Indian Pharmacy

 

India — which is called ‘pharmacy of the world’ for being a leading supplier of drugs to many Countries.
Despite being a leading supplier of high-quality medicines to several countries, Indian pharmaceutical industry is highly dependent on China for raw materials even to produce medicines as basic as Crocin.
These raw materials are called the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), also known as bulk drugs. Indian drug-makers import around 70 per cent of their total bulk drug requirements from China.
In the 2018-19 fiscal, the government had informed the Lok Sabha that the country’s drug-makers had imported bulk drugs and intermediates worth $ 2.4 billion from China.
But with an indefinite lockdown in China due to the deadly coronavirus outbreak, supplies of raw materials from China to produce drugs for treating HIV, cancer, epilepsy, malaria, and also commonly-used antibiotics and vitamin pills, are likely to be hit.
To prevent the shortage of medicines, the Narendra Modi government is considering curbing export of 12 bulk drugs. India lost its growing market of APIs to China in the 90s, due to largely , taxes, lack of support by way of subsidies, as a result the Chinese product were 20 to 25 percent cheaper and our domestic API products were squarely taken over by imports from China.