The government of India is in the process of designing bilateral business arrangements with countries like Russia and Kazakhstan, and talks with more countries in the Commonwealth Independent States (CIS) are under consideration to support the Indian pharma exporters to aggressively win the overseas market.

The Indian pharma industry is equipping itself with global standards in quality of manufacturing and products and the country, with its strength in generics, has huge opportunities to be explored in the CIS pharma market, said Ashok Kumar, secretary, Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP). He was addressing a business delegation from the CIS nations, in a three-day business meet between the Indian pharma and the buyers from 15 CIS countries organised by Pharmaceutical Exports Promotion Council (Pharmexcil).

Assuring the delegation on the quality standards of Indian pharma and the efforts from the central government to support the industry to keep up the international standards, he said that the country is trying to materialise more bilateral business agreements with CIS nations other than the already initiated talks to bring in such agreements with Russia and Kazakhstan, two member countries of CIS.

The government thinks that India and Russia could delve on more areas for joint effort for mutual growth. For instance, with the Russian government planning to increase presence of local manufacturers in Russian pharma market, the Indian and Russian companies could explore opportunities like setting up joint production facilities for pharma business. “In future, we will see an increased role of multilateral organisations in business relations between both the countries,” said Kumar.

Certain measures like fast-tracking of regulatory approvals as well as mutual recognition arrangements for such approvals could be possibilities to be probed for future growth through cooperation, he added. The Government of India has weaved out a complete plan to develop Indian pharma as an end to end drug discovery platform through the Pharma Vision 2020 and support for the small and medium scale firms to adhere to the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) with the World Health Organisation (WHO), he added.

India has already initiated talks with countries like Japan for bilateral agreements in improve access for Indian companies in overseas market, said Rajeev Kher, joint secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry. He added that the ministry has also sought the Director General for Foreign Trade (DGFT) to bring in specific technologies to track the pharma consignments send from India, in order to keep the country's profile intact on the export nations by ensuring standard of the drug exported.

India is one of the major exporter of medicines to the US$ 2 billion CIS pharma market with almost seven percent of the country's total pharma exports to the region. As per data available, India is the fifth largest supplier of formulations and sixth largest supplier of bulk drugs to Russia. Similarly, in formulations, India is the second largest supplier of Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, third largest in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, and fifth largest supplier of Georgia.