Indian pharmaceutical industry

Story hook

In August 1970, the Indian Parliament passed the Patents Act, 1970, which deliberately excluded product patents on medicines. Indira Gandhi later told a WHO assembly: "My idea of a better-ordered world is one in which medical discoveries would be free of patents, and there would be no profiteering from life and death."

The phrase was rhetorical, but the legislation was concrete. For the next 35 years, Indian companies could reverse-engineer any foreign drug — as long as they used a different process — and sell it for a fraction of the originator's price. By 2005, when the Patents Act was amended to comply with TRIPS and restore product patents, India had built a $50 billion generics industry that supplied 20 % of the world's generic drugs by volume, 80 % of the world's antiretrovirals, and ran the world's largest pharma manufacturing footprint outside the US.

When COVID-19 arrived in 2020, the world re-discovered the phrase "Pharmacy of the World". Within a year, the Serum Institute of India had produced over a billion doses of Covishield, Bharat Biotech had developed the indigenous Covaxin from scratch, and India had shipped 280 million vaccine doses to 100+ countries under the Vaccine Maitri initiative. This is the story of how a 1970s patent act became a geopolitical asset.

Why this matters for UPSC

Pharma and IPR are a steady high-frequency UPSC topic — almost every year asks about TRIPS, compulsory licensing, Patents Act 1970, or a recent CDSCO/drug-policy issue. Mains questions on generics, CRAMS, biosimilars, and the India-as-pharmacy narrative recur. Interview probes test whether candidates can navigate the IPR-public health trade-off that defines Indian pharma policy.