October 16, 2020.
TAD News Desk, New Delhi:
DV Sadananda Gowda, Minister of Chemicals and Fertilizers, plans to grow the chemical industry from existing $165 billion to $300 billion through policy changes made to attract foreign participation.
Minister pointed the need of five more crackers in the country by 2025 and fourteen more by 2040, which would require an investment of $65 billion.
Speaking at a virtual meet related to Latin America, organised by FICCI, Gowda said, “We are planning to extend financial incentive on sales to the chemical industry as is provided in the pharmaceutical sector. The policies would also be tweaked a bit to strengthen the chemical industrial sector, which we call PCPIRs (Petroleum, Chemicals and Petro-chemical investment regions) and plastic parks.”
These government policies would ease the business of chemicals and petro-chemicals and support the structure of the companies in India.
He talked about India being the largest producer and exporter of the generic medicines. As per his opinion, India is the only country where the largest number of USFDA compliant pharmaceutical plants, exist outside the US. The Indian pharma is expected to grow to $65 billion by 2024 and would export pharma products worth of $20 billion.
“We have launched schemes for development of seven mega parks — three bulk drug parks and four medical devices parks — across the country. New manufacturers will be made eligible for Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme under which they will receive financial incentives based on their sales for first 5-6 years,” said Gowda.
Gowda emphasised on this being the perfect time for setting up manufacturing pharma base or even to invest in it, as these people would get access to more significant markets such as US, Japan, EU and south-east Asia along with the domestic market. He stressed that anybody who will be interested to know more about the pharma sector, they could contact his office, and they will be more than happy to facilitate the learning of the industry.
Gowda also talked about fertilisers sector being a promising sector to invest. There is a considerable demand for fertilisers every year, and domestic productions don’t meet the demand, India heavily imports urea and P&K fertilisers. In 2018-19 India imported 7.5 million tonnes of urea, 6.6mt of DAP, 3mt of MOP and 0.5mt of NPK fertilisers.
He further added that he had been made aware that Latin American and Caribbean countries also import fertilisers. Thus we should make efficient supply chains for adequate sourcing of material at competitive prices, rather than competing as buyers.
Source: The Hindu BusinessLine
