Biotechnology and healthcare: where we are in India, and where we need to go

Biotechnology, when I was a student in the early 1970s, was test tubes, pipettes, culture plates and microscopes. Today, however, biotechnology is no longer just a laboratory discipline. It is a platform for technologies that power healthcare, agriculture, industrial manufacturing and environmental solutions. Biotechnology today is an integrated inter and multi-disciplinary science where biology has married data, engineering, computation, advanced bioprocessing and enterprise to solve real world problems. This convergence is what makes the field dynamic and relevant to India’s future.

The Indian bioeconomy was worth USD 195.3 billion in 2025.

India is rapidly becoming a healthcare-biotech ecosystem, built around biologics, biosimilars, genomics, diagnostics, cell and gene therapies. AI-enabled discovery and domestic manufacture of complex medical technologies is on the rise. Of the over 2,40,000 startups in India 5% or 12,000 are in the biotech space, with about 30% of these in healthcare.