War on Iran Strikes India’s Pharmaceuticals Sector

March 31, 2026

Latha Jishnu

In 1996, during the wave of bombing attacks unleashed on Iraq by a coalition of western countries led by the US, Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations and later secretary of state, was asked on a CBS television programme if the human cost of the war and punitive economic sanctions imposed on a country are worth the price. Albright’s chilling reply is the clearest understanding we have of how the US and its allies view such wars.

The collateral damage, for want of a better term, inflicted on the civilian population is not their concern even if thousands of children perish for want of food, drinking water and medical care. It is important to keep this in mind as the criminal assault on Iran by the Israeli-US regimes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump inflicts pain across the world. India, the “pharmacy of the world”, as the Indian drug industry is called, is staring at a crisis that will affect not just its population but also those in a host of developing countries in Africa and elsewhere.

Given this morality, it is unlikely that the aggressors in the latest offensive will be unduly concerned about the insidious collateral damage that is being inflicted on the global pharma industry, the repercussions of which will affect millions of people, a majority of them children. There are ominous signs that the expanding war in the Gulf could make access to medicines one of its biggest casualties.

Missile strikes have disrupted supply chains and forced importers to reroute shipments, especially of temperature-sensitive medicines such as for cancer treatment which require refrigeration. As news agencies report that key air transit hubs in the Gulf have been knocked out, Indian pharma is showing signs of nervousness. There are no shortages of medicines as yet but industry and trade bodies have warned that a scarcity of critical raw materials is building up in the complex chemical chain involved in drug manufacture.

What happens in India will matter in differing degrees to the rest of the world. Indian pharma provides access to affordable generic medicines in around 200 countries, offering a lifeline to people and governments that cannot pay the steep costs of innovator drugs. But that lifeline which allows public health programmes to run in Africa and other susceptible regions is in jeopardy because of a fundamental weakness of the industry: a heavy dependence on imported raw materials. The Iran war has once again exposed the soft underbelly of the largest generics producer.

As the war drags on, the situation is expected to worsen. Official statements, however, tend to mask the risks the country faces, both from disruptions of the global supply chain and from price escalations.

These figures mask the reality of India’s increasing vulnerabilities. The cost of imported APIs is rising—some of it comes from Europe—and the intensity of imports from China has deepened from 70 per cent two years ago to 74 per cent. In sum, Rs 29,064 crore of the import bill was paid to China. Import dependency carries other risks. Indian firms will now pay higher logistics costs and face more currency volatility.

It is important to recall what happened to Iraqi children as a result of the Allied invasion and sanctions. The widely cited figure of 500,000 child deaths put out in a Unicef survey was disputed with several US mainstream media outlets and medical journals debunking the figures. Even if the figures had been overstated (by a UN agency?) it would be difficult for right thinking people to deny the catastrophic consequences of destroying health and other essential infrastructure on very young children.

Since the Iraqi invasion, the transformation of war strategy by the invading powers, particularly Israel, calls for a change in the definition of collateral damage. For decades, it has been used euphemistically to describe the inadvertent killing of non-combatants. Civilian deaths and damage to essential infrastructure is no longer an unintended consequence; it is the actual mission of an assault as the killing of 167 schoolchildren in Minab, south Iran, on the first day of the war by the US shows.
(Courtesy: DTE)