India has emerged as a global leader in Pharmaceuticals, ranking as the third-largest producer and key supplier of generic medicines in the globe, said Union Health Secretary Punya Salila Srivastava while addressing the India Leadership Summit 2024 organized by US-India Strategic Partnership Forum.
The success of Indian pharmaceuticals has saved billions of dollars for health systems the world over. To illustrate, medicines coming from Indian companies alone saved the healthcare system $219 billion in 2022 in the U.S. “All in, she said savings from 2013 to 2022 are estimated to be up to $1.3 trillion.“
Punya also pointed out that India boasts the highest number of U.S. FDA-approved pharmaceutical plants outside the U.S. India hosts 25% of all FDA-approved manufacturing plants globally. A fact that underlines the rising status of the country in global healthcare.
Apart from pharmaceutical manufacturing, the country is also a leader in vaccine production, accounting for half of the vaccines produced in the world. As a matter of fact, over the last year alone, India manufactured 4 billion of the 8 billion doses of vaccines distributed around the world, earning it the sobriquet “pharmacy of the world.”
Medical education has been transformed in India to support the growing private health sector. India replaced its archaic regulatory frameworks with the National Medical Commission Act. The consequence of these reforms has been a sharp rise in medical and nursing colleges, improving shortages in healthcare professionals.
Recognizing the importance of healthcare, government efforts have improved the quality, scale, and affordability of healthcare services in India. For example, the percentage of households’ out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure has declined by as much as 25 percentage points between 2013-14 and 2021-22. Indicating a significant gain in the accessibility-to-affordable-care dimension.
Punya highlighted the Indo-US collaboration in the health sector, stating that the U.S. CDC closely partnered with India’s NCDC on shared priorities such as surveillance, pandemic preparedness, and antimicrobial resistance. So far, programs in collaboration with the U.S. CDC have trained over 200 EIS officers and another 50 are in training.
That’s why, with the Bio-5 alliance, both countries would be able to work on strengthening global health security. By optimizing the biopharmaceutical supply chain for less reliance on any single-source supplier.
Moving ahead, Punya explained, research, technology transfer. And capacity building are ways in which both countries may prioritize making global health security better. Expanding public-private partnerships in both countries with vaccine initiatives can achieve better health outcomes.
ANI
