I do believe anybody manufacturing products for healthcare cannot regard it truly as a 100 per cent business: it is business plus a humanitarian approach to society because you are saving lives. You are playing with people's lives.

I believe that life-saving, essential drugs should be freely available and the innovator should be paid a suitable royalty payment for his invention.

Reducing the price of cancer drugs is a humanitarian move.

Patients are becoming aware that they're being taken for a ride by big pharma companies. They charge high prices and have never cared for India's healthcare. There are 23 million cases of cancer every year and India has a fair share of that.

If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.

India made a big mistake by signing up to TRIPS. With a population of 1.3 billion, India can't afford a monopoly in healthcare. Monopolies lead to higher prices and we can't allow them in a country like India with so much poverty and misery. It was like signing our own death warrant.