Bangalore, April 22 Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Chairperson, Karnataka’s Vision Group on Biotechnology and CMD, Biocon India, said the country should target 2010 as the timeline to achieve $5 billion revenues from the Biotech sector.

Speaking at the inaugural session of the fifth edition of ‘Bangalore Bio 2005’, to be held between April 22-24, Shaw said the theme of India’s biggest Biotech show — ‘Bio-Partnering for Global challenges’ — is extremely relevant as Bio-Partnering is the way forward, especially for countries like India and China. She said the global BT sector is a $40-billion industry, nearly 250 new drugs have emanated from BT and 70 per cent of drugs in the approval pipeline are from BT.

Stating that Karnataka is a good case study of how the BT sector has grown in India, the Biocon CMD reeled out some impressive statistics: Bangalore is the fastest growing ‘Biocluster in India,’ Karnataka’s BT sector has attracted the maximum venture capital funding in the country — $100 million, and accounts for the 21 new BT companies established over the last 12 months.

‘‘Of the total number of 256 BT companies in India, Karnataka is home to 131, of which 127 are in Bangalore. Karnataka employs over 20,000 people in BT, of which 33 per cent are graduates, 30 per cent are post graduates, 18 per cent are PhDs, 15 per cent are engineer/MBAs. In 2005, 131 BT companies have employed scientific manpower of over 7,500 and a total manpower of over 12,000,’’ she said.

Karnataka Chief Minister Dharam Singh, who presided over the inaugural session, said his government attached a lot of importance to attracting investments into Karnataka. In the last 10 months the High Level Committee which approves major industrial projects has cleared projects worth more than Rs 40,000 crore. Work on ‘Bangalore Helix’— the much-delayed Biotech Park project — will begin in June 2005 for which the central government has sanctioned Rs 14.45 crore.