This article is devoted to Indian experience of catch-up development strategy implementation in the pharmaceutical industry. Economic development in various countries is sometimes based upon import substitution system. But for the officially supported programs, production sectors used to demonstrate low competitiveness (or worse). On the other hand, alternative industrial strategies (export-orientation) tend to be resulting considerable performance and promotion on the global market. So, the following issues have attracted our attention: 1) effects of catch-up development policy enforcement in Indian pharmaceutical industry (from 1947 up to now); 2) identification of competitive differentiators in Indian pharmaceutical industry. The research showed that Indian pharmaceutics success had been determined by combination of external and internal factors: a wide range of import substitution and exportoriented tools and activities (internal factors); forfeiture of patent rights of leading medical products on the int