India hopes ‘Pharma City’ will break China’s grip on industry

Proposed US$8.4 billion complex in Hyderabad is expect to employ 560,000 people in the pharmaceutical sector

Currently China accounts for about 28 per cent of the US$236.7 billion global active pharmaceutical ingredients market

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A sign board displayed at the site for Pharma City in Hyderabad, India, on Tuesday, March 22, 2022. On the edge of Hyderabad in southern India, a vast patch of arid shrub-land the size of about 14,000 football fields is becoming a testing ground for a model that could help wean the world off its dependence on Chinese drug ingredients. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 10:15pm, 12 Apr 2022Updated: 1:26am, 13 Apr 2022

On the edge of Hyderabad in southern India, a vast patch of arid shrub-land the size of about 14,000 football fields is becoming a testing ground for a model that could help wean the world off its dependence on Chinese drug ingredients.

This empty site of the Hyderabad Pharma City, marked out by scuffed sign posts and a rubble-strewn access road is expected to attract about US$8.4 billion and employ 560,000 people in hundreds of sprawling plants.

Within two years of land being allotted, officials say, it will be rolling out vital raw ingredients for medicines like penicillin, ibuprofen and antimalarials that make their way around the world.

At the heart of the endeavour is India’s race to wrest control from China, which supplies almost 70 per cent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients – or the bread-and-butter chemicals – that go into the medicines produced by the Indian pharmaceutical industry.

It’s a vast project that shows how governments are growing increasingly concerned about China’s stranglehold over drug supplies – as well as the challenges they face in loosening it.

A sign for Pharma City in Hyderabad, India, on Tuesday, March 22, 2022. On the edge of Hyderabad in southern India, a vast patch of arid shrub-land the size of about 14,000 football fields is becoming a testing ground for a model that could help wean the world off its dependence on Chinese drug ingredients. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

India’s ability to secure not just its own drug supply but that of Africa, the Americas and Europe is at stake, since it supplies most of the generics sold in American pharmacies and hundreds of countries globally.