The draft National Pharmaceutical Policy 2011 is scheduled to be placed before a Group of Ministers (GoM) headed by Mr Sharad Pawar, later this month.
The GoM, scheduled for March 28, is an effort to incorporate the divergent views of ministries on the proposed policy, and thereby take it forward, a ministry source told Business Line .
Though the draft policy tries to balance its act between keeping medicine prices affordable without affecting the working of the pharma industry – it has not quite had a smooth run.
Price control has taken centre-stage of the debate between ministries, industry and healthcare advocacy groups. For instance, though the proposal to bring under price control all 348 drugs on the National List of Essential Medicines has not met with resistance; the attempt to rope in NLEM combination medicines has. The draft policy proposes that combinations made with medicines listed in the NLEM would also be brought into the price net, there by increasing the scope of price control on medicines to 60 per cent of the over Rs 48,000-crore domestic pharma market. The Rs 1-lakh crore pharmaceutical industry is unhappy with the move as they say it does not necessarily improve access to medicines.
The draft policy also proposed a market price-based method to peg the referential ceiling price, a shift from the earlier cost-based method. In the market-based system the average of top three brands would be pegged as the ceiling — a formula that does not find favour with the Health Ministry, as representatives point out, it may not bring down prices for the consumer.
The GoM would seek to break the present impasse between ministries, even as developments on the proposed pharma policy are being closely watched by the Supreme Court, where a petition related to the issue is coming up for hearing later this month.
Besides the Ministries of Health, and the Department of Pharmaceutical's nodal Ministry – Chemicals and Fertilizers, who are part of the GoM, also represented would be the Ministries of Law, Commerce, besides the Planning Commission.