Government investment will turnaround APIs industry in India, says analyst

India’s Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) has proposed an incentive scheme worth around 10,000 billion rupees ($1.3 billion) aiming to strengthen the domestic active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) facilites to boost domestic manufacturing in India to compensate for dwindling Chinese supply because of the coronavirus outbreak.

Responding to the development, Prashant Khadayate, pharma analyst at GlobalData, noted that the package will help boost the capabilities of domestic API manufacturers. The timing of the announcement was crucial as Indian pharma companies are facing potential supply disruptions due to COVID-19 outbreak. Indian pharma manufacturers depend heavily for their supply of fine chemicals and drug intermediates on China.

As part of the strategy, three API manufacturing parks will be set up in different parts of the country to further help in setting up API manufacturing units, and incentive scheme will be implemented for the production of government identified 53 API’s by the manufacturers.