BackPune newsletter | The promise of biotech remains unfulfilled
The promise of creating hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs and another knowledge workforce has not been fulfilled
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Biotechnology was to have been similar to the infotech wave that swept and transformed the country over 25 years ago. Biotech remains a draw as an undergraduate course, leading to a Master’s degree and even perhaps a doctorate. But that promise of creating hundreds, if not thousands (lakhs in the case of information technology, or IT) of jobs and another knowledge workforce has not been fulfilled. Back then, when biotech was poised for take-off, a job was expected to be guaranteed since this was regarded as a spin-off of the IT sector.
That was nearly three decades ago. What happened to that promise? Biotech has not proliferated the way IT has. Not in numbers and certainly not in salaries, with a lot of students having enrolled in expensive courses in biotech. Parents counted steep fees as a return on investment, the investment paying off through high salaries in the next five-seven years.
“That’s what happened—biotech became an interesting proposition and universities wanted to do their own courses. Private universities, run or backed largely by politicians which had been running MBA courses till then, got into the act seeing the market opportunity. They offered a two-year course with training of some kind leading to a degree. There was no quality control either on the students taken in or on the faculty. Now the country has over-produced biotech students who have not learned technology, not been taught much, and there are no jobs," said Sohan Modak, the man who initiated the first biotech course at Pune University, the first university to run it the way it was visualized.
Modak, who besides being a teacher also runs his own research company in the bioinformatics space, outlined the problem further, saying, “The problem with biotech is that it needs lots of equipment to conduct biotech work and for students to learn the technology. Large numbers of institutes brought in the equipment and then locked it up—it was expensive equipment. So they created museums of equipment. Pune University was the only university, of the five biotech departments created by an Act of Parliament (the others being the Jawaharlal Nehru, Benares Hindu, Madurai Kamaraj and Jadavpur universities), which bought equipment worth ₹ 1.5 crore in 1985-87, and every student was taught to use the equipment. They learned to handle the equipment, there were no accidents. We placed all our zoology and botany students in industry, and the first batch from our biotech intake was picked up by Biocon’s Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw."
This is hardly new; after all, Nasscom, the software industry’s lobby group, has for long saying that only a small percentage of all engineering graduates in the country are employable. So why should it be different for any another technical course? Biotech was after all expected to become an industrial technology. Small-scale industrial units did start but the support needed, in the form of research by pharma, agriculture, IT was lacking. Also, there were no venture capitalists then in India who would hand hold these start-ups.
Of course, when the course was visualized, the idea was to have about 200 students finishing the postgraduate course annually from the five universities, with roughly half going to research. While the initial lot of students were all placed, that is not the case any longer. And the number of students finishing the Master’s course has increased dramatically.
Opportunities in biotech exist in the agriculture and floriculture sectors, covering so-called exotic vegetables such as coloured bell peppers, mushrooms, or cut flowers for the overseas market. As one grower explained, the cost of production of one coloured bell pepper is ₹ 0.50, which retails at ₹ 5-10. And the cost of production falls as the farm gets bigger. While there is scope to use biotech in agriculture and horticulture, other areas such as the pharma, IT and agriculture industries did not take off in India as they have in the West.
All is still not lost, thanks to yet another initiative that Modak took. He published a paper in the December 1996 issue of Current Science India, where he outlined a syllabus for the sector. This eventually turned into the Indian Institute for Science Education and Research, a government of India funded entity that is training scientists.
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