A high level committee on building capacity of SMEs has recommended setting up of clusters for Small and Medium Enterprises so that pharma SMEs can relocate to these exclusive clusters where GLP complaint laboratories may be set up as 'common facility centre'.

The Joint Working Group for building capacity of SME and auxiliary industry, in its report, also called for assistance as grant to the extent of 70 per cent of the costs, with a maximum limit of Rs. 15 crore, for setting up common facility centre from the MSME under the 'cluster scheme'.

The JWG was set up as per the recommendations of the India pharma summit 2009 with the mandate to formulate strategy and its implementation to enhance the technological and physical capacity of SME. Two rounds of meeting were held under the chairmanship of DoP joint secretary Arun Jha before submitting the consensus recommendations to the pharma department which has now sought comments from the stakeholders and concerned departments.

The JWG in the first meeting in June this year, made a sub committee comprising Lalit Kumar Jain of SMPIC consultative committee, NIPER, G Wakankar of IDMA, Dr Sanjay Jachak of NIPER, and Kawaljeet Singh of FICCI. The recommendations of this panel were discussed in detail before finalising the report of the JWG for action.

“The views of NIPER, Mohali, may be sought with regard to its capacity to deal with issues relating to NABL accreditation facilities, services, BA/BE studies, impurity characterisation, standardisation of herbs etc. If NIPER cannot handle these matters, it should be explored whether any other agency can undertake these tasks,” the report said.

“NIPER may organise training programmes. This should be linked to setting up and upgrading of GLP labs in the clusters exclusively meant for SMEs,” the report said.