Scheme to promote innovation in pharma, medtech sectors to be launched this month

The government is looking to formally launch a scheme to promote innovation in the pharmaceutical and medtech sectors within this month, Department of Pharmaceuticals Secretary Amit Agrawal said on Tuesday.

The Promotion of Research and Innovation in Pharma MedTech sector (PRIP) scheme was notified on August 17, 2023, with a total financial outlay of Rs5,000 crore, of which Rs4,250 crore is focused on accelerating investments in the R&D ecosystem within the sector.

“We are focusing in a very big way now on innovation in India. So we have a scheme (PRIP) which was announced some time ago, but we hope to launch that scheme within this month,” Agrawal said while speaking at the APACMed event here.

The scheme will cover pharma and medtech equally, and it could have both early-stage and late-stage funding support, he added. The scheme will support the extent of 35 per cent to 50 per cent of the cost, depending on the nature of the proposal, in the late stage and the early stage, Agrawal said. “We are also looking at deepening the ability in the ecosystem to produce critical raw materials and critical components which are needed to deepen the value footprint within India, which will help it make more business sense to really locate production within India,” he noted.

Agrawal stated that the medtech sector has already experienced double-digit growth for the last one and a half decades, and there is every indication that this will continue, not for a few more years, but for decades to come.

In terms of infrastructure, three medical device parks were coming up in the country, he said.