Mumbai: Catching up with the booming pace of Indian pharma industry, the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) Surinder Singh has planned to bring reforms in this sector by introducing e-Governance in its system.

Speaking at the CII Pharma Summit 2008' in Mumbai organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry, Singh said, "e-Governance will bring reliability, accountability and timeliness and will play a major role in bringing reforms in the Indian pharma industry."

The DCGI said he was also planning to set up a data resources centre to update all information and data regarding the manufacturing, exports and monitoring of drugs so that anyone can get information at a finger touch.

"Policy initiatives like revisions in the Patents Act, stringent measures to prevent making of spurious drugs and creation of pharma R&D fund with corpus of US $33.3 million are some of the steps taken by the regulator," he highlighted.

The office of the DCGI will be soon adopting a single window facility for clearing new drug approvals to speed up the whole process of approving new drugs, Singh said.

There is a huge market of US $380 billion for the clinical trials and US $2 billion for medical diagnostic, the DCGI said.

The problem of manpower shortage will be over in short time and number of inspectors will be increase, he said.

"The Finance Ministry has approved the appointment of 74 additional inspectors. Our vision is to paperless CDSCO office to accelerate growth of pharma industry. We are looking out for strict standers for clinical trials and by 2009 we will be able to put system in place including training for staff," Singh said.

Speaking on the occasion, KPMG Pharmaceuticals India Head Hitesh Gajaria said, "Amendments to India's patent legislation in 2005 have proved to be a turning point, which resulted in growth in the partnerships between Indian and foreign companies across a varied range of areas such as discovery research, development and manufacturing.”

He further added that this market is projected to grow at a healthy CAGR of 13 per cent over the next four years to touch US $73 billion by 2011.
—iGovernment Bureau