Becton Dickinson India Ltd, a 100 per cent subsidiary of the New Jersey-based Becton Dickinson, has commissioned a Rs-200 crore facility at Badwal (Haryana) for the manufacture of hypodermic medical devices. The highly automated process plant has a capacity to make over a billion disposable needles a year.

The unit, which complies with current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) requirements, will cater exclusively to the domestic market "thereby ensuring regular supply at affordable prices," says C D Sharma, BDI''s managing director.

Becton Dickinson, the $3.2 billion Fortune 500 company, has decided to invest a total of $100 million in India by 2000. Since launch in 1996, BDI has invested $50 million in the core business area.

"We see a rapid growth in our Indian operations which will offset the current meltdown in the South East Asia region," says BDC''s Asia Pacific region president, Eugenio Naschold.

The Indian subsidiary has identified seven core business areas for future investments. These include, besides injection systems, diabetes health care, infusion therapy, sample collection, infectious diseases, diagnostics and pre-filled syringes and immuno-cytometry systems.

The company is also concentrating on health care management programmes and has recently designed a staged diabetes management (SDM) module to improve the level of healthcare given to hypoglycaemics.

Becton Dickinson''s worldwide operations are spread over 80 locations in 40 countries. The company acquired $33-million research-oriented U.S. company PharMingen in 1997 to broadbase its operations in monoclonal antibodies and reagents used in research. The merger is expected to give the company a discovery-to-diagnostics identity in the health and medicine field.