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The 21-day lockdown due to Covid-19 has united both sides of the pharmaceutical industry — domestic and foreign companies — to speak in one voice.
Despite being part of essential services, workers are getting beaten up by the police in some States, or employees and medicine consignments are not being able to cross State borders.
As an extension of the lockdown seems imminent in some States, industry veterans cautioned that despite existing inventories, critical products like vaccines, insulin and cancer medicines that need cold-chain facilities could come under pressure if supply lines are not kept operating smoothly.
“Early days of the sudden lockdown saw transportation and other operational challenges,” said KG Ananthakrishnan, Director- General with the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India, a platform largely for multinational companies. In the last 10 days though, there has been “unprecedented” dialogue between the government and different industry associations who are working together, he added.
“But factories are operating at 40-50 per-cent capacity in some States, and at 30 per cent in others,” Anathakrishnan, formerly head of Merck Sharp & Dohme in India, told BusinessLine . However, he said that he was optimistic that production would ramp up to 60 per cent in a few weeks.
The inventory will last three months in terms of finished goods, but supply issues involving Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and ancillary needs like cartons, packaging etc need to be sorted out, he added, calling for priority clearance of APIs and formulations at the ports/ airports.
Baddi woes
Raising similar bottleneck issues, Sudarshan Jain, Secretary General with the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), said that since pharmaceuticals was not clearly defined earlier, there were ground-level problems.
Factories located in Daman and Baddi (Himachal Pradesh), for instance, were seeing reduced operations. “A worrying reality as about 500 companies have plants in Baddi,” he said.
“There is existing inventory for about 30- 45 days,” he said, adding that a similar amount was in the market, at distributors etc. To ensure smooth medicine supplies, he said, the government needed to identify courier services and other surface transport as essential services.
Industry representatives, who did not want to be named, said that employee fears were being addressed by ensuring staggered work and lunch hours, social distancing and protective gear.
But with reports coming in, even this week, on contract manufacturers getting attacked in Goa, a greater effort will be needed by State and Central authorities to ensure that medicine supplies are not disrupted across the country in an extended lockdown period.
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