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The number of drugs under the controlled price regime is set to go up, with a committee constituted under the Ministry of Health favourably inclined towards bringing more drugs under essential medicines list.
The first meeting of the 12-member committee, chaired by the Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research, VM Katoch, met on Tuesday to take a stock of the existing list.
Revisiting of the National List of Essential Medicines has become a cause for concern for some industry members, as this would mean squeezing their margins further.
The list, which was revised last year, increased the number of drugs under price control to 348. Before that, the Government had controlled the prices of 74 bulk drugs and their formulations, through the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority.
According to industry estimates, as much as 20 per cent of the market is currently under price control. This translates to almost ₹16,000 crore worth of the market.
DG Shah, Secretary General, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, said the Government would need to look at the medicines under the existing list of essential medicines and the medicines that don’t fall under this and then decide what constitutes as ‘essential’.
“Merely increasing the span of control is not going to ensure availability of medicines,” he said, adding many companies already want to stop production of essential medicines as they are becoming unviable. “How long can the Government push for manufacturing?” he asked.
He added an increase in the number of the essential medicines will not serve the Government’s purported intention to start universal healthcare in the country. “The prices in the private market should be reasonable. But if you put more pricing controls, then supply will dry up.” Manufacturers will not have any incentive to increase production of essential medicines in the long run, he added.
Echoing the same view, a senior executive of a drug-maker said: “Last year itself, the introduction of new medicines under price control had started affecting our margins. Increasing the ambit of control is not going to ensure supply; all it could, potentially, do is to lead the industry to restrict production of certain medicines.”
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