Andhra Med Tech Zone (AMTZ)- company established under government of Andhra Pradesh has finally received formal registration which will kick start establishing Asia's first dedicated medical device park in an area of 226 acres at Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh.

The park is proposed to have all such facilities in-house that are required for specialized product verticals to reduce manufacturing process costs. The park will provide for modern state of art common facilities such as specialised laboratories, warehousing, testing centre apart from 100 to 150 independent manufacturing units, each in a built-in ready to use area of 0.5 to 1 acre each.

Established subsequent to announcement made by Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu after a series of consultations with Indian medical device manufacturing industry, AMTZ is the brainchild of Dr Jitendar Sharma, head of health technology department of National Health Systems Resource Centre (NHSRC) and also advisor to chief minister of Andhra Pradesh for health and medical technology.

The creation of manufacturing park for medical devices is the need of the hour as medical devices manufacturing requires certain high investment facilities which are too capital intensive for individual manufactures to invest upon. A park with in-house high investment scientific facilities would help manufacturers reduce the cost of manufacturing by more than 40 per cent to 50 per cent.

Currently, due to lack of such centrally located common facilities, manufacturers do not undertake production of technologies and therefore send their products abroad for process upgradation and value addition.

It will help facilitate to create an ecosystem for manufacturing of high end medical device manufacturing aimed at import substitution and export opportunities and would be a major boost to SMEs.

Indian medical device industry is worth over Rs. 60,000 crore and country's humongous import bill for this segment amounts to over Rs. 23,000 crore while export amounts to only over Rs. 7,000 crore. India's import dependency on high-end medical devices is over 80 per cent and 60 per cent to 70 per cent for other devices. And this is where the dedicated medical device park would be of great value - reducing humongous import dependency, increasing export while generating wealth and employment within.