The Centre is conducting widespread consultations with all stakeholders, including the pharma industry concerned, to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak in China, which has led to shutdown of industries resulting in a drop in the supply of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), said Union secretary of chemicals and fertilizers P. Raghavendra Rao on Friday.
Talking to the media at the CSIR-IICT after delivering the National Science Day lecture, he said that there was no need to panic and the country was capable of handling the situation. “Things should return to normalcy in a couple of months. We are also receiving supplies from other parts of China unaffected by COVID-19,” he said.
Mr. Rao also said that India has the scientific capability to make APIs and it was not as if our institutions or scientists do not know the processes but the sheer scale of cost and volumes make it cheaper to obtain the APIs from China. At the same time, he expressed his concern over the agro-chemical industry involved in manufacturing pesticides that require raw materials from China. “The agro-chemical industry also depends on raw materials known as ‘technicals’ and this could be a challenge in the days ahead. Our dependency on China is high. The saving grace is this is not the agriculture season,” he said.
CSIR-IICT director S. Chandrasekhar advised people not to stock up medicines due to the scare. “There is going to be some impact on the production of drugs because of the situation there but that does not mean, citizens should rush to buy drugs. The present stock should last for up to six months and by then, the crisis is expected to blow over,” he said.
“We have APIs stock for three months. We are receiving supplies from China and the Union government has offered to airlift them from China,” said executive director, Bulk Drug Manufacturers Association (India), P. Eshwar Reddy.
