will be issued next month, a senior official of the Pharmaceutical Department said.

The fund would be raised in three tranches and the government will be giving 10 to 15 per cent of it as corpus. The bid is being finalised by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy and will be issued soon. The agency for designing the project is expected to be selected in the next six months, DoP secretary Ashok Kumar told reporters on Monday.

But the government is also apprehensive about how the industry will respond to it as it would be a novel attempt in the pharma sector. "We are going ahead with the plan and inviting the agency. Let's see what the market has to offer. We will see how the industry would take it. There are no institutional funding for new drug development activities and the government wants to make the country the hub for research in pharma sector," Ashok Kumar told Pharmabiz later.

The venture fund is one of the key elements of the PIDI which is a comprehensive programme, being mooted by the Department. The goals of making India globally competitive in infrastructure and new drug discovery under the PIDI would be met through public-private partnership in all projects, development of world class R&D infrastructure for chemical and biological pharma products, and targeted venture capital finance for funding new drugs discovery. Another important feature is to unlock the value of idle land, managerial and financial assets, unutilized, partly or inefficiently utilised, whether in central pharma enterprises or those under the state governments and other government organisations, industrial estates, export promotion zones and parks.