The Pharmaceutical industry in India is the world's third-largest in terms of volume and stands 14th in terms of value. According to Department of Pharmaceuticals, Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, the total turnover of India's pharmaceuticals industry between 2008 and September 2009 was US$21.04 billion. While the domestic market was worth US$12.26 billion. Sale of all types of medicines in the country is expected to reach around US$19.22 billion by 2012.
Exports of pharmaceuticals products from India increased from US$6.23 billion in 2006-07 to US$8.7 billion in 2008-09 a combined annual growth rate of 21.25%. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) in 2010, India joined among the league of top 10 global pharmaceuticals markets in terms of sales by 2020 with value reaching US$50 billion. Some of the major pharmaceutical firms includ Ranbaxy,Cipla,Sun, Cadila Healthcare and Piramal Healthcare.
The government started to encourage the growth of drug manufacturing by Indian companies in the early 1960s, and with the Patents Act in 1970. However, economic liberalization in the 1990s by the former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and the then Finance Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh enabled the industry to become what it is today. This patent act removed composition patents from food and drugs, and though it kept process patents, these were shortened from a period of seven years to five years.
The lack of patent protection made the Indian market undesirable to the multinational companies that had dominated the market, and while they streamed out. Indian companies carved a niche in both the Indian and world markets with their expertise in reverse-engineering new processes for manufacturing drugs at low costs. Although some of the larger companies have taken baby steps towards drug innovation, the industry as a whole has been following this business model until the present.
India's biopharmaceutical industry clocked a 17 percent growth with revenues of Rs.137 billion ($3 billion) in the 2009-10 financial year over the previous fiscal. Bio-pharma was the biggest contributor generating 60 percent of the industry's growth at Rs.8,829 crore, followed by bio-services at Rs.2,639 crore and bio-agri at Rs.1,936 crore.
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