NITI Aayog has launched the “Roadmap for Building India as a Leading Bioeconomy Powerhouse by 2035”. It is developed by NITI frontier Tech hub in consultation hub with DBT, Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises(ABLE).
IMPORTANCE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY IN BUILDING NEXT PHASE OF INDIA’s GROWTH
- It has potential to transform how we produce medicines, fuels, chemicals, materials and climate resilient solutions.
- Provides opportunity for India to move from being a trusted global supplier of affordable medicines and other healthcare products to becoming a leading global bioeconomy.
- The country’s Bioeconomy has expanded from $10 billion in 2014 to $195.3 billion in 2025, contributing 4.8% to national GDP.
MAJOR OBJECTIVES OF THE ROADMAP
- To scale the bioeconomy to $691 billion by 2035 and $2.6 trillion by 2047.
- Creating over 30 million high-value jobs
- Positioning India among the world’s leading biotechnology powers.
- Translating innovation into impact at scale- through high performance biomanufacturing, stronger industry linkages.
Shri Rajesh S. Gokhale, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology emphasised: “India’s next bioeconomy leap must go beyond incremental innovation. The real opportunity lies in creating entirely new technologies, products and industries, and taking them from discovery to deployment at scale**.** By combining entrepreneurship with advanced biomanufacturing, India can build globally competitive enterprises and help define the future of the biological age.”
STEPS TO ACCELERATE THE PROCESS
Creation of six National Biomissions
- GeneIndia: Aims to advance affordable cell and gene therapies
- AgriBio2.0: To create bio-resilient crops and bio-inputs
- BioXFoundry: To generate AI-enabled biofoundaries
- One Health Grid: For integrated disease surveillance
- Marine Biotechnology: Production of marine bioproducts
- BioPharmaNext: For advanced biomanufacturing of biologics, biosimilars, vaccines and next generation therapeutics.
Convergence of AI and biology: The roadmap highlights the need for computational biology, biofoundries, digital twins, biosensor networks, robotics and AI-driven Design-Build-Test-Learn platforms to accelerate discovery, reduce costs and enable India to compete in next-generation biotechnology and biomanufacturing.
A bioEconomy Growth Fund: To scale-up commercialization, biomanufacturing infrastructure, advanced therapeutics, fermentation platforms, biomaterials, diagnostics and synthetic biology.
Importance for the policy for us:
As researchers we limit our selves to working in academic research fields. According to me when government keenly works in sectors of our field it motivates many to innovate and keep working hard to make it useful for the society.
All these steps by government and its increased and targeted interest in Biotechnology sector paves way for more outcome based innovation in the sector.
The full roadmap can be accessed here: https://niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2026-07/Roadmap-for-Building-India-as-a-Leading-Bioeconomy-Powerhouse.pdf
Do you think these steps help in bringing more innovation to the field and changes focus of researchers to not just increase the number of published papers.
MBH/PS