Piyush Goyal announces government support for shared testing facilities for medical devices, aiming to cut regulatory barriers, enhance quality standards, and expand India’s global healthcare footprint amid cautious industry uptake.
Piyush Goyal has offered India’s pharma machinery and medtech industry full central funding for advanced testing equipment, but the sector has not yet filed a single proposal to claim it. Speaking on 7 September at EEPC India’s Pharma Machinery and LabNext Expo in New Delhi, the commerce and industry minister said the Bureau of Indian Standards was prepared to pay the entire equipment cost for testing laboratories, while a PTI report carried by Moneycontrol said the wider laboratory infrastructure and running costs would still have to be provided by the host institution.
The government’s idea is to build shared facilities, rather than leave every manufacturer to create its own expensive testing set-up. According to the Press Information Bureau, those centres could sit inside government-sponsored or university laboratories, allowing Indian-made medical devices, laboratory equipment and consumables to be tested against global benchmarks, certified and shown to overseas buyers. Yet the proposal remains at an early stage. Policy Edge noted that no scheme document, budget, site list, product coverage or implementation timetable has been announced, leaving the offer as a policy signal rather than a ready-to-use programme.
That distinction matters because the commercial hurdle in medtech is rarely just invention. It is proving, in a form regulators and hospital buyers will accept, that a product is safe, reliable and performs as claimed. Policy Edge said medical devices in India are regulated by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 and the Medical Devices Rules, 2017, while laboratories testing products for manufacturers need accreditation from NABL or another notified body. Shared facilities could lower the barrier for smaller companies and start-ups, but only if the testing they provide lines up with Indian approval rules and is recognised in export markets. Lower tariffs through trade deals do not remove technical compliance requirements.
Goyal tied the testing push to a much larger trade and innovation argument. The Press Information Bureau said he told industry that healthcare now extends well beyond treatment into diagnostics, telemedicine, digital health and research. He also pointed to India’s expanding trade architecture, saying free trade agreements that once covered economies worth about $10 trillion now span around $60 trillion after nine recent deals, with ongoing negotiations potentially lifting that figure to about $75 trillion. He said 100 per cent foreign direct investment is already allowed through the automatic route and cited the Economic Survey 2025-26 as showing pharmaceuticals moving from volume to value. Hello Entrepreneurs reported that he cast the opportunity in employment terms too, saying the wider healthcare ecosystem could generate crores of jobs, thousands of business openings and lakhs of start-ups, especially in medtech, while also pointing to a ₹1 lakh crore commitment for research, development, innovation and funding.
The message came after a broader weekend pitch for healthcare exports. Pharmabiz reported that at Bharat Health Global Expo on 6 September, Goyal warned that the drive for secure supplies must not turn into dependence on a single source of imported active pharmaceutical ingredients. “Resilient supply chain is the need of the day,” he said, adding that Indian companies also needed overseas investments to secure local market access. The same report said Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal urged exporters to look harder at Latin America and the Caribbean and asked whether the sector could be sold abroad as a “Brand India” proposition. Jitin Prasada, the minister of state for commerce and industry, said India now had an integrated healthcare value chain spanning machines, services, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and nutrition. Pharmabiz said the event drew delegates from about 50 countries and around 1,000 participants.
Goyal also linked product quality to India’s ambition to win more foreign patients. Rediff Money reported that he said 3.5 million patients had benefited from India’s medical value tourism ecosystem over the past seven years, but argued that the country should aim for 10 million patients a year. He called for interpreter pools for overseas patients, smoother digital tools from insurers and health-tech companies, faster reimbursement, trained and certified caregivers, and clearer treatment packages from hospitals. He also said inbound patients should be treated only at NABH-enabled, verified and panelled hospitals, and warned that dishonest conduct by hospitals would quickly damage India’s credibility in overseas markets.
His wider appeal to industry was for collaboration rather than technological isolation. According to the official release, Goyal said India should use partnerships, joint ventures, co-design and knowledge transfer to speed capability-building, instead of insisting on developing everything from scratch. He said the country’s cost advantage in research could be amplified through closer work between companies, academia, medical colleges, IITs and other centres of excellence. Hello Entrepreneurs said he also argued for stronger incubation for medtech and for better design, copyright, patent and intellectual property systems to make India more attractive to global innovators.
Whether any of that turns into bricks, equipment and usable certificates will now depend on execution. Moneycontrol’s report suggests the support window itself is not new so much as underused, because the minister was referring to an existing BIS mechanism in critical areas and saying industry had failed to tap it. Policy Edge argued that success should be judged not by how much kit is bought, but by whether more products clear testing, fewer firms have to repeat those tests overseas and more Indian devices actually reach hospitals and export markets. Until proposals are filed and the government spells out who can use the facilities, where they will be located and which product categories they will cover, the promise of full funding remains an invitation rather than a delivered policy.
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