India, Brazil, South Africa to co-operate in healthcare

New Delhi, Oct 14 (IANS) India, Brazil and South Africa Tuesday agreed to cooperate among themselves to provide quality healthcare, said experts here at a trilateral summit on trade.

"We together can bring a turn around in our health facilities for the people. There is huge scope for cooperation," said Jasimar Henrique da Silva of Brazil at the India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) business summit here.

A group of six experts deliberated for an hour at the summit to identify greener pastures in the three nations where each of them can chip in with expertise to help out the others.

"From research and development (R&D) to creating infrastructure, India can play a pro-active role in enhancing Brazil's health facilities and vice-versa," said da Silva, who represented the South American nation at the tri-nation trade summit.

Added Daljit Singh of Indian healthcare chain Fortis Healthcare: "India offers the world's cheapest tertiary healthcare in the world. We are doing extremely well in research and development."

"India, Brazil and South Africa can jointly research clinical trials. We can carry out continuing medical education programmes," said Singh, who looks after strategy and organisational development at Fortis.

Agreed Malvinder Mohan Singh, chief executive officer leading Indian pharmaceutical firm of Ranbaxy, who recently sold his majority stake to Daiichi Sankyo of Japan.

"It is high time India, South Africa and Brazil revisit their business modules. We need to more frequently and explore business opportunities," said Malvinder Singh.

Stavros Nicolaou of South African pharma firm Aspen Pharmacare echoed an identical view, saying the cooperation among the three countries in the field of healthcare was at best minimal.

"IBSA gives us a platform to find out opportunities in pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare for mutual benefit," said Nicolaou.

Said Surinder Singh, India's Drugs Controller General (DGI): "We are going for international collaboration in clinical trials, and are streamlining regulations to monitor domestic pharmaceutical activities."

"We intend to provide a conducive ambience to pharmaceutical firms to grow at a faster pace. We have taken steps to prevent making of spurious drugs and creation of pharma research and development fund with corpus of $ 33.3 million," he said.