A road to excise free zone

COVER STORY/ PHARMA INDUSTRY

Nearly 60 per cent of India's medicine production today comes from a tiny stretch of land called Baddi in Himachal Pradesh. Of the 250 drug units that are functioning in this newly developed industrial area, 200 are SMEs. Not that all are run by traditional pharma industrialists "� many are first-generation entrepreneurs, who have set up medicine manufacturing capacities just to cash in on the excise-free status of the region and make medicines on contract assignments for larger companies.

The cumulative investment of drug companies is around Rs 2,000 crore in Baddi-Barotiwala-Nalagarh (BBN) region. However, all is not well for the drug SMEs in BBN region. The road conditions are dismal and the basic amenities to accommodate the swelling migrant population are absent.

Road is an absolute necessity, opines Sanjay Kumar, general manager, Unichem Laboratories Ltd: "There are no good approach roads to Baddi from nearest urban bases like Panchkula or Chandigarh. Yet one has to commute this distance every day as Baddi has no hospitals, schools, houses or shopping centres."

The 235-odd drug units alone transport around 400 truckloads of finished medicines and raw materials in and out of BBN region every day. The Pinjore-Baddi road and the internal roads within the township, which was not built to withstand such heavy loads, will have to be completely redeveloped to find a lasting solution to the road problem.

The government of Himachal Pradesh is hopeful of addressing the infrastructure bottlenecks soon. But how soon? Will the five-month old Baddi Barotiwala Nalagarh Development Authority (BBNDA), considered as the state government's answer to all infrastructure bottlenecks of Baddi, be able to carry out the job in a time-bound manner? Questions remain. The sooner there are answers, the better it would be for pharma players here.