The Hindu Business Line : `New price control to affect only 12% of drugs market'

The Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers has emphasised that the list of 354 drugs that are proposed to be brought under price control will result in bringing just another 12 per cent of total drugs market (in value terms) under the control regime.

This is as opposed to the 20 per cent market coverage accounted for by the 74 drugs under the existing Drug Price Control Order.

Exemption plan

According to officials in the Ministry, since price control is only applied to a few and specific strengths of the 354 drugs, the total number of formulations covered amount to about 663 as opposed to all 1,577 formulations of the 74 drugs earlier.

The Government also proposed to exempt vaccines, biological drugs, drugs sold to hospitals only and units costing less that Re 1.

Further, the Ministry, taking all exemptions into account, believes that in the new scheme of things only 450-odd formulations will be covered. New drugs developed in India through product and patent process will be exempted for five years, so will generic drugs and drugs from small-scale industries.

Pharma policy

The Ministry believes the industry should have nothing to complain about, but admits that the issue of drug prices in the draft pharma policy forwarded to the Cabinet was unresolved.

Pharmaceutical industry representatives who have been demanding price monitoring instead of price control will be putting forth their arguments to various Ministries including the Ministry of Finance early next week.

Meanwhile, the Ministry, which has often accused the pharma industry of passing on the cost of aggressive marketing expenses onto consumers, will now do its own marketing of generics.

Awareness campaign

Following up on its promise to provide affordable medicines to consumers, it has planned an awareness campaign for drugs under price control as well as low-priced generic equivalents of branded drugs and will be setting up a dedicated Web site for the purpose.

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