Two decades of saltatory acceleration

The Y2K phenomena provided a pivot to the IT industry which took advantage of it as well as the support of Government of India (GoI) to quickly gain market traction; much of that was business process innovation. There was no similar pivot for the biotech industry in the early 2000s. The biotech ecosystem has evolved in a saltatory fashion anchoring itself to a few path breaking programmes by the GoI. By the mid 2000s, the S&T arms of GoI especially the Departments of S&T (DST), Biotechnology (DBT) and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had launched programmes, such as NSTEDB, Technology Development Board (TDB), SBIRI and NMITLI, which were beginning to create a nascent industry in the biotech and medtech arenas. However, the density and frequency of entrepreneurs and new enterprises being formed were still few and far between. A force multiplier in the entrepreneurial landscape was the establishment of DBT-BIRAC which through its slew of programmes such as BIG and SPARSH and National Biopharma Mission (NBM), helped unleash the entrepreneurial energy in the ecosystem which currently consists of five thousand biotech and medtech startups. Most of these startups are at nascent or early technology readiness levels and some have late-stage product development and a few have products in the market.