Karnataka drugs controller Raghurma Bhandary has now instructed his team that each of the 36 Circles of the department in the 30 districts will now need to monitor the drug prices as prescribed by the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority.
“This will be the only way to ensure the right pricing adherence as indicated in the Drug Price Control Order 2013. The team of officers from the 36 Circles of the drugs control department will now keep a close watch on the 27 categories of medicines, Bhandary told Pharmabiz.
The state so far has been known to adhere to the DPCO 2013 and the enforcement team will conduct surprise checks, he added.
So long the department has been carrying out regular inspections of pharmacy outlets to ascertain the drug quality and with a close watch on the sale of expiry dated drugs. The drug samples are picked up at random and tested at the three drug test labs of the state’s drugs control department in Bengaluru, Hubli and Bellary. If the drug samples are tested for not-of-standard quality, then the companies are alerted. Besides, the state’s 23,000 pharmacy outlets, medical practitioners and the public are cautioned from selling, prescribing and purchasing the same respectively.
In the case of the manufacturing plants, inspectors check out if the companies are adhering to the good manufacturing practices .
However, the pricing issue is a latest entry on the radar of the department. “We have now taken on the responsibility to ensure that there is no overcharging of prices. Therefore, we made the teams at the 36 Circles to take up the onus of pricing surveillance and this ease the process,” noted Bhandary.
The department also prepared a list of companies which have drugs coming under the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) to have a database of information at one go. The tabulated data indicates that price fall is between 15-35 per cent. As per the July 10, 2014 listing the 108 drugs under ceiling prices.
While companies are ready with the revised pricing, the issue of the prevalence of existing stocks at over 22,000 pharmacy outlets in the 30 districts of the state are also being sorted out.
The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) too has been levying fines for overcharging. Earlier this month, it imposed a fine of around Rs.300 crore on Swiss Novartis for overcharging consumers on sale of Voveran, its best-selling painkiller medicine. There are several instances among the Indian pharma companies too. The violations are also possible not just with retailers but wholesalers too.
With the implementation of DPCO 2013, the state pharma industry were uncomfortable about the government efforts to cut prices of drugs without taking the pharma industry into confidence.