Scientific nutrition has always been arborvitae of India since 3300 BCE. Ayurveda is one of the most scientific ancient texts on clinical nutrition and preventive health nutrition. This science took a backseat due to chronic exposure of India to foreign invasions that disrupted its progress. Meanwhile, in the early 1900s, the Western world had begun to witness the newly found gold rush for vitamania. The discovery series were motivated by the principles of pharma leading to molecular reductionist approach coupled with clinical validation methodologies. The discoveries of those times evolved into a convergence of allied fields like biotechnology, agrotech, chemical engineering, pharmaceutical technologies and principles; thus fuelling the onset of nutraceuticals – the newly formed discipline with relatively lesser-known long term health impact but commands unified global support that interprets to $387 billion markets.
Global nutraceutical market continues to grow at eight per cent per annum with the US commanding 60 per cent of the market share.
Nutraceuticals are only going to get bigger with time as the “want” for preventive health turns into a “need” in the current times. Hence, it is bound to be an integral part of any country’s economic growth strategy.
For instance, India intends to become an economy which will touch $10 trillion by 2030. The quadrupling of growth is certainly worth praise, but the question is who would deliver these numbers? The citizens of India? 840 million citizens are calorific sufficient but malnourished. Subjecting the absolute majority of the population to stress to achieve a $10 trillion economy would open up the unknown challenge of managing lifestyle diseases that will spiral without many controls.
The growing population size, information access, increasing spending power, the emerging “need” to stay healthy – the nutraceuticals in India is bound to have a robust growth for the next few decades. Currently, Indian nutritionals/nutraceutical industry is $9 billion, growing at 12 per cent per annum.
The question is – how equipped is India to develop and deliver high quality, clinically validated nutraceuticals and what is its equity into the global market in the field of formulated products and ingredients?
Most of the Indian nutraceutical industry operates with a “cookie-cutter” model and has not evolved with times. India’s exports in nutraceuticals are slightly below $250 million (ingredients and formulation combined). That’s negligible equity into the global nutraceuticals market of $387 billion. On the other hand, India imports active ingredients and formulated nutraceuticals to the tune of $2.3 billion. It has 108 large contract manufacturers in nutraceuticals, but none can tap into international projects.
For India to emerge as a nutraceutical hub that delivers world-class high science nutraceutical products to serve the needs in India and also command a respectable share in the international nutraceutical market, it will need some structural categorisation in ministries, start-up incubation hubs and regulatory.
On government front
Incubating nutraceutical industry: To enable and empower the nutraceutical industry, it needs to be incubated first and this would essentially mean centralised ownership. The most suited ownership would be with the Ministry of Food Processing Industries (MoFPI). This would mean including the ecosystem (Active Nutraceuticals Ingredients, formulations, contract manufacturing, raw materials processing) of nutraceuticals under it. MoFPI could create a sub-category as Medical/Health foods. Nutraceuticals are the other side of the coin named food/nutrition. Irrespective of its science, outcomes, it is still a portion of food. Hence it would naturally fit into MoFPI. By creating a subcategory and incubating the industry under it would enable the government to roll out an industry-specific focussed incentivisation programme.
By including medical foods ecosystem into MoFPI, the component related to Biodiversity laws in MoEF (Ministry of Environment, forest and climate change) and NBA (National Biodiversity Authority) could be managed under MoFPI ministry. This will stop Indian innovators using the US as the platform to launch their plant ingredient discoveries ...
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