‘Drug barcodes are good, but where is the equipment?

A barcode on every medicine pack or bottle. That was the Centre’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 Centre expects them to be bar-code ready in the domestic market by December.

Initiatives of this scale impact the industry and the Centre ought to plan a phased implementation — wherein capacities are first built and then the scheme rolled out — said Satish Reddy, Chairman, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories. Reddy is also President, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA).

“The country is not in a position to implement it (barcoding) because the capacity is not built up yet,” Reddy told BusinessLine here.

Pharma majors are not against barcoding their products, he insisted, adding that the concern is who will supply the code-making equipment for the various companies and their products. “They don’t have the capacity to supply to even the 10 large companies…if we have to be fully compliant. And here we are talking of implementing it for the entire industry,” said Reddy, adding that SME players would have a steeper task ahead.

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

Running parallel to the Health Ministry’s barcoding 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 Centre to cut it some slack on the primary packs — bring 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.

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

The entire system needs to be fully tested before it is made mandatory in the domestic market, and the Centre should ensure that two different barcoding systems do not prevail for local and export markets, he added.

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-digit Global Trade Item Number, the IPA said.

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