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Lifesciences sector wants govt to create conducive atmosphere for fostering research, development and innovation
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Nandita Vijay, Bengaluru
January 31 , 2018
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The life-sciences industry insists that the government should aim at
creating a conducive atmosphere for fostering research, development and
innovation, if it really wants its dream of Make in India drugs/
biomarkers/ biosimilars, a reality.
At the same time it should
also roll back and provide clarity on the weighted deduction for
expenditure on the outsourced scientific research. Besides, it should
also increase the spend on education and skilling programmes but also
should allocate a substantial amount towards measuring the quality of
vocational training programs.
According to Ritu Shaktawat,
Associate Partner, Khaitan & Co, from a taxation standpoint, the
recent amendments which have reduced and seek to eventually discontinue
the weighted deduction for scientific research related expenditure
should be rolled back. Further, the patent box regime which offers a
lower rate of tax for royalty from patents developed in India should be
modified to ensure that in cases of joint patentees, the benefit of this
regime is extended to the assignee of the true and first inventor.
Fiscal incentives of this kind would lead to capacity building for
sustainable growth and development of the Indian pharma industry.
“Biotech
needs government push to tackle the burden of communicable and
non-communicable diseases. The government should aim at creating a
conducive atmosphere of fostering research. We expect the government in
this budget invest in building and maintaining public health
infrastructure, setting up new medical academies and consider making
health insurance mandatory for all. It should also take steps to create
an ecosystem that brings together academia and industry to boost
innovation in healthcare,” stated Surajit Chakrabartty, CFO, MedGenome.
“India
pharma industry should focus on the adoption of outcome based training
practices. The fund allocation from the government should cover all legs
of the vocational skilling programs, especially monitoring the
effectiveness and quality of these training programs. Further, there
should be a system wherein the progress monitoring is not just
restricted to the period of training but also beyond the course period.
We should continuously monitor the progress of the candidates who have
undergone these trainings,” said Neeti Sharma, senior vice president,
Learning Services at TeamLease.
In this regard, funds must be
allocated for devising robust mechanisms which will help create an
integrated learning environment which includes classroom education,
practical training, online learning, apprenticeship and consistent
evaluation of vocational skill training, she added.
Also with
regard to employable resources, there is the pivotal need to bridge the
demand and supply gap. Currently the availability of skilled resources
does not directly align to the demand from the industry. This is both in
terms of available skills sets and well as geographical positioning of
the resources. A more improvised budget allocation will help address the
gap and overcome these issues.
Today, keeping in mind the
Make-in-India vision and India’s objective to create the workforce of
the future, it is imperative that skilling is made more viable for all
stakeholders. We expect the upcoming Union Budget to help achieve this
objective by bring about changes in the tax structure as well. The
government needs to exempt education and vocational skilling from GST.
This will make the eco-system more conducive for all stakeholders,
stated Sharma.
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