Tanzania Attracts 400 Indian Pharmaceutical Firms
Posted on :Monday , 15th December 2014
At least least 400 leading Indian pharmaceutical companies see Tanzania, which has a population of just under 45 million, as a highly promising market they ought to capture.
Ashutosh Gupta, Vice Chairman of the Pharmaceuticals Export Promotion Council of India (Pharmexcil), said here last week that India ranks fourth globally in terms of pharmaceutical production volumes and 13th globally in domestic consumption value and that more than 100 pharmaceutical firms are already making inroads into the Tanzanian market.
He appealed to the government to facilitate the entry of Indian pharmaceutical and other products to get into the Tanzanian market, “as our own government is keen to ensure that whatever items are consumed domestically and those exported are of high quality”.
“We are aware that there are unscrupulous people making and selling fake and other substandard drugs they have labeled as genuine ones made in India. Our Commerce and Industry ministry has introduced bar-coding on all genuine pharmaceutical exports,” explained Gupta.
“During the first phase of implementation, the trace and track technology has been made compulsory for tertiary level packaging since October 2011. After several rounds of extensions, the ministry has now made bar-coding mandatory on second level packaging with effect from January this year,” he added.
He described bar-coding as “a very good concept in reconfirming the genuineness of products, as it will addresses the possibility of counterfeits entering the market and also supports a pharmaceutical sector striving to stabilise economically and meet the demands of the ever-changing regulatory scenario”.
Murli Shukla, international marketing manager at Aurochem Laboratories (I) PVT Limited, concurred: “The African continent as a whole and Tanzania in particular are indeed highly promising markets for the products of Indian firms. We know that anyone winning the Tanzanian market will likely also win the African market.”
“The fact Tanzania has a national food and drugs screening and accreditation agency means that manufacturers of the respective products are assured a secure market both in the country and elsewhere in Africa,” he said.
Shukla described the inspection and licensing of pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities on the basis of compliance with good manufacturing practices (GMP) as a vital element of drug quality control.
“Accordingly, more and more Indian companies are investing in research and development. We are working overtime to improve the overall quality of our products and services lines by putting in place conducive conditions for investors,” he said.
He added that India had embarked on a multi-billion-dollar initiative funded through the public-private partnership model, with a view to more effectively harnessing the country’s innovation capability.
“The aim is to make India become one of the top five pharmaceutical innovation hubs by 2020, thus ensuring that one out of every five to ten drugs discovered globally by 2020 originates from India,” he noted.
Kissa Mwamwitwa, GMP Enforcement Officer at TFDA, said when contacted for comment in Dar es Salaam that the agency had no problem with the Indian pharmaceutical industry.
She added, though: “But we have the responsibility of protecting our people, and we have procedures to ensure that is done – as is the case across the globe.”
She said it normally takes one to three years to register a product but for TFDA it can take “even as little as six months, thanks to the introduction of a fast-track system”.
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