Ahmedabad Likely To Get First National Medical Device Centre

The $2-billion Indian medical device sector is set to get a push with the Centre considering setting up the country’s first National Centre for Excellence for Medical Devices in Ahmedabad.

The Centre is already spending Rs. 330 crore in setting up NIPER Ahmedabad, which is coming up on 60 acres at the outskirts of the city.

According to the director of DOP, Mr. RC Jha, the national medical device centre will take 3-4 years to get operation.

NIPER, Ahmedabad, is already conducting a study to find out the status of medical industry in India. Similarly even IL&FS is conducting a pre-feasibility study for setting up a green field project for a medical device cluster at Ahmedabad.

In an earlier statement given to ET, Dr Harish Padh, project of NIPER, Ahmedabad had said, “Gujarat’s contribution in medical device was nearly 90% in the country, which has recently, come down to 60%”. The purpose of the study is to bring the medical device under mainstream pharma industry.

As per the primary findings of NIPER report, more and more bio-material and high-end medical engineering, small-size companies are coming up in and around Ahmedabad. Earlier, most of the medical device makers were in low-value business segment like Intravenous Infusion (IV) sets manufactures. Now many companies are manufacturing high value products like ocular lenses (used in cataract treatment), biomedical apparatus, cardiac stent and subdermal products.

Out of six Pan-India NIPER centres, each should have its core area of specialization, and Ahmedabad centre has medical devices as its core competence area. This is the reason why we are also considering to bring National Centre for Excellence for Medical Device here, he said.

The state government has already declared NIPER as the centre of excellence for testing, standardisation and conducting clinical trials of Herbal and Ayurvedic medicines. The state government recently sanctioned four projects to the tune of Rs 4 crore in the field of Herbal and Ayurvedic medicines, biotech and Biotech formulations, and PERD will contribute equally to fund the projects.

Taking about the overall, contribution that NIPER would make to Indian economy, Mr. Kumar said that he expects all the NIOERs to generate 5,00,000 manpower and add $20 billion to country’s GDP by 2020.

(Ref : The Economic Times, dated August 5, 2009)