Pharma companies may get more time to re-label drugs
Pharma companies may get more time to re-label drugs
NEW DELHI: The government may allow pharma companies one more month from the cut-off date of July 29 to re-label their essential drug products currently in the market and with distributors which will have revised lower prices mandated under drug price control order (DPCO), 2013.
However, this wouldn’t mean that pharma firms can continue to sell these essential drugs at old higher rates, according to an official. “Drugmakers will have to send their revised price lists under the new DPCO separately to trade channels,” the official said. Also, this marginal relief is likely to be restricted to the first set of 151 drugs, which were notified in June and the deadline for which was set for July 29. However, the government turned down an industry request to make price changes from the next batch after government notification on revised prices came.
The pharma secretary and the chairman of the national pharma pricing authority met drugmakers on Wednesday to discuss the problems they are facing in the implementation of the new DPCO. This meeting came even as pharmaceutical companies queued up in courts challenging a provision under the new drug price control order, which says essential drugs must have labels of revised prices listed within 45 days of government notification.
Over the past fortnight, over a dozen drug firms and two industry bodies – the Indian Drug Manufacturers Association and the Confederation of Indian Pharma Industry – have challenged the order to label revised prices within 45 days of the price notification in the Delhi High Court.
“The secretary of the pharma department heard us out and said that the benefits of the new drug price regime must reach the consumer at the earliest. He assured us that no severe action would be taken against companies for now which in right earnest begin the task of stickering their existing stocks at the stockist level and send revised price lists to distributors to comply with DPCO in spirit,” said Daara Patel, secretary general, Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association, who attended the meeting.
The court has asked the government not to take coercive action against some of the companies that have moved the court. It has, however, also asked the companies to furnish price lists of essential drugs they manufacture as mandated under the new Drug Price Control Order to domestic drug distributors and state drug controllers.Late last week, the court also directed the firms to file copies of the agreements they enter with theirstockists and distributors within two weeks. It asked the companies for a record number of drugs sold before and after the cut-off date when the DPCO was enforced.
