Looking at the strong presence of Pharmexcil in the global healthcare sector, the Union commerce ministry has recently directed Pharmexcil to work closely with the Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC) and Services Export Promotion Council (SEPC) to promote the interest of these sectors, wherever possible.

Both EEPC and SEPC are trade and investment promotion councils under the commerce ministry constituted to aid the growth of the Indian engineering sector, and interest of the service sector like hospitals, education, etc, respectively. Through this strategic initiative, the government aims to leverage the influence of the Council, for boosting the healthcare sector across the globe.

Since these collaborative efforts are basically targeted to assist and aid the growth of the healthcare sector by boosting export and trade initiatives, the Council is understood to be keen to include other key healthcare players as well under its focus, whenever possible, as per the direction of the ministry.

According to Dr P V Appaji, director general of Pharmexcil, “Over the years, through our relentless efforts Pharmexcil has been able to establish huge network of contacts, which has played a major role in the development of the pharma sector across the globe. It is this resource that the commerce ministry aims to tap for strengthening and spurring the growth of the healthcare sector, as a whole. As advised, we have already initiated the process that is aimed at identifying the areas that can be explored to work in collaboration.”

It is understood that following the direction, Pharmexcil already had a meeting with the executive director of EEPC and SEPC to deliberate over the possibilities of working together on select projects. Dr Appaji informed that the idea behind this meeting was to identify common grounds on which they can work together for mutual benefit.

“We got a pro-active response from them wherein they expressed keen interest in associating with Pharmexcil, whenever there is opportunity to explore. This includes working with them by taking delegates to trade fairs and events associated with the Council, under the existing marketing development assistance (MDA) and market access initiative (MAI) schemes so that SMEs from all the related sectors having shared and mutual interest could take benefits out of them extensively,” informed Dr Appaji.