Vizag rising: Shaping India's pharma future

At the Vizag Pharma Summit 2025, hosted by Express Pharma, industry leaders discussed how quality, R&D, compliance, and emerging technologies are driving India's next phase of pharma growth

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As the Indian pharmaceutical industry grapples with a defining question: What comes after scale?; the conversations in Visakhapatnam (Vizag) on December 17, 2025 offered some clear answers. At the Vizag Pharma Summit 2025, hosted by Express Pharma, industry leaders, policymakers and decision-makers came together to confront the hard realities of a sector under global scrutiny, even as it stands on the cusp of unprecedented opportunity. The message was unmistakable: cost leadership may have built India’s pharma reputation, but global excellence will demand far more rigour, innovation and long-term vision.

Held in a city fast emerging as a serious pharma contender, the fourth edition of Express Pharma's national summit series reflected the shifting centre of gravity within Indian manufacturing and R&D. From debates on policy direction and supply chain resilience to the push for quality-first growth and innovation beyond generics, the discussions mirrored Vizag's own trajectory: ambitious, infrastructure-backed and export-oriented. What unfolded over the day was not just a regional narrative, but a broader blueprint for how Indian pharma must evolve if it hopes to remain relevant in a rapidly transforming global market.

Why not Vizag? A call for excellence

Setting the context for the day's deliberations, K Raja Bhanu, Director General, Pharmexcil, delivered the Special Address with a clear-eyed assessment of where Indian pharma stands, and where it must go next. Pointing to the unmistakable slowdown in the plain generics growth story, he noted that the industry can no longer rely on volume-led expansion alone. The next phase, he stressed, will have to be driven by movement into more complex and differentiated territories, such as complex generics, biosimilars and innovative formulations that demand deeper scientific capability and higher execution standards.