After the much-awaited national pharmaceutical policy went into oblivion, another keenly-awaited policy move of centralising regulatory mechanism was also buried under the carpet with the government dropping the Central Drug Authority (CDA) Bill for the time being.
Though the Drugs and Cosmetics (amendment) Bill seeking to set up the CDA was expected to come up in the Parliament during the just-concluded Session, it was dropped in the last minute. The bill was likely to be presented either on Monday or Tuesday, but the move was shelved, presumably under the pressure from the small scale industry associations and other interest groups, it is learnt.
The brief session, concluded on Thursday, was supposed to be the final sitting of the present House as the term of the UPA government is ending in a couple of months and general election is likely to be announced any moment now. Likewise the CDA Bill, the government also chose not to present the Clinical Establishments Bill, seeking to make it compulsory for all clinical establishments to get registration.
Small-scale industry associations, which have been lobbying against the CDA bill which they presumed as harmful to the small players, hailed the move as a victory for them. The SSIs, some State FDAs and a group of NGOs have been campaigning against the bill for some time now. "It is a good move. We have been opposing the same for long time now and we are given breathing time. It was in fact against the interests of the large sections of the pharma industry and we were successful to check it," claimed one leader from the SSI sector.
However, health ministry was so keen to present the bill during the session. After the prime minister asked the ministers to list all the pending bills for the recent session, the CDA bill was included in the priority list. "It was a brief session mainly for the vote-on-account and we did not get time to present the bill though we wanted to see that it is passed," an official of the health ministry reacted, without going into further reasons of dropping the bill. "We have not dropped the bill. Only thing is that we could not present it this time and we are very much keen on it," he added.