The ongoing feud between the two pharmaceutical trade organizations, All India Organization of Chemists & Druggists (AIOCD) and All India Chemists & Distributors Federation (AICDF), is likely to take a new turn with the scheduled press meet of one of the trade bodies in the national capital next week.
The office-bearers of the AICDF is expected to give a tit for tat explanation at the meet to all the allegations made against them openly and clandestinely by AIOCD, said P Elango, the newly elected secretary of Tamil Nadu Pharmaceuticals Distributors Association (TNPDA), an exclusive body of wholesalers, which is affiliated to AICDF in the national level. The feud between the two associations has put even the big major manufacturers in the country into quandary over distribution of their products.
"We are determined to fight. We will disclose everything. They have been making myriad ways of harassments of our business. It is high time to counter the big-brother attitude," an aggressive secretary said.
Elango, who is one of the top leaders of AICDF, has come down heavily on the office-bearers of AIOCD for their alleged blatant attempt to control the entire traders in the country. "They were threatening certain manufacturers by instructing them not to supply their products to us. We suffered a lot. At last our members in Coimbatore had to approach the Civil Courts and MRTP Commission. The Commission passed strong strictures against their autocratic trade practices and passed an injunction restricting them from indulging in such practices," he told Pharmabiz.
While reacting to some statements made recently by the AIOCD members, TNPDA members said that despite strong strictures from MRTP, the AIOCD continued its way of functioning and they even went to the extreme step of writing to the manufacturers to stop supplies to those wholesalers who were not in their good books or not their members. In Coimbatore, Tirunelveli, Trichy, Erodu and Chennai, a host of retailers have raised boycott threats to TNPDA because of the strict instruction given by AIOCD and TNCDA, sources from Coimbatore said.
The wholesale association secretary P Elango emphasized that in the ensuing press conference in New Delhi, the AICDF members would expose to the media and public all those malpractices being carried out by AIOCD under the pretext of a limited company called AIOCD Ltd. "So many irregularities are committed by the office-bearers of the AIOCD Ltd and TNCDA Ltd. Several retailers are their share holders. Many of them are not getting the report of annual general body meeting or copy of balance sheet even when asked for. They are not following the norms put forward by SEBI in collecting public funds. We have all the documents," raising a file he said.
A wholesale dealer from Coimbatore zone explained that when some senior members of AIOCD had questioned the irregularities committed by its members, they were sidelined by the top brass of the organization.
TNPDA, which have five zones in the state, has more than 3000 members, out of them 250 are company authorized wholesalers.