By Venkatachari Jagannathan

Chennai, Mar 26 (IANS): The decision of Department of Pharmaceuticals notifying 19 medical devices to be sourced only from Class I local suppliers will be a huge boost for Make-in-India and cut import bill by about Rs 4,000 crore, said a top official of Association of Indian Manufacturers of Medical Devices (AiMed).

On Thursday, the Department of Pharmaceuticals issued an order listing out 19 medical devices including consumables to be sourced from Class I local manufacturers.

The order is applicable for procurement of the listed items by the central government, government companies, states and local bodies under central schemes and central sector schemes fully or partially funded by the Centre.

"This one single strategic action will help boost domestic manufacturing and imports bill reduction by approximately Rs 4,000 crore," Rajiv Nath, Forum Coordinator, AiMed told IANS.

He said Class I local suppliers are the ones whose product have local content of 50 per cent and more.

Nath thanked the Department of Pharmaceutical for using the Public Procurement Order as a Make-in-India enabler while addressing the issue of pseudo manufacturers (those who import and stick the Made in India label).

"Now actual manufacturers who do the real value addition and not just sticking labels or repackaging will get the gain of their investments in India," Nath said.

He said during 2019-20 the import of medical devices was about Rs 41,658 crore.

According to him, bulk of the low cost consumables imports by India are from China.

India imports medical devices from US, Germany, China, Singapore and Netherlands.

During 2019-20 India imported Rs 8,057.71 crore worth of medical devices from the US, Germany (Rs 5,117.53 crore), China (Rs 5,207.46 crore), Singapore (Rs 4,357.46 crore) and Netherlands (Rs 2,393.82 crore), Nath said.