Bioeconomy hubs target big goal

India’s biomanufacturing push is moving from lab work to factory-scale production, with the National Agri-Food and Biomanufacturing Institute and regional hubs lining up shared facilities and artificial-intelligence tools for microbe-based manufacturing. (pib.gov.in) The Department of Biotechnology and Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council opened the program through a joint call for biofoundries and biomanufacturing hubs in late 2024, asking applicants to build shared pilot-scale and pre-commercial facilities for sectors including enzymes, smart proteins, precision biotherapeutics, biofuels and carbon capture. (dbtindia.gov.in) In India’s system, a biofoundry is the early-stage workshop and a biomanufacturing hub is the scale-up plant: the government’s implementation plan says startups and small companies often stall after proof of concept because they lack pilot and pre-commercial infrastructure. (dbtindia.gov.in) The policy frame is BioE3, approved by the Union Cabinet on August 24, 2024, to back “high-performance biomanufacturing” with Bio-Artificial Intelligence hubs, biofoundries and biomanufacturing hubs across six sectors. (pib.gov.in) That matters because India is trying to turn a fast-growing biotechnology sector into a manufacturing base: the government says the bioeconomy reached $165.7 billion in 2024 and is targeting $300 billion by 2030. (pib.gov.in) By March 2026, the government said it had already launched India’s first Biofoundry Network at eight academic institutions and set up 11 industry biomanufacturing platforms with shared infrastructure for startups, small businesses, industry and academia. (pib.gov.in) The “design-build-test-learn” cycle in the announcement is a standard biotech workflow: researchers design a microbe, build the genetic changes, test how it performs in fermentation, then feed the data back into the next round, often with automation and machine learning. (cell.com) NABI, based in Mohali and now branded as the BRIC-National Agri-Food and Biomanufacturing Institute, is one of the public institutes being positioned around that scale-up agenda; its website says it was established in 2010 and aims to translate agri-food biotechnology into products. (nabi.res.in) The industry names attached to the effort show the kinds of products India wants to make. Laurus Bio says it engineers microbes as “cell-factories” for animal-free proteins and growth factors, while String Bio says it uses methane as a feedstock to make ingredients for agriculture, food and other low-carbon supply chains. (laurus.bio) (stringbio.com) The government’s own list of supported platforms includes a Laurus Bio fermentation facility in Visakhapatnam for functional foods, smart proteins, bio-based chemicals, enzymes and precision biotherapeutics. (pib.gov.in) If the plan works, the hubs will do the unglamorous part of biotech that often decides whether a product survives: giving companies a place to move from promising microbes on a bench to repeatable batches in industrial tanks. (dbtindia.gov.in)