The Hindu Business Line : Globalisation should not deprive poor of medicines: Cipla chief

DR Y.K. Hamied, Chairman and Managing Director of Cipla Ltd, has said that globalisation of healthcare does not mean that the sick and needy are denied access to drugs at affordable prices.

"One of the greatest predictable tragedies the world has witnessed started in India in the form of the Ordinance amending the Indian Patents Act, 1970," he said.

This would deprive the poor of India and the Third World of medicines they need to survive.

This would divide the human race between those that could afford life-saving drugs and those that could not.

Dr Hamied made these comments delivering the A.V. Rama Rao Research Foundation Award Lecture for 2005 on `Indian pharma industry: Decades of struggle and achievements' here last week.

"It is systematic denial to the three-billion in the poorer nations to help their own people and shape their own destiny," he said.

He pointed out that healthcare in India had always been in a state of perpetual crisis. The disease profile was frightening. There are 80-million cardiac patients, 100-million afflicted with mental illness, 60-million diabetics, 50-million asthmatics, 50-million hepatitis B cases, and one in three Indians was a latent carrier of TB.

The World Bank had estimated that India would be home to 35-million HIV cases, nearly half of the all the AIDS cases in the world, by 2015.

Dr Hamied felt that a patent regime should ensure people's right to access affordable quality healthcare without allowing monopoly.

This, he said, could be achieved by an automatic licence of right with a suitable royalty payment on net sales to the innovator. Also, the Government should only allow patents filed post January 1, 2005, as product patents and not the 1995 mark. "This would give us a 10-year leverage," he felt.

He also wanted the Government to be careful in `ever-greening and frivolous patenting'. "Importation of a patented product alone should not be considered as operative working of a patent."

Speaking on the genesis and growth of the Indian pharmaceutical industry, Dr Hamied said the industry grew from a total turnover of Rs 10 crore in 1947 to Rs 28,000 crore. Also, the share of multinationals in the domestic market came down from 70 per cent in 1971 to 23 per cent.

"The power of globalisation is being felt in our pharma industry as well, with all major Indian companies looking at global opportunities," the Cipla Chairman said.

Dr Hamied was later conferred on the award instituted by the Foundation. He donated the cash prize of Rs 1 lakh to Apollo Hospitals for taking up surgeries on children suffering from heart problems.

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