After more than three years since the scheme was first proposed, the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) has revived the Pharmaceutical Technology Upgradation Assistance Scheme (PTUAS) to assist medium enterprises (MEs) in terms of soft loan at the interest rate of five per cent per annum for making these units WHO-GMP compliant.

On the directive of the planning commission, SIDBI has been appointed as the nodal agency to disburse the loan. As per the proposal, SIDBI will provide need based soft loan to pharma MEs at concessional rate of five per cent per annum and proposed Rs.500 crore interest free corpus fund to be kept with them for disbursement of loan to 250 MEs at the rate of  Rs.2. crore per unit.

Senior officials in the DoP said that the PTUAS scheme would go a long way in improving quality, efficacy and efficiency of drugs manufactured by medium enterprises. It will also strengthen the presence of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in domestic as well as international markets given the globalised nature of pharmaceutical industry. The PTUAS scheme will also stimulate continuous technological upgradation and trigger healthy competition among the pharma MEs towards improving quality of drugs by availing soft loan assistance. It is expected that by the end of 13th Five Year Plan, all medium enterprises would have state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities conforming to WHO-GMP/ international norms.

As per the initial plan of the DoP, the PTUAS scheme was to come into effect from July 1, 2010 and the date was later postponed to January 1, 2011. But, the DoP could not launch the ambitious scheme so far mainly due to objections raised by the planning commission. The planning commission's objections in this regard came in the wake of its earlier experience with a similar scheme named CLCSS which was literally rejected by the industry as the scheme had several lacunae.

As the scheme hung in balance, the DoP made a presentation to the planning commission on 08.12.2011 in connection with approval of PTUAS scheme to assist MEs for making them WHO-GMP compliant by providing financial assistance by way of reimbursement of five per cent point of interest on the loan taken from the schedule banks/financial institutions. After hearing the DoP presentation, the commission advised the DoP that “Instead of subsidy route, SIDBI could be approached directly by medium sized pharma units for soft loan.”