AiMeD applauds Dr PD Vaghela for his contribution to Indian medical device industry at his farewell

New Delhi: Association of Indian Medical Device Industry (AiMeD), an umbrella association of Indian manufacturers of medical devices held a farewell meeting of Secretary, Department of Pharmaceuticals, Dr PD Vaghela who retired on the 30th September 2020 for his great contribution towards the betterment of the Indian Medical Device industry. Dr PD Vaghela will now serve as the Chief of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) for the next three years.

The various pharma and medical devices industry associations expressed their gratitude to Dr Vaghela. They have expressed hope that the next Secretary DoP, S Aparna, an IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre 1988 will continue to take forward the good initiatives to make India Atmanirbhar in the Medical Devices sector.

Calling Dr PD Vaghela a positive change agent during the last one year, Mr Rajiv Nath, Forum Coordinator AiMeD highlighted the key initiatives led by him.

“During his tenure, DoP sponsored 2 conferences for AiMeD on Regulations for enabling the capacity building of the medical devices industry to enable them to be globally competitive. Dr Vaghela initiated a 5% surcharge in the budget as import duty protection to protect the beleaguered domestic Manufacturing while creating a corpus for Public Healthcare. He did not allow price caps of stents & knee implants to be removed as sought by the USA as that would have been detrimental to consumers and domestic manufacturers. Under his leadership DoP introduced a scheme for 4 Medical Devices Parks and PLI scheme as making in India enablers under the government’s Atmanirbhar campaign; the PLI Scheme is reportedly being revised to enable wider acceptability,” said Mr Nath.

“Mr Vaghela led by example and he along with his 2 Joint Secy and team was available 24×7 on COVID-related medical devices production debottlenecking issues during the complete lockdown. He also created the Pharma & Medical Devices Bureau as a single window for current and potential investors. The otherwise sleepy DoP Dept. reportedly became motivated, active & sprightly & most staff moved under a new Pharma bureau in new offices in Jhandewalan. He even allocated specific duties in Dept. for Medical Devices which had been shunted in the past amongst various officers for short durations without the development of domain knowledge and ownership in the department. Dr Vaghela reportedly encouraged teamwork by providing leadership and direction. Even NPPA became a facilitator in addition to being a regulator with the onset of COVID,” Mr Nath mentioned.

“India imports over 85% of its requirement of medical devices and has a huge import bill that crossed Rs. 42000 Cr last year due to nominal custom duties of zero to 7.5%.“We are glad that initiatives like Aatmanirbhar Bharat under leaders like Dr Vaghela will help India in the process to end the huge import dependency and will also strengthen India’s resolve to vie for being the 2nd factory in the world for medical devices.” added Mr Rajiv Nath.