Union Minister Jitendra Singh stated on Friday that the bioeconomy has experienced tremendous growth in the past ten years, with India’s biotech ecosystem now consisting of nearly 9,000 startups, up from just 50 in 2014. The Science and Technology Minister, speaking at the FE Green Sarathi summit, stated that India’s bioeconomy has experienced tremendous expansion, rising from $10 billion in 2014 to over $130 billion in 2024 in just a decade and is expected to reach $300 billion by 2030.
Given the current climate crisis, pollution threat, and other issues, this government has made sustainability a top priority. This is in stark contrast to the period until ten to fifteen years ago, when India was not given much weight when it came to climate or environmental issues because people believed that either India was unfamiliar with them or that we were unaware of how serious they were, Singh said.
Singh emphasized India’s goal to reach net zero by 2070, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at COP-26 in 2021. He said that from a country that was once thought to be either foreign or uninformed about these futuristic issues, India has advanced to the point where it could set the standard for others to follow. The minister also discussed the government’s sustainability initiatives over the past several years.
Our goal is to use green hydrogen. Our goal is to combat climate change. And we are the ones who started the deep-sea mission when we discussed the biodiversity issue. He remarked, “I believe we are among the first in the world to launch such a mission.” The minister emphasised the importance of India’s coastal regions, stating that the sea bed of the nation is rich in biodiversity, metals, and minerals that other nations, even those that are situated in coastal areas, cannot access.
India wants to become the third largest economy, so when it learns that, it will benefit economically, he continued. Furthermore, “we are among the first in the world to have very recently developed a biotechnology policy that is primarily aimed at enhancing bioeconomy and also the cellular economy, and that has been properly named as BioE3.”
