Sarvesh Singh, Director and CEO of Telangana Lifesciences and Pharma, called on industry leaders at a CII Telangana conference to embed safety by design into manufacturing culture, deploying AI, IoT, and drone-based inspections. He argued that as the self-styled life sciences and vaccine capital of the world, Telangana carries an outsized responsibility to lead on both innovation and workplace safety. Industry leaders echoed that growth without resilience is not sustainable.
Hyderabad has spent years building its reputation as India’s pharmaceutical heartland, but a senior state government official told industry leaders on Saturday that reputation alone won’t hold if safety remains an afterthought. The message, delivered at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Telangana conference, was pointed: stop treating safety as a regulatory hurdle and start treating it as something that makes your business harder to beat.
Sarvesh Singh, Director and CEO of Telangana Lifesciences and Pharma, addressed the gathering and made a direct appeal for the sector to reimagine what competitiveness actually means. His argument was that a manufacturing facility with an embedded safety culture is simply a better-run facility, and that the two ideas, safety and efficiency, are not in tension.
A capital with greater responsibility
Singh described Telangana as the life sciences and vaccine capital of the world, a label the state has worn proudly given the concentration of drug makers, bulk drug manufacturers, and vaccine producers around Hyderabad. But that scale, he suggested, comes with proportionally greater obligations. Speaking at the conference titled ‘Pillars of Protection: Forging a Safer Future for Pharma and Chemical Manufacturing’, he told stakeholders the goal should be to make Telangana the safest destination for pharmaceutical manufacturing, full stop.
“Innovation, quality, and safety are the three pillars of a globally competitive Life Sciences ecosystem,” Singh said, according to The Hindu. He urged the use of Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, digital twins, wearables, and drone-based inspections as practical tools to move safety from a paper exercise to an operational reality.
These are not futuristic abstractions. Digital twins, which are virtual replicas of physical manufacturing environments, already allow plant managers to simulate hazardous scenarios without exposing workers to actual risk. Drone-based inspections reduce the need for human access to dangerous areas of a facility. The fact that Singh named specific technologies rather than speaking in generalities gave the appeal a practical weight that is sometimes absent from such forums.
Beyond compliance, into design
The second speaker to draw attention was Chakravarthi AVPS, Convener of the CII Telangana Pharma and Life Sciences Panel, who offered what may be the sharpest formulation of the day. “Scale without safety is a liability and growth without resilience is unsustainable,” he said, calling on companies to embed safety by design as a core business philosophy rather than something bolted on after engineers have already drawn up the floor plan.
This distinction matters in practice. Safety by compliance means a company installs guardrails because an inspector will ask for them. Safety by design means the guardrail is factored into the first architectural sketch. The gap between the two approaches shows up in incident rates, insurance costs, regulatory actions, and, most directly, in the lives of workers on the shop floor.
R. Sivaprasad Reddy, past chairman of CII Telangana, reinforced the structural argument, saying process safety is fundamental to building a resilient and globally competitive life sciences sector. He also reaffirmed CII Telangana’s commitment to advancing the industry through knowledge sharing, capacity building, and collaboration on best practices. This was the second event in the series, suggesting the industry body intends to make safety culture a sustained conversation rather than a one-day declaration.
Why the timing matters
India’s pharmaceutical industry has faced repeated scrutiny from international regulators, particularly the United States Food and Drug Administration, over manufacturing quality and safety standards at Indian plants. Several Hyderabad-based facilities have received warning letters or import alerts in recent years. Singh’s appeal to voluntarily raise the bar, before an overseas regulator forces the issue, carries obvious commercial logic: companies that self-correct tend to stay in the market longer than those that wait for enforcement.
The CII conference drew prominent leaders from across the pharma and chemical manufacturing sector in Telangana, and the choice of topic reflects a broader industry reckoning. Chemical manufacturing, which often shares industrial zones with pharma in the state, carries its own acute safety risks, from solvent handling to reactor pressure management. Including that sector in the conversation broadens the impact of any safety culture shift that does take root.
Technology as the practical bridge
Singh’s call for AI and IoT adoption is particularly relevant for mid-sized manufacturers, who make up a large portion of Telangana’s pharma base. Large multinationals typically already have sophisticated process safety systems. It’s the smaller and medium-sized companies, often running older equipment and leaner teams, that stand to gain most from affordable sensor networks and predictive maintenance platforms now available at accessible price points.
Wearables that track worker fatigue, ambient temperature, and exposure to hazardous chemicals are commercially available today and can be integrated into existing plant management systems without a full technology overhaul. The barrier is less about cost and more about organisational will. That is precisely what the CII forum was trying to address: shifting the mindset before the next incident forces the shift anyway.
Telangana has invested heavily in its pharma city project and in positioning itself as a destination for global pharmaceutical investment. If the state can credibly attach a safety premium to that offering, it becomes a harder pitch for competitors to match. Singh’s framing on Saturday was, in that sense, as much about economic positioning as it was about worker welfare. Both arguments point in the same direction.
