Still unexplained
The hunt for the origins of Covid-19 has for the past four years been a tangled web of politics, power struggles, and international finger-pointing.
India’s bio-economy has grown by eight times in the last eight years from $10 billion in 2014 to over $80 billion in 2022, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said here on Saturday.
Addressing the “International Conference on Emerging Trends in Biosciences and Chemical Technology- 2022” in Jammu, Jitendra Singh said biotech startups have grown 100 times in the last eight years from 52-odd startups in 2014 to 5,300 plus in 2022.
He said three biotech startups were incorporated every day in 2021 and a total of 1,128 biotech startups were set up in 2021 alone, signaling the rapid growth of the sector in India.
Advertisement
Jitendra Singh pointed out that from a paltry investment of Rs 10 crore in the bio-economy in 2014, the fund grew 400 times to Rs 4,200 crore in 2022, creating over 25,000 high-skilled jobs.
He said the number of biotech incubators has increased from six in 2014 to 75 now, while biotech products have increased from ten to more than 700.
Dwelling on the growth of India’s bio-economy, Singh pointed out that India administered nearly four million doses of COVID-19 vaccines per day and a total of 1.45 billion doses in 2021. ”Similarly, we conducted 1.3 million COVID-19 tests each day in 2021 and overall 507 million tests in 2021.”
The minister said India would soon enter the league of top-5 countries in biotech’s global ecosystem.
Jitendra Singh quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to cite the five big reasons why India was being considered a land of opportunities in the field of biotech. One, diverse population and diverse climatic zones, two, India’s talented human capital pool, three, increasing efforts for ease of doing business, four, the demand for bio-products increasing continuously in India and five, India’s biotech sector and its track record of success.
Advertisement
