India’s bio-economy to touch USD 300 billion by 2030, says Minister

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By Our Special Correspondent

New Delhi, July 19: Amid Ministers in the Narendra Modi-led NDA government at the Centre currently on a spree to make projection of the size of the economy, the Union Minister Jeetendra Singh on Tuesday said that the bio-economy of the country would touch USD 150 billion valuation by 2025, and then it would double to USD 300 billion in 2030.

Union Minister of Textiles Piyush Goyal had first spoken of the Indian economy becoming USD 30 trillion ‘in a few years’, which was later stated to be 2050.

Within a few days, Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri spoke of the potential of the green hydrogen industry in India scaling upto USD 12-13 trillion.

Jeetendra Singh is also among the Union Ministers who are looking far into the future to draw a rosy picture, as he said that the bio-economy is on the course to become a USD 300 billion industry by 2030.

The Minister on Tuesday released India’s Bioeconomy Report 2022, claiming that the industry has already scaled to the size of USD 80 billion in 2021, recording 14.1 percent growth over USD 70.2 billion in 2020.

“Bio-economy is likely to touch USD 150 billion by 2025 and over USD 300 billion dollars by 2030,” said the Minister.

He said that the number of biotech start-ups in the country has increased from 50 to over 5,300 in the last 10 years, while adding that it would go to 10,000 plus by 2025.

“India is among the top 3 in South Asia and top 12 destinations for biotechnology in the world, with approximately three percent share in the global biotechnology industry. Moreover, India has the second highest number of USFDA approved manufacturing plants outside the US,’ said Singh.

BioPharma Industry in 2021 tripled their R&D spending to nearly USD 1 billion from USD 360 million in 2020, he said, adding that the industry also augmented the manufacturing capacity by three times from 1300 million doses in 2020 to 4500 million doses in 2021.

The overall impact on Bio-economy from Covid-19 vaccines was registered as USD 8.7 billion as per the India Bioeconomy report 2022.

The production capacities also witnessed major increase in Covid Diagnostics from 25 million tests in 2020 to 2000 million tests in 2021.

In the case of bio-fuel, target year for 20 percent ethanol blending has been advanced by India from 2025 to 2023 and this biotech sub-sector has shown two times growth, said the government.

The ethanol production of 3.3 billion liters capacity has doubled to 6.5 billion litres in 2021.

“With further growth, India would save its import costs, thereby, directly impacting the Forex reserves and Import-Export imbalance in the favor of achieving USD 10 trillion overall economy target by 2030,” said the Ministry of Science and technology on Tuesday.