Life sciences & Healthcare Subtitle
The life science and healthcare industry has seen immense growth in India since liberalisation in the 1990s. An increasingly affluent population is spending on private healthcare, and Indian pharma and biotech companies are increasing investments and growing internationally. India has a substantial life science manufacturing presence; it currently supplies over 50% of global demand for various vaccines and supplies approximately 25% of all medicine in the UK. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated India's capacity and importance to the world, with the often quipped title 'pharmacy to the world', ranking among the highest of all countries for pharmaceutical production by volume and exports.
The size of the Indian healthcare sector is expected to cross USD372 billion by 2022. Furthermore, Delivering Ayushman Bharat, the world’s largest government funded healthcare insurance scheme, could potentially benefit over half a billion people in India and has great scope for UK-India collaboration. The Indian government recently permitted FDI up to 100% under the automatic route for manufacturing of medical devices and the liberalisation of the insurance industry in India will also boost healthcare insurance.
The UK is well recognised, too, as a world leader in the Life Science and Healthcare sectors, with strength in medical devices, medtech, diagnostics, genomics, and pharmaceuticals, and boasting world class research and innovation, biotechnology and manufacturing clusters throughout the country. In total, there are more than 6300 life sciences businesses in the UK, generating an £80.7bn turnover, and employing more than 256,000 people.
The UK and India thus share huge complementarities to lead the world in the sector by collaborating across R&D, science and technology, and production capacity, benefitting both our populations and the wider world.
