Social entrepreneurship is all about understanding the need of the society and then working on the demand and supply ratio, said the founding chairman of Shantha Biotechnics K.I. Varaprasad Reddy.
He was delivering a lecture on ‘Social Entrepreneurship – challenges’ here at Dr. Lankapalli Bullayya College, on Friday. The lecture was organised by the college in association with Centre for Policy Studies and Society for Integrated Development and Research (SIDAR).
Talking about how and why he founded Shantha Biotechnics, he took the participants on walk down the memory lane that he had undertaken three decades ago.
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“Despite being an electronics engineer, I delved into the path of biotechnology, as my country was ridiculed for being poor and not being able to produce a Hepatitis- B vaccination, at a WHO conference in Geneva.”
He gave a glimpse of his travails in setting up a research lab in Osmania University and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, until an independent R&D facility was built by him. “On one hand we did not have the technology, facility, experience and finance and on the other hand we had the government red-tapism in issuance of licences. Thereafter, every step was a challenge right from preclinical trials to convincing the animal rights and human rights groups. But I was firm in developing a vaccine that would be available for the poor,” he said.
According to him in those days, importing three doses of vaccine for two children in a family would cost around ₹10,000 and he wanted to give it to the people for ₹50. “And after a struggle for almost six years, I was able to deliver,” he said. According to Dr. Varaprasad, prior to the development of the vaccine about 45 million children were infected.
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‘Lagging behind in R&D’
“We are still lagging behind in R&D. When a pharma company like Pfizer spends around $4.7 billion on R&D, our country’s budget is just $3 million,” he said.
Dr. Varaprasad Reddy was also critical about the present system of education and said that it has become more academic in nature and has lost the touch of values.