India to be one of top 10 drug markets

India will be one of the world's top 10 pharmaceutical markets by 2015 due to rising incomes and the spread of stress-induced chronic diseases, global consultancy McKinsey said Wednesday.
Real average household incomes in the nation of over one billion people have roughly doubled over the past two decades, giving consumers the purchasing power to buy more medicines, and are set to climb further, it said in a report.
"India's pharmaceuticals market will undergo a major transformation in the next decade," the report's co-author Gautam Kumra told AFP.
"The market will triple to 20 billion dollars by 2015 from six billion" and India will be ranked 10th globally, up from 14th place in 2005, Kumra said.
Along with growing incomes, the market's expansion is being fuelled by a shift in disease patterns with increasingly stressful lifestyles leading to big rises in chronic ailments, he said.