Indian biotech needs to lose its handcuffs

From regulatory reforms to rewarding research and discoveries instead of patient volumes treated at hospitals, the existing ecosystem needs many changes to be future-ready

- Vivek Wadhwa

Every headline about Donald Trump's tariffs sounds like another disaster for India. Yet this time, the blow landed softer than feared. His 100% duties fall on branded drugs, sparing India's generic exports - the foundation of its pharmaceutical trade. That is the silver lining. The darker truth is that India was even holding its breath. An industry that should be shaping the future was instead bracing for Washington's next move. That is the real vulnerability.

Trump's action shows how fragile India's position is when it leans too heavily on the past - on its role as the world's low-cost pharmacy. The future of medicine is being written in biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and those who master it will define global health care. India has the talent, the patients, and the history to lead. What it lacks is the urgency to break free from the bureaucracy and inertia that keep it chained.

China understood this long ago. It has built entire biotech cities like Wuxi, where molecules move from discovery to trials to production in months. Clinical trials that take years in the West are approved there in weeks. Behind it all is a national priority backed by billions in State funding, fast-track regulation, and a vast patient base. Confronting that juggernaut would be risky, so Trump avoids it. Instead, he turns his fire to India, where it is politically safer.