Build bar-coding capacity first, industry tells Govt 

A barcode on every medicine pack or bottle -- that was the Government’s ambitious plan to help consumers check if the medicine they’d bought was genuine.

But the implementation of this plan has not been thought through in terms of logistics and cost, say top industry representatives, even though the Government expects them to be bar-code ready in the domestic market by December.

Initiatives of this scale affect the industry and Government needs to have a phased implementation where capacities are first built and then it is rolled out, says Satish Reddy, Chairman, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories. Reddy is also President, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), a platform for large domestic drug companies including Sun Pharma, Lupin, Cipla and Natco.

“The country is not in a position to implement it (barcoding) because the capacity is not built up yet,” Reddy told Business Line, adding that large drugmakers were not against bar-coding their products. The real concern is who would supply the code-making equipment for the different companies and their products, he points out.

“They don’t have the capacity to supply even the 10 large companies, because of the number of lines that we have, if we have to be fully compliant. And here we are talking of implementing it for the entire industry,” says Reddy, adding that small and medium scale companies would have a steeper task ahead of them.

Unique code

The original plan was for consumers to be able to pick up a medicine, punch in the unique code into a Government website or read the code with a smart phone that would get communicated to the portal. And in minutes they would have a reply if their product was genuine.

Running parallel to the Health Ministry’s bar-coding plan for domestic medicines is a similar Commerce Ministry diktat already in existence on export medicines. Having complied with the rule to barcode tertiary and secondary packages of export medicines, the industry had asked the Government to cut them some slack on the primary packs – that meant barcoding down to individual bottles and vials, for instance. But several delayed deadlines later, an October deadline now looms over the industry for primary level barcoding on export packs.

Different strokes

IPA’s DG Shah points out that drug manufacturing units vary from “bullock-carts to a spaceship” and their systems range from manual and semi-automatic to high-speed machinery. Top companies with sophisticated machinery would have 15 to 20 product lines, but there are barely a handful of equipment suppliers to service them, says Shah.

The entire system needs to be fully tested before it is made mandatory in the domestic market, and the Government should ensure that two different bar-coding systems do not prevail for local and export markets, he points out.

There need to be a few model plans for units with varying capacities and these need to outline the investment required for each model and the recurring cost of implementing the universal global product identification code in the 14 digits Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), the IPA said.

The plans should also reflect the production loss of 20 percent (compared to the existing output per line) that would also push up costs, the industry-body added.

COMMENT NOW