India’s med-tech space got a booster shot from the pandemic. A firm policy push can take it global.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged India’s medical devices and biomedical companies to invest in bleeding-edge research and scale up in his speech at the Indian Science Congress in Bengaluru in January 2020, little did he know about the incoming storm.Less than three months after the prime minister encouraged companies in the sector to come up with tools and concepts to save people from communicable diseases, the deadly virus entered India.