The journey to becoming the 'pharmacy of the world'

India, which once looked to others for medicines, is today a major supplier of generic drugs worldwide. Critical tweaks in laws, spirit of enterprise, and the pandemic brought about this transition. Tech and innovation will now define the industry's future

- SOHINI DAS

To get a sense of where India's pharmaceutical industry was 25 years ago and how far it has come, we need to turn the clock back to the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi, the prime minister then, is said to have received a message from the scientist Yusuf Hamied, who is now the non-executive chairman of Cipla. Hamid asked her: Should Indians be denied a lifesaving drug (propranolol, a cardiac drug) because the inventor "does not like the colour of our skin"?

What followed is today part of India's corporate folklore: The country's patent laws were changed almost overnight. This shift allowed pioneers of the Indian pharma industry, like Hamied, to make slight modifications in manufacturing processes and produce generic versions of patented drugs. The new law stipulated that companies could only patent the process to make a product, not the product itself, and that protection lasted for just seven years.

Several years later, India became a signatory to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which came into effect on January 1, 1995. The agreement binds all members of the World Trade Organisation. India subsequently amended its patent laws to comply with TRIPS, which introduced product patents for pharmaceuticals. This granted inventors exclusive rights to their inventions for 20 years, regardless of the manufacturing process.

However, in the last 25 years, post-TRIPS, Indian pharma companies have significantly increased investments in R&D, becoming integral players in the global pharmaceutical value chain.