The pharmaceutical industry had successfully turned the challenges posed by the WTO regime to its advantage. There were apprehensions on the high cost of medicines in the country post-2005 due to WTO norms, but India had successfully turned the global pharmaceutical battle in its favour with the help of quality production at cheapest manufacturing cost. This was stated by Union Law and Commerce & Industry Minister, Arun Jaitley, in Hyderabad on Saturday. He was addressing a gathering of scientists and industrialists, mostly from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, to coincide with the inauguration of the modern manufacturing facility of Granules India Ltd, a Hyderabad-based pharmaceutical company specialising in pharmaceutical formulations intermediates (PFIs).

Jaitley said there was a genuine fear that medicines would become highly expensive in India because of the high cost of Intellectual Property Rights that the multinationals would charge for their drugs. But the growth of the Indian pharmaceutical industry in the last 10 years had been so remarkable that it had scared even the US multinationals.” The whole equation that the Indian patients have to pay for medicines in dollars is now changed. Now the fear of the US multinationals is that Indian pharmaceutical products will be available to the world at the price equivalent to rupees. And, therefore, those exorbitantly priced products of the US will not sell in competition,” Jaitley said.

He said though one of the sharpest growths that had taken place in the last one decade had been in the pharmaceutical industry, the focus went to the growth achieved in IT and projected it as the greatest achievement of India. With the result, the growth recorded by the pharmaceutical industry had been the unsung success story, the minister said.

Stressing that the pharma industry had become one of the key sectors in the Indian economy, Jaitley said as drugs produced in the country were cheaper, many countries, including the US, were procuring drugs from India in huge quantities. The exports grew significantly last year and the country had a positive trade balance. Indian exports to the US were worth $ 16 billion and imports were only $ 4 billion. This left a trade gap of $ 12 billion in India’s favour. The two key growth areas were steel and pharmaceuticals.

Jaitley said the healthcare sector in the country had become more affordable because of the participation of private entrepreneurs. The quality of healthcare had also improved, he said. Granules India Ltd (GIL) started commercial operations at its new PFI facility at Gangillapur on the city outskirts on Saturday. M Venkaiah Naidu, all-India BJP president, inaugurated the new plant. With a capacity of 7,200 tonnes per annum, this is the world’s largest commercial PFI plant.

C Krishna Prasad, GIL Managing Director, said the company had invested Rs 30 crore in the highly sophisticated and fully automated plant, designed to conform to the highest standards of cGMP. “Over the last several years, Granules had pioneered the manufacture and propagated the use of PFIs for the generic prescription markets, besides OTC (branded and generic) markets,” Prasad said.

With the inauguration of the new plant, Granules now moves on to the next level in the pharmaceutical value chain.The company now expects accelerated change in the manufacturing paradigm in the industry with global pharma giants switching over to the purchase of PFIs, instead of APIs, and relies on dedicated companies like Granules for their PFI requirements. “The new plant is the perfect launch pad for the next phase of accelerated growth of Granules. It also forms the cornerstone of the company’s growth strategy for the future, which aims at becoming an integrated pharmaceutical company by implementing forward and backward integration,” Prasad said.

The new PFI facility has two granulation lines, High Shear and Fluidised Granulation. This fully automated plant produces large batch size PFIs that will result in significant savings in costs for consumers.