It is more than an year now after the government constituted a Group of Ministers under the chairmanship of Sharad Pawar, the Union agriculture minister, to finalize the long pending new drug policy for the pharmaceutical sector. The third meeting of the GoM ended without making any headway on January 30. At the meeting, the officials from the Ram Vilas Paswan's Chemicals ministry just made a presentation of a recent NPPA survey of drug prices in the country to the seven member panel. The survey, as reported earlier, had found that the controlled drug prices rose just one percent yearly since 1994 while the prices of drugs outside control went up much higher. In cases of 87 per cent of the samples collected by NPPA across the country, prices had increased beyond 20 per cent of the ceiling fixed. The survey supports Paswan's stand to bring in more drugs under price control in the new policy. No deliberations,however, took place after the presentation during the brief meeting. The ministry of chemicals had prepared the draft pharmaceutical policy some time in November 2006 and sent to the Cabinet for approval. The draft policy sought to increase the span of control to 354 essential medicines, besides the existing 74 drugs currently under DPCO, 1995. In the wake of strong objections from the industry against expanding price control, the government had decided to refer the policy draft to a GoM in January, 2007 for speedy finalization. Now looking at the pace of progress made by GoM so far, an announcement of on new policy should take several more months.

The pharmaceutical industry seems to be least bothered about the finalization of the new policy. The reason is somewhat obvious. The price control is just nominal today with less than 50 drugs out of 74 drugs listed in the DPCO, 1995 are effectively under control. Whereas, there are 500 or more drugs outside price control. Therefore, this is a better state of affairs for the industry than what is expected from Paswan as the new policy with an expanded price control plan. The Paswan's ministry strongly feels that some serious modifications to the existing drug policy and DPCO are called for. Because, a large number of drugs required for treating life threatening diseases in the changed disease profile of the country, are remaining outside price control. All these drugs are introduced in the country after 1995 and the prices charged by the pharmaceutical companies are several times more than their costs of production. The need to have some kind of a price control in pharmaceutical products is accepted all over the world as this is one class of consumer product which is as essential as food. Paswan's resolve to have a wider price control in this sector is, probably, because of this. But, if the pharmaceutical industry behaves responsibly in fixing prices of essential and life saving drugs, the government's role in controlling drug prices can be brought to a minimum. But, for that a large majority of pharmaceutical companies should come forward and exercise voluntary price restraint with reasonable profit margins on their products. Only on a commitment like that, the government and industry can work together for the sustained growth of this sector in the years ahead.