The "Gujarat Pharma Industry: Striding into the future" report highlights the strong and well established engineering industry in a specific region of India called Gujarat, as an area where strong growth is possible.

Gujarat already accounts for the production of around 35 to 40 per cent of India's pharma machinery. However, thanks to it being highly fragmented, the sector is still very much routed nationally and this problem must be overcome if India is to make serious inroads in the global market.

"There is a dearth of pricing power and critical scale," KPMG states. "This, in turn, restricts the ability to produce the technology driven products required for operating in global markets."

If the pharma machinery manufacturing industry in Gurarat can consolidate and combine the skills available in the broader engineering sector, it should "be able to create world-class players with the scale and resources required to tap the global as well as local demand."

Having said that, there are yet more barriers blocking India's dominance. Specifically, KPMG points out that although the country has "carved out a significant portion of the world pharma pie", there has to be "an enormous change in mindset and transformation to attract global capital and talent" and hence become a global pharmaceutical hub.

More competition, especially from a country where costs are so much lower, would put pressure on leading equipment firms and surely lead to cheaper machines for the lab scientist.

Emerging Asian economies, like India and China, are already taking on established Western players in almost every walk of life and it seems like lab equipment is set to be the latest. KPMG also believes Gujarat could lead the way in medical tourism and contract research.