ANNUAL REPORT - Department of Biotechnology

An Overview
Biotechnology is a set of rapidly emerging and far
reaching new technologies with great promise in
areas of sustainable food production, nutrition
security, health care and environmental
sustainability. Our vision is to use powerful tools of
biotechnology to help convert the country's diverse
biological resources to useful products and
processes that are accessible to its masses for
economic development and employment generation.
Biotechnology is globally recognized as a rapidly
emerging, complex and far reaching new technology.
Biotechnology can, over the next two decades,
deliver the next wave of technological change that
can be as radical and pervasive as that brought about
by IT. The recent and continuing advances in life
sciences clearly unfold a scenario energized and
driven by the new tools of biotechnology. The
convergence of advances in biology genomics,
proteomics, bioinformatics and information
technologies is driving the emergence of a new
bioeconomy.During the last five years, biotechnology
industry has been growing at a rate of 40% and in
2005-06 exceeded US$ 1.5 billion in turnover.
Though the growth was achieved mainly through
leadership in biogenerics and contract
manufacturing, research leading to innovative
product development did not lag behind. The social
impact of such growth is evident from India assuming
a dominant place in vaccine exports, diagnostics,
transgenics (Bt Cotton) and a number of
biotherapeutics. There is a projection of an annual
turnover of US $ 10 billion for India by 2010 and a
speculated about 25% annual growth rate between
2010 and 2015.During the year 2006-07, the impetus
has been on programmes of national relevance with
special emphasis on strengthening of infrastructure,
creation of centers of excellence, capacity building
and developing mission mode programmes and
public-private partnerships. Over 450 R&D projects
have been supported during the year with
approximately 200 universities and research
laboratories being provided the necessary support in
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terms of both capacity building and infrastructure
strengthening.In the area of health care, new
vaccines and diagnostics have been indigenously
developed and are under clinical trials. A major
initiative has been taken to develop stem cell
research in the country and 6 centres have received
programme support. A road map has been
formulated and city clusters established to forge
interdisciplinary collaboration, crucial to this sector.
Cutting edge research in areas of tissue engineering,
bio-medical devices, biomaterials, nanobiotechnology
and RNAi is being supported. A
special initiative for devices and formulation required
for a national programme on maternal, neonatal and
child health has been initiated. In the area of
agriculture biotechnology the focus is on nutritional
enhancement, increased productivity and
development of crops resistant to biotic and abiotic
stresses. Establishing Centres of Excellence has
received special attention during the current year to
achieve reengineering of certain institutes for greater
innovation and focus. The societal development
programme has received special attention and
benefited more than 20,000 SC/ST population,
women and rural population during the year. The
efforts were focused to create enably circumstances
for increasing access of common people to new
technologies and products and promoting the mass
use of these technologies for healthcare, nutritional
security, employment generation and environmental
well being.Life science and biotechnology sector is
characterized by dynamic changes in flow of new
idea and conception and development of new tools
for research. Rapid responses are required to meet
these challenges. A number of new initiatives has
been taken up during the year to achieve this goal,
which include increased number of Ph.D., post-docs
including overseas fellowships, rapid grants for
young investigators, innovation fellowships etc. A
major success during the current year has been the
launch of public/private partnership scheme Small
Business Innovation Research Initiative (SBIRI),
An Overview