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India · The Global Interest

Everyone is looking at India.
Few know where to look.

India is the most contested market in health and life sciences right now. Attention is not the advantage — knowing precisely where to enter, with whom, and in what order is.

Start an India engagement →Where we work
18+ years on the groundEvery area we work inCurated cross-border partnerships for health & life sciences
The global interest

India is being built and courted at the same time.

Pharmaceutics, biomedical engineering, biotechnology, agriculture and food, marine science and the health workforce are all being constructed at once — each with its own policy, its own regulator and its own geography. Every serious institution in the world has noticed. You do not need us to tell you the market is large. What is worth knowing is how long we have been working inside it.

18+
Years building partnerships in India
Long enough to have watched partners, policies and regulators change — and to know which relationships survived it.
6
Markets across the Asia-Pacific
Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, with people on the ground rather than visiting.
1
Strength, built deep
Health and life sciences is where our relationships, our training and our track record all sit — which is why the judgement in this market is worth something.
Where the judgement sits

Interest is universal. Judgement is not.

Market size, seat numbers and growth forecasts can be found by anyone with an afternoon, and everyone competing for the same partners already has them. What cannot be found is which state to enter for your discipline, which regulator’s current position will decide your approval, which institution will still be a serious partner in five years, and which adjacent area you should be moving on at the same time.

That reading is the work. We do not publish it, because it is what universities engage us to produce — specific to their discipline, their risk appetite and their timeline, not a view broadcast to everyone including their competitors.

What we track

Five national frameworks rewritten since 2019.

Every framework governing health and life sciences partnership in India has been replaced or created inside six years. Which of them bites, and how hard, depends entirely on your discipline and your state.

2019 – 2023

Four new health regulators

Medical, allied health, nursing and midwifery, and dental.

2023

Foreign campuses permitted

UGC regulations opened Indian soil to foreign universities.

2023

National Medical Devices Policy

A stated push from import dependence to domestic capability.

2024

BioE3 policy

The first national bioeconomy policy anywhere, spanning health, agriculture and sustainability.

Where we already stand

Four corridors into Indian life sciences.

These are standing positions, not projects. They are the reason an engagement with us starts further along than a cold market entry does — and what we build inside them is designed for one university at a time.

Corridor 01 · Pharmaceutics & biotechnology

The pharmacy of the world is trying to stop being a generics business

India supplies around a fifth of the world’s generic medicines by volume. Its stated ambition is now biologics, biosimilars and advanced therapies — and that is a capability problem before it is a capital problem.

The ground

A market moving from roughly US$55 billion toward US$120–130 billion by 2030, with national programmes behind biologics and a CRDMO sector doubling.

Our position

This is the sector we know best at both ends — Australian pharmacy and pharmaceutical science faculties on one side, Indian pharmacy institutions, manufacturers and the policy environment on the other.

Corridor 02 · Biomedical engineering

From a bench in Australia to a manufacturing floor in India

India imports most of its medical devices while building the capacity to make them. That gap is precisely where translation partnerships belong.

The ground

India’s first integrated medical device park runs to 270 acres, houses more than a hundred companies, and offers shared scientific facilities no individual manufacturer could fund alone. A second zone on a larger footprint has been announced.

Our position

We hold an advisory role inside that ecosystem. For a university with device or diagnostics research, that is a direct route to testing infrastructure, manufacturing partners and the regulatory people who sit within it — not a cold approach through a trade body.

Corridor 03 · Agriculture, food & marine science

The sector everyone else has left on the table

India is the world’s second-largest fish producer and a top-three producer across much of agriculture. Almost no foreign university partnership is built here.

The ground

Fish production has roughly doubled in a decade across an 11,099 km coastline, alongside a food processing sector carrying 13% of national exports and a bioeconomy policy naming climate-resilient agriculture as a priority.

Our position

We read this as life sciences rather than as agriculture. A marine biology group, a pharmacy school and a food science department belong in one partnership, and we are among very few people making that argument in this market.

Corridor 04 · Health systems & clinical practice

Clinical partnerships need a hospital that will actually answer the phone

Clinical exposure, placement capacity and workforce programmes rest on relationships inside hospital groups — not on an agreement signed with a university.

The ground

823 medical colleges and 5,299 nursing institutions, distributed across the country in a pattern that does not follow reputation. Distribution follows capability rather than reputation, and the two are frequently confused.

Our position

We hold an advisory role with one of India’s major private hospital groups and long-standing relationships across hospital and diagnostics networks, alongside nearly two decades in senior international roles across six Australian universities.

Case study · on request

We share the detailed work privately

Named engagements, the obstacles inside them and the outcomes they produced are discussed in conversation rather than published — partly out of respect for the partners involved, and partly because the approach itself is what we are engaged for. Ask and we will walk you through the most relevant one.

Our method

We start with your problem statement, not our product.

The sequence is the same in every engagement. What changes is what has to be solved at each step.

Step 01

Understand the problem statement

We begin with what you are actually trying to solve — the objective, the constraint and the timeline — before anything is proposed.

Step 02

Assess the strengths

A detailed assessment of your organisation’s real capability and standing. Partnerships fail when they are built on what an institution wishes it had.

Step 03

Curate and finalise

We match those strengths to the right partner from our network, structure the agreement and take it through to signature.

Step 04

Manage to the outcome

We stay on it after signing and manage the partnership to the outcome you set — delivery, revenue, reputation or reach.

The network we curate from

Every partnership is matched from a network built over eighteen years, not sourced on request.

InstitutionsHospitalsResearch centresStart-up ecosystemsGovernmentsIndustriesand more

The outcome we manage to

You set the priority at the outset, and it governs how the partnership is designed and run.

DeliveryProgrammes, pathways or research that actually run and keep running.
RevenuePartnerships structured to generate income, not just activity.
ReputationAssociation that raises institutional standing in the right rooms.
ReachEntry into markets, systems and networks you could not access alone.

Bring us a sector and a market.

Tell us the discipline and the scale you are aiming for. The specific read — where to enter, who to approach and in what order — is what we produce for you, and it starts with a conversation.

Start a conversation →Where we work

Enquire about working with NexELabs

Tell us about your institution and we will come back with what we would actually recommend.