India boosts local medical device production
The Indian government is pushing medical device manufacturers to increase local value addition and shift from assembly operations to full-scale component production, a senior official said Friday.
Government wants 40-45% domestic value addition
Manoj Joshi, Secretary of the Department of Pharmaceuticals, said the country’s medical device sector has seen a rise in assembly operations but still relies heavily on imported components. While imports haven’t grown significantly, he suggested classification issues may be masking the true scale of dependency.
“Some of the factories which you see are plain assembly line operations,” Joshi said at the CII Global MedTech Summit. He added that the government aims to incentivize manufacturers to reach 40-45% domestic value addition, up from current levels in many cases.
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Component makers will receive stronger incentives than assembly units, he noted. “We would like to incentivise from the government side… more component manufacturing… more domestic value addition to take place in India.”
Joshi acknowledged that progress has been uneven. “In the last five-seven years, a lot of imports have shifted to assembly in the country,” he said, but the next step—deepening domestic manufacturing—requires more investment and technical capability.
PLI scheme faces challenges as few claim incentives
The government is reviewing its Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for medical devices after realizing that many companies that invested under the program haven’t been able to claim benefits. The scheme, with a financial outlay of ₹3,420 crore, offers a 5% incentive on incremental sales of domestically manufactured devices across four target segments, running from FY23 to FY27.
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“A large number of people invested, but only few are getting incentives,” Joshi said. He suggested the government may extend the scheme’s timeline or adjust criteria to help companies that met investment or sales benchmarks but missed out on incentives for other reasons. “We are looking at it. Any inputs would be welcome.”
Testing infrastructure remains a weak link
Beyond manufacturing, Joshi highlighted another gap: product testing. “It is not really happening much in our system,” he said, referring to both prototypes and commercially produced devices.
The government’s focus on local value addition, PLI adjustments, and testing infrastructure suggests a broader effort to strengthen the medical device ecosystem.
