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The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) is unable to ensure ground-level compliance of its orders on ceiling prices for essential medicines due to a massive manpower crunch.
The Authority now plans to experiment by setting up units in seven states to ensure better enforcement. NPPA, which regulates prices of medicines and medical devices, has only one office in the national capital with no State-level units.
The regulator had announced a draft central scheme to set up such Price Monitoring and Resource Units (PMRUs) in January 2015 to monitor prices of scheduled as well as non-scheduled drugs.
“We don’t have an earmarked team of inspectors or the manpower needed to monitor (prices),” Bhupendra Singh, Chairman of NPPA, said.
He added that if the units in these seven states yield results more would be set up across the country.
The first of these State-level units would be established in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odisha, Haryana, Kerala, Assam and Manipur at an investment of ₹4-5 lakh each. However, the regulator would only provide the States logistical support for now, and not hire new inspectors. In the absence of the pricing authority units in States, the regulator has been functioning in an informal capacity, banking on information from State drug controllers or other officials to crack down on pricing violations.
However, given the crunch in the offices of drug controllers, who have various functions such as licensing and quality control, checks on pricing often get overlooked.
The regulator has also set up a Pharma Data Bank — Ingredient Pharmaceutical Data Base Management System — to monitor prices.
Pharmaceutical companies were expected to register on the Data Bank by March 31, 2016, following repeated revisions of deadline.
However, several companies have not done this, forcing NPPA to issue show-cause notices to them, Singh said.
The regulator is waiting for responses before taking any action, he said.
Pharma companies are mandatorily expected to update all changes in prices on this online data bank, which is expected to help the regulator monitor pricing changes, including in the enforcement of ceiling prices as well as the annual WPI-linked price increases of essential medicines.
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