Indian Pharma spending Rs 200 Bn on R&D Indian pharma companies are gearing up to take on their global peers in terms of expenditure on research and development R&D, which has shown a steady increase in the last few years. Over the years Indian pharma industry has been often pulled up for spending too little on R&D. But the latest trend shows that India’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are now investing more in this direction. Besides building on the traditional generic product pipeline, pharma companies are now investing in research on complex generics, specialty and differentiated products, and biosimilars. For the FY2018, the R&D expenses have constituted 9.1 per cent of the cumulative revenues of the companies. The cumulative R&D spend for the top 10 pharma companies has been around Rs 95 billion or Rs 9500 crores this fiscal. This figure eventually reaches a score of Rs 20,000 crores after considering the cumulative expenditure by other small and medium players of the Indian pharma industry working equally hard in the field of R&D.