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BIOTECHNOLOGY Arcane Goals, Renegade Souls and The Search for Gold A story of boom-town vigour from Hyderabad, a city pursuing its soaring-if sometimes confused-biotechnology ambitions, fuelled by old money, new promises and a little insanity. By Samar Halarnkar & E. Kumar Sharma
The air outside D.R. Raju's new business operation is heavy with NoX, SO2, PPM and all those other indicators of an Indian city's progress. A slight young man with greasy hair and thin moustache, Raju agrees to step out into heaving Ameerpet in central Hyderabad and look up at his signboard. ''Oh this!'' He grins broadly. ''It is best to attract people with something new and exciting.'' Awash in red and green luminous paint, decorated with marigolds, the sign declares, ''Biotech Barber Shop.'' Splashy signboards, buzzwords and new, new things. Hyderabad loves all these. The signboards-on the gleaming new malls, on roadside paan stalls-are the brightest and arguably the most creative ones in India. There's perhaps no other city in India that revels in creating a boom. Remember it was the film capital of India, outgunning Bollywood for years. Remember it ran more sophisticated Bangalore ragged in the battle for India's IT capital. Now, you may argue till the proteins fold that its only rival in the biotech sweepstakes, Bangalore, has more companies and scientists actually doing biotechnology, but if you want to study the evolution of a boom-real or imagined-this is the town to do it. Fertiliser-makers, hoteliers, poultry farmers-they're all in on it. Moreover, they say, IT's decade was the 1990s. This is another decade, and Hyderabad has another buzzword. Officials in the state industries department say that since October 2000 at least 50 entrepreneurs have displayed ''serious intent'' for biotech ventures. ''We get at least two inquiries every week to set up biotech ventures,'' says Utkarsh Palnitkar, head of the Hyderabad office of Ernst and Young Consultants. Six months ago, says Palnitkar, almost no one asked for biotech funding. In a far corner of a 600 sq. km swathe of land declared by the Andhra Pradesh government to be ''Genomics Valley'', Dr V.V. Subba Rao, acting CEO of ICICI's Rs 31 crore Knowledge Park is waiting for the flood. The retired technocrat says he's had more than 100 inquiries in the last nine months, mostly from biotech wannabes. The Park, with its waterways and clipped lawns impeccably crafted from an expanse of wind-hewn rocky land, is a 50-minute drive from the city. It leases plug-and-play labs to start-ups, providing clean rooms, gas pipelines, filtered air, phone and Net connections, even a customs clearing house and help with patents. ''The idea is to provide a world-class environment to carry out business-driven research,'' says Rao. Next door is the Andhra Pradesh government's Biotech Park. Right now, it's only been demarcated on the government's glossy biotech policy document.
Dodging rickety buses and the occasional chicken, Kodu Ishwari Varaprasad Reddy, turns off the busy highway and eases his late-model Opel Astra into a guarded campus of squat, white buildings and clipped lawns. This is Reddy's baby, Shantha Biotechnics, womb of a genetically engineered hepatitis-B vaccine whose success over the last two years prompted much of Hyderbad's rush into biotechnology. A former defence scientist who set up Shantha in 1997, Reddy has dark forebodings about his home town's new craze. ''We all say the BT era is coming, but what we are doing is all bogus sir,'' exclaims Reddy. ''We think, what is the lie I should create today? What is the hype I should create today. The entire biotech industry will get a bad name because of a few miscreants in this city.'' It is hard to pinpoint the ''miscreants'', but quite clearly everyone sees gold in their genes. ''N.P.V. Raju, the Managing Director of Classic Biotech, is set out (sic) with ambitious plans to convert the huge potential available in Hi-tech Agriculture, Biotechnology, IT and Entertainment sectors.'' This from a press release. ''The flag ship co. Classic Biotech is under expansion and will be the best in the country in its line.'' If you haven't heard of Classic Biotech, there's good reason. In a residential nook of Hyderabad, the company's swarthy MD, the aforesaid Raju, 42, sheepishly admits: ''We are not very serious.'' Thus far, Classic Biotech has never actually done any biotech. It's a floriculture company that ran up losses in the last four years in trying to produce and export cut flowers. Now he says, ''we're interested in bioinformatics, we're very clear about that.'' His release says ''the area of interest is environment biotechnology (investment Rs 100 million)''. Raju leans back in his chair. ''Without proper handling, biotech will be utter failure.''
Raju would like to talk about Landpower Biotech Ltd, a new company launched by his family, primarily made up of prosperous grape and poultry farmers. He displays photos of the Karnataka chief minister S.M. Krishna inaugurating Landpower in Bangalore. ''My uncle is an MLA in Raichur (Karnataka),'' he says explaining Krishna's presence. ''That is very important.'' Landpower has roped in a director from Hyderabad's ICRISAT (International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics), and the company's focus is sharp: it will try to genetically extend the life of seeds upto 25 days during a drought. Raju confides that he's buying ''semi-finished patent'' through a scientist of Indian origin in Japan for about Rs 1 crore. Across town in the swank Banjara Hills area, Rajesh Aurora, 30, describes his company's plans to bring in expertise from abroad: a scientist from Switzerland. Sipping tea in his partner's house-a rambling Hyderabadi bungalow with an overgrown garden, defunct swimming pool and period furniture-Aurora declares that their closely held company, Trindus Biotech, is in negotiations with ''parties in Europe and the U.S.'' Trindus, the wiry, amiable techie explains, was ''basically the pioneer for bioinformatics, genomics etc'' in Hyderabad since 1999. They also run an infotech company called Cerebral Soft. Aurora, who formerly worked for a multinational oil consortium in Baku, Azerbaijan, comes from a Pune family with a flourishing construction business. In the first phase, explains Aurora, Trindus will enter ''bioinformatics, clinical analysis, gene and protein expression, proteomics''. By the time the third phase rolls by in a couple of years, the company, which has a staff of nine, should have 300 people and ''do tissue engineering, which no one is going in for in India''. And how much will this cost? Aurora doesn't bat an eyelid. ''Rs 100 crore.'' Isn't that a lot of money? ''No, not a lot. Rs 100 crore is nothing actually for biotech.'' 1 2 |
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