Decades of Practice

Oct 13, 2026 · 0:28

India learned to make the world's pills by copying. Aki: how? Old Tane: India ignored drug patents for decades, and its makers copied and learned; a factory there takes a year, an executive says, and four in America. Aki's cut: decades of practice.

India became the world's generic drug maker by design: starting in the 1970s it refused to recognise drug patents and let its firms patent their ways of reverse-engineering Western medicines, so by the time its patent law met WTO rules in 2005 its companies were already experts; Americans switched too, with generics more than half of US prescriptions by 2002; and a factory that takes four years to set up in the US or Europe can be competitive within a year in India, one executive says.

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