After reading this article you will learn about the growth of bio prospecting in India.
Agriculture accounts for 30% of India’s GDP and employs over 60% of the workforce’. Since such a high proportion of the population depends on the viability of subsistence and other agricultural systems oriented towards staple foods, it is essential that devoting land and resources towards increased production of export crops does not disrupt the staple foods sectors.
However, during the first half of the 1990s, India experienced a contraction in the area of land used for food grain cultivation due to a shift towards cultivation of non-staple crops, including those targeted at overseas markets.
Nonetheless, if the wider application of agro-biotechnology can truly satisfy the needs of low external-input subsistence farmers, commercial farmers producing food for domestic consumers and export-oriented cultivators, then gains to one sector do not necessarily have to conflict with the interests of the other two.
This is, of course, a big ‘if’, raising such important questions as: What actually are the needs of the various stakeholders within the agricultural sector as a whole?
To what extent can be ‘biotechnology fix’ satisfy them?
How far is agro-biotechnological research biased so that the interests of some stakeholders are prioritized while those of others are ignored?
India’s agro-biotechnology capabilities are quite substantial as compared to most other developing countries. India has a lot of experience in agricultural research dating back to the colonial era. Most of the research is carried out by the public sector, but since the mid-1980s annual increases in public research have declined.
At the same time, the private sector has becoming increasingly committed to research, mainly on hybrids. Private sector plant breeding research expenditure is now about US$4.4 million per annum and for food and agriculture to R&D but is also utilised in the production of exportable products. In addition, a growing number of tissue culture companies are producing inter alia ornamental plants and flowers.
Blue green algae bio-fertiliser
Bio-pesticide – Commercial products
Foreign firms are increasingly entering the Indian market and investing in research, as are growing numbers of Indian firms. This can be explained by the fact that India is among the world’s largest markets for agricultural inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, and also that it has one of the biggest and fastest growing food industries.
At the same time, market shares of State-owned corporations have declined while new regulations since 1986 have allowed large Indian and foreign firms to increase their presence in the seed and biotechnology industries.
Even so, India is largely an untapped market. For example, as we saw earlier, Indian farmers themselves ‘produce two-thirds of the country’s annual seed requirement’ and many of them are organic farmers by default since they cannot afford to use chemical inputs. This does not mean they can secure good prices. This would require their produce to be certified as organic by an independent association (Table 7.14).
Apart from traditional medicine, India’s health-related S&T capabilities lie mainly in diagnostics, vaccines and fermentation processes, rather than in pharmaceutical products. India has some outstanding research institutions, such as the National Institute of Immunology, which is working in, for example, DNA fingerprinting and hybridoma techniques. A number of health products developed by the public sector have been commercialized.
The private sector consists of 20,000 registered pharmaceutical firms, of which 7-8,000 are actively manufacturing drugs and drug formulation. The top five companies make up about 20 per cent of the domestic market in sales.
Investment in R&D is low compared to developed-country standards but has increased, especially among larger firms. Total R&D expenditure for the industry increased 73-fold between the periods 1965- 1966 and 1997-1998, although this still averages only 2 per cent of total turnover as compared to 16 per cent among US firms.
Several of these companies are quietly building up their patent portfolios in overseas markets. Ranbaxy has been granted 24 US patents since 1990, and 112 worldwide. Other Indian drug companies actively patenting their inventions abroad are Dr Reddy’s Lab (DRL) with 15 US patents, and Lupin with 10.
These quantities are minuscule compared to giants like Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. But, considering that all of these patents have been granted since 1990, the trend is clearly for a steady increase.
Although they are mostly for processes of manufacturing drugs rather than for new chemical endues, both Ranbaxy and DRL have discovered several new chemical entities (NCEs) that are undergoing clinical trials. The Indian market is large in terms of volume but small in terms of sales due to extremely low prices.
Consequently the more ambitious Indian firms are turning their attention to overseas markets where the returns are higher. Utilizing India’s existing S&T capabilities also means using traditional biodiversity-related knowledge and technologies. A number of events awakened people to the commercial value of TK (Technological Knowledge).
From the mid-1990s the disclosure that patents in other countries, especially the US, were being acquired for inventions closely related to knowledge held by traditional communities in India provoked worldwide protests.
In two cases, such patents were successfully challenged on the grounds of lack of novelty by Indian governmental agencies and NGOs.
In 1995 the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute (TBGRI) granted an Ayurvedic company, Arya Vaidya Pharmacy, an exclusive 7-year licence to manufacture and sell a product based on extracts of a sub-species of the Tricbopus zeylanicus plant called jeevani, which was used by members of the tribal Kani people of Southern India.
Till date, perhaps the most profitable health product based on Indian TK is reserpine, a tranquillizer and antihypertensive derived from the medicinal plant Rauwolfia serpentina. Estimated sales of antihypertensives derived from this plant exceeded US$240 million in 1994.
Other commercially promising natural products include Phylanthus amarus (or niruri), a medicinal plant used in India for treating various ailments including jaundice.
It was discovered in tests to display effectiveness against viral hepatitis-B and E, resulting in a number of patents, including a US patent awarded to the Fox Chase Cancer Center (US) for a pharmaceutical preparation comprising extractable components of Phyllanthus, and a European patent to an Indian company, Dabur, for a poly-herbal composition including extracts of Phyllanthus.
Several governmental and non-governmental iniuatives are being undertaken to investigate and document traditional biodiversity-related knowledge.
Perhaps the most important is the All India Coordinated Research Project on Ethno biology (AICRPE), which was launched by the government in 1982 and completed in 1998, and involved 27 government organisations including TBGRI, the Central Drugs Research Institute, the Botanical Survey of India, and the Zoological Survey of India.
The project focused on various aspects of tribal life, culture and traditions, and aimed to:
1. generate and document the multi-dimensional perspectives of tribal life, culture, traditions and their impact on the environment;
2. preserve and conserve those traditional beliefs and knowledge systems that promote conservation-oriented practices and sustainable utilisation of the local resources; and
3. develop or provide a scientific basis for sustainable resource management as well as to evolve appropriate welfare to improve the quality of life of the tribal communities.
The resulting database, which is held by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, provides a wealth of information on uses of plants and animals by the 70 million tribal people of India. It reveals inter alia that 10,000 wild plants are used for various purposes ‘with 2,000 new claims warranting scientific scrutiny’, and that 76 animals are sources of medical treatments.
Of these, ‘more than 25 animal products have been short-listed for scientific investigation’. The discovery by TBGRI scientists of jeevani’s health-giving properties resulted from an AICRPE expedition. Other TK documentation projects are being undertaken by the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, the Honey Bee Network, and the Indian Institute of Science.
The Honey Bee database has more than 10,000 innovations with name and addresses of the innovative/creative communities and/or individuals along with the name of the communicators through whom we have learned these innovations (Table 7.15).
About 85-90 per cent of these innovations are Indian and fall into 13 categories.