Select Chinese drug inputs likely to face price floor in India

India plans to introduce a minimum import price (MIP) for select pharmaceutical raw materials in a move to shield its domestic industry from a flood of cheap Chinese imports, two people directly involved in the process said, a step that will also shore up India's status as the world's largest supplier of generic drugs.

- Priyanka Sharma & Dhirendra Kumar

India accounts for about a fifth of the global supply of generic drugs, manufacturing about 60,000 generic brands, across 60 categories.

"The government is working on a plan to impose a minimum import price on all PLI-based pharmaceutical products. The plan is to protect the domestic industry so that they are able to continue to do the business and to make India self-reliant," said one of the two people mentioned above.

The plan comes against the backdrop of the Centre's move to bulk up its production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for generic drugs by including more molecules used in manufacturing key starting materials (KSMs), drug intermediates, and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). KSMs and intermediates are chemical compounds used to synthesize APIs, which are the main components of a drug.