ahmedabad indian pharmaceutical companies are making major strides in tapping the 42billion world market for generic drugs they have become aggressive in filing for drug and plant approvals with agencies like the us food and drug administration challenging patents and exploring partnerships abroad significantly not just big companies are figuring on this listand what could make india a preferred hub for outsourcing drug manufacturing are the same factors which have made the country a major force in information technology skilled but cheap manpower and superior inhouse synthesis skills say industry analystsoutside the us indian companies own the highest number of manufacturing plants numbering over 60 with us fda approvals according to a clsa asiapacific markets report indian firms have filed 36 again the highest by a country other than the us drug master files dmfs for plant approvals the country also accounted for nearly 40 per cent of all bulkactive filings in the us and interestingly 70 per cent of them were by small companiesaccording to clsa there are several small companies which are focusing on the global opportunity through different strategic initiatives matrix aurobindo and lupin for example are actively pursuing us generics opportunity via partnerships patent challenges as well as plainvanilla generics while nicholas piramal aims to be the partner of choice of mnc pharma and divis lab is moving into contract research and custom chemical synthesisan ss kantilal ishwarlal securities sski report expects the global generics market to reach 60 billion in calendar 2005 generics constituted 10 per cent of the global pharma market in 2002 with the us and europe constituting 53 per cent of global generics sski expects growth to come from a large number of patent expiries and successful patent challengesin the next five years drugs with sales of 5565 billion are expected to go offpatent in the us alone despite the discounts prices of generics are seven times as high in the us as in india the opportunity for the indian pharma industry which exported drugs worth 25 billion in 2002 is therefore clear says sskiaccording to an enam securities report the next decade is likely to see a complete transformation of the pharma industry from a wetlab intensive rd to a databaseintensive approach with it and in silico or simulated experiments set to replace the traditional petridish method a combination of biology and computer technology offers the promise of changing the very mechanism of evolutionenam says that the advent of the ipr regime in india post 2005 will lead to a more conducive climate for global pharma majors to enter into collaborative research with indian companies the larger role of it in rd will also help tilt the balance in indias favour we believe the market for outsourced rd itself can present a 20 billion opportunity up from 10 billion in 2001 as the proportion of total rd expenditure outsourced is expected to increase gradually from 166 per cent in 2001 to 283 per cent in 2010 says the