Must target biotech sovereignty by 2047: Biocon's Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw urges India to achieve 'biotech sovereignty' by 2047, driven by a $330 bn bioeconomy, BioE3 framework, scale exports, a sovereign AI stack, and crucial R&D investment

India must strive for ‘biotech sovereignty’ by 2047, a goal that would empower the nation to “ideate, design, engineer, manufacture and regulate its own breakthroughs at global standards,” asserted Biocon executive chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw at the Bengaluru Tech Summit on Tuesday.

 

Speaking on the road map for Indian biotechnology, Mazumdar-Shaw highlighted the rapid growth of India’s bioeconomy, which swelled from a mere $10 billion in 2014 to $165 billion in 2024, and is projected to hit $330 billion by 2030. To sustain this trajectory and unlock its full potential, she stated, “We need a quantum leap.”

 

The path forward hinges on accelerating the BioE3 framework — a national vision that integrates bioeconomy, bioenvironment, and bioemployment. This involves scaling advanced biomanufacturing to position India as a global powerhouse for biosimilars, complex generics, smart proteins, vaccines, industrial biotech, and synthetic biology.

 

To achieve this scale, Mazumdar-Shaw called for significant investment in infrastructure: “We need to pilot GLP-lines for R&D and cell and gene therapy, shared wetlabs, sovereign genomic data bases and large-scale bio manufacturing.”

 

She emphasised the need for a strong export focus. “Unless India exports at scale to the world, we will not realise the true potential we have in biomanufacturing and bioengineering. We must invest, scale and industrialise at speed.” She added that India, “with its extraordinary scientific depth, digital scale and value advantage, has a once-in-a-generation opportunity not to follow global frontiers, but to push them forward.”

 

Mazumdar-Shaw noted that the future of biology is computation, with multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) models dramatically changing “the velocity of discovery” in fields like protein folding and vaccine design. While the IndiaAI Mission is a promising start, she cautioned that global leadership demands more.

 

“We must build a sovereign AI stack. Our own models, our own data architectures, and eventually our own semiconductor ecosystems,” she said, calling for a leadership position not just in AI, but in “green and ethical AI, ensuring that technology remains energy efficient, inclusive, and free from bias.”

 

To build biotech sovereignty, India must establish a strong ‘triple helix’ linking government, industry, and academia. This needs to be supported by a “science-first, tech-enabled regulatory system supported by agile, risk-balanced and innovation-friendly policies.”

 

However, she pointed out significant gaps that need to be addressed to reach the Viksit Bharat goal by 2047. India has only about 250 researchers in the field per million and receives less than a billion dollars in annual venture capital investment — a stark contrast to the $100 billion invested in the US. Furthermore, biotech parks employ only 1,000 people when they should be employing ten thousands. Closing these gaps is essential for India to transform biology from a descriptive science into a design discipline.