Harish K Jain appointed as new FOPE president, calls for focus on quality as self- regulatory initiative

Monday, June 12, 2023

Federation of Pharma Entrepreneurs (FOPE) has appointed Harish K Jain as its new president for the next two years ending 2024-25.  He takes over from Vinod Kalani. The Federation has also put in place a new team comprising RC Juneja as chief patron,  Arun Vasistha is the working president, Sanjay Gupta is general secretary,  treasurer is NS Bhatia, chairman is B R Sikri with Rajesh Gupta & Vinod Kalani as  co chairman.

Harish Jain who is also the president of  Karnataka Drug and Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (KDPMA) is at the helm of  Embiotic Laboratories, Bengaluru. As he takes on the mantle of FOPE, he said the efforts would be to solve Indian pharma ’s  growth  and marketing challenges, ground upwards.

Now FOPE’s key purpose has been to take up the common issues affecting the pharma industry at the national level.  The Federation has been in frequent intervals as and when needed to approach the government of India across the milieu  of its various ministries and concerned departments responsible for the  policies to support the sector.

Even as the pharma business is all about safety, efficacy & quality for the patients, there have been major challenges of quality impacting the sector. Today for any pharma company globally, the biggest challenge is perception about quality, Jain told Pharmabiz.

In my capacity as president, FOPE in coming days will bring in the much-needed whiff of positivity for the industry specifically on the sector’s quality perception. This will be driven by various quality improvement initiatives and ease of doing business, he added.

Time has come to consider continuous quality improvement as a self-regulatory initiative. We need to step up our efforts representing the Indian pharma.  We would also like to strengthen and expand State chapters across the country to be a truly pan India organization. To this end a new team formed which is all set to provide value to its members specially Micro Small Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) who feel left out in this growth momentum, said Jain.

Since its inception FOPE has taken up number of issues like rate of excise duty on finished formulations, fixed dose combinations, spurious drugs act amendment bill, DPCO/NPPA issues etc., with the concerned departments of the Union government.

In his capacity as KDPMA president, Jain has noted that although India commands over 10% of the global pharmaceutical industry market share by volume, it represents only 1.4% in terms of market value by revenue. This led him to give undue attention to strengthen industry-academia collaboration to building an innovation-led ecosystem in India.

Concerted efforts will be made to ensure that Indian pharma stands to gain on the quality and transparency front globally and on the domestic front  with measures like technology adoption across the value chain from manufacture, storage to marketing  where  trace and track to be brought to the fore, said Jain.

PHARMABIZ.com