NITI Aayog’s blueprint proposes six National BioMissions and a Rs 50,000-crore fund to move India from the ‘pharmacy of the world’ to a biotechnology innovator.
India’s bioeconomy could expand to about $691 billion by 2035 and generate more than 30 million high-value jobs, according to a roadmap released by NITI Aayog, the government’s principal policy think tank, on 16 July. The document positions biotechnology as a central pillar of national economic strategy and sets the ambition of placing India among the world’s top three biotechnology powers within a decade.
Titled ‘Roadmap for Building India as a Leading BioEconomy Powerhouse by 2035’, the report was prepared by NITI Aayog’s Frontier Tech Hub in partnership with the Department of Biotechnology and unveiled by Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology. It frames the coming decade as the point at which India stops importing biotechnology capability and begins exporting it. “Biology is the technology of the 21st century,” the minister said at the launch, arguing that the country is now willing to take calculated scientific and commercial risks.
From $195 billion to $2.6 trillion
The roadmap records that India’s bioeconomy has grown roughly sixteen-fold over the past decade to reach an estimated $195.3 billion in 2025, contributing about 4.8 per cent of gross domestic product. It projects a rise to $392 billion by 2030, $691 billion by 2035 and, on a longer horizon, $2.6 trillion by 2047, at which point the sector would account for an estimated 8 to 10 per cent of GDP. The bio-industrial segment is presently the largest contributor, ahead of biopharmaceuticals, bio-services and bio-agriculture.
India already operates more than 700 US FDA-approved manufacturing facilities, the largest number outside the United States, and remains the world’s biggest vaccine producer by volume. The roadmap’s implicit argument is that this manufacturing scale has not yet translated into commensurate innovation, intellectual property or high-margin value capture, and that the next phase of growth must be built on discovery rather than generics.
Six missions and a growth fund
Operationally, the plan proposes consolidating fragmented departmental schemes into six mission-mode National BioMissions spanning gene and cell therapies, climate-resilient agriculture, synthetic biology, disease surveillance, marine biotechnology and next-generation biopharmaceuticals. Each mission is to be governed by a ten-year execution horizon rather than annual budget cycles.
The financial centrepiece is a proposed Rs 50,000-crore BioEconomy Growth Fund for the period 2026 to 2035, intended to bridge the persistent gap between laboratory research and commercial-scale manufacturing through blended finance, catalytic equity and infrastructure support. The roadmap also recommends Production Linked Incentive-style support for biomanufacturing, regulatory sandboxes, faster and modernised approval systems, and a fast-track intellectual property pathway. To coordinate this machinery it calls for an Empowered Committee on National BioMissions, a National BioData Council and a BioEconomy Investment and Policy Forum, alongside expanded doctoral and post-doctoral pipelines in computational biology, AI-driven biotechnology and regulatory science.
A Hyderabad-shaped question
For India’s established life-sciences clusters, and for Hyderabad’s Genome Valley in particular, the roadmap is both an opportunity and a test. Telangana has separately signalled a drug-discovery push intended to move the city up the pharmaceutical value chain, away from contract manufacturing and towards originator science. The state’s dense concentration of contract research organisations, analytical laboratories and instrumentation suppliers is precisely the ecosystem the national plan needs if lab-to-market translation is to work in practice rather than on paper.
The execution gap
The harder question is credibility. India’s biotechnology ambitions have been restated repeatedly and revised upward each time. In 2023 the government spoke of a $300-billion bioeconomy by 2030; the 2024 BioE3 policy raised the framing again; the present roadmap now cites $392 billion for the same year. Successive targets have outrun the pace of delivery, and the roadmap itself is advisory rather than a funded, notified programme. The Rs 50,000-crore fund is a recommendation, not an allocation, and the six missions remain design documents until Cabinet approval, budgetary backing and institutional ownership are secured.
Analysts note three recurring bottlenecks that the plan acknowledges but does not fully resolve: the shortage of patient, long-horizon domestic capital for deep-science ventures; regulatory timelines that still discourage first-in-class innovation despite the proposed sandboxes; and a talent base weighted towards services rather than discovery research. The roadmap’s own emphasis on regulatory reform, IP protection and computational-biology training is a tacit admission that these gaps are structural, not incidental.
The vision, in other words, is coherent and the arithmetic is defensible. Whether India reaches $691 billion by 2035 will depend far less on the quality of the document than on the state’s willingness to fund it, staff it and stay the course across electoral cycles, the historical weak point of India’s mission-mode ambitions.
–Rashmi Kumari
