New Delhi

Medicaldevices sector needs to focus on more local value addition and components manufacturing, Department of Pharmaceuticals Secretary Manoj Joshi said on Friday.

The government is also open to suggestions from the industry to address issues faced by companies that had made investments under PLI (production linked incentives) scheme for medical devices but could not claim incentives for any reason, in order to encourage local manufacturing in India, Joshi said while addressing CII Global MedTech Summit here.

"In the last five-seven years, a lot of imports have shifted to assembly in the country," he said.

Although some of the components are produced in India, Joshi said, "Some of the factories which you see are plain assembly line operations."

While data shows that imports of medical devices are not growing up, he said a reason for that could be that "how we classify components as medical devices or otherwise".