Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Science & Technology, Health and Family Welfare and Earth Sciences has released a white paper on “Focused Interventions for ‘Make in India’: Post COVID 19” and “Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients: Status, Issues, Technology Readiness and Challenges”, prepared by Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC).

Dr. V K Saraswat, Chairman TIFAC Governing Council, and Prof. Pradeep Srivastava, Executive Director, TIFAC, Dr. Sanjay Singh, Scientist ‘G’ and Mukesh Mathur, Incharge (F&A), TIFAC were also present on the occasion.

This White Paper captures sector-specific strengths, market trends, and opportunities in five sectors, critical from the country’s perspective, includes healthcare, machinery, ICT, agriculture, manufacturing, and electronics with reference to supply and demand, self-sufficiency and mass-scale production capacity.

It has identified policy options primarily in the areas of Public health system, MSME sector, Global relations: FDI, recalibrated trade alignments, new-age technologies, etc.

This is precisely important for the development of technology clusters in champion segments, creating Technology Start-up Exchange, identifying, supporting, and piloting ten blockbuster technologies and collaborating with new dynamics with incubators of Israel, Germany, towards promoting import substitution as well as evolving technology platforms in sunrise technologies. 

The recommendations are directed towards giving immediate technology and policy impetus to make India “ATMANIRBHAR”. Based on the linkages and interdependencies between the outputs of different sectors, output multiplier and income multiplier for various sectors have been presented in the paper.

Pointing out that “India has been largely successful in mitigating the impacts of COVID-19 so far”, Dr. Harsh Vardhan said, “We got the opportunity to position ourselves as a Global manufacturing hub with a big push under ‘Make In India’ with adoption of appropriate technology and policy reforms and focused thrust in crucial sectors”. He emphasized that “This calls for furthering investment in developing infrastructure, industrialization, strengthening supply chain mechanism, creating demand for goods and services, converting farming into a business proposition etc.” The Minister said, “The current pandemic is global, but the solutions to the challenge should be local.”