Gujarat government is likely to sign 250 MoUs related to pharmaceutical industry with potential domestic and international investors at the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit (VGGS) - 2017 at Gandhinagar between January 10 and January 13, 2017. Four MoUs are from overseas. It had inked 201 such pharma MoUs at VGGS- 2015.

These MoUs come at a time when Gujarat has become a favoured pharmaceutical hub accounting for nearly 40 per cent of India’s pharma production and 28 per cent of pharma exports. It has also registered a growth of 445 per cent in pharma exports in the past one decade. According to official sources, exports worth 3,060 million US Dollars has been achieved in 2016 from Gujarat in comparison to exports worth 562 million US Dollars in 2006.

Gujarat is hosting Vibrant Gujarat under the theme Connecting India to the World with focus on ‘Make in Gujarat’ series to promote Gujarat’s pharma manufacturing strength aligned with Make in India.

Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, UAE, UK, USA, Sweden and Singapore are the partner countries for the event which attracted 1250 companies and 110 countries with 14 country seminars at VGGS-2015.

Theme seminars in areas of GST: game changer for Indian economy, business potential of international financial services centre in India, innovation, startups and entrepreneurship, ease of doing business – regulators as facilitators, B2B and B2G meetings on each day and country seminars will be the main highlights of the event.

Gujarat today has 255 WHO certified manufacturing units with 23 MHRA certified, 24 TGA certified, 15 EU certified and 16 PICS certified units.  Besides this, it boasts of 158 formulation units and 97 bulk drug units. It has 40 per cent of CROs and 40 per cent of CRAMS companies.

Over 3300 manufacturing units are located across the state in four large clusters with 5 Special Economic Zones in an area of over 1500 hectares, as per government of Gujarat data released as part of the 8th Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit (VGGS) - 2017.
 
The growth in pharma exports would also complement the first upcoming medical device testing lab of the country at Vadodara in Gujarat. A final proposal on the same has been sent to the Union health ministry for its implementation.

Recommended and promoted by the Union commerce ministry to help Indian manufacturers gain self-reliance in medical device testing in the country, an amount of Rs. 15 crore has also been earmarked for the country’s flagship project.

National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) Ahmedabad is also being developed as a National Centre for Medical Devices (NCMD) which will provide a conducive environment to nurture innovators and industry.

Gujarat is also coming up with a manufacturing park for medical devices at Sanand. Medical devices manufacturing requires certain high investment facilities which are too capital intensive for individual manufacturers 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.

During the period 2011-12 to 2014-15 both import and export of medical devices have grown at more than 10 per cent annually.

Medical devices sector in India is relatively small as compared to the rest of the manufacturing industry, though India is one of the top twenty markets for medical devices in the world and is the fourth largest market in Asia after Japan, China and South Korea.