Access to modern medicine to the people suffering from life threatening diseases has been a matter of serious concern to the governments of developing countries and to patient community for some time now. With these diseases affecting increasingly large number of people, the disease burden of these countries has increased tremendously and providing  medicines to this ailing population has become a major challenge and responsibility to the governments. India with a population of 110 crore has a huge disease burden and almost 65% of the population lacks access to essential drugs. One of the primary reasons for the inaccessibility is the unaffordable prices of life saving drugs subsequent to the adoption of the new patent law by the Indian government in 2005. Now, most of the new drugs required for treating life style diseases like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, etc. are beyond the reach of millions of poor patients as they are patented. Even the 74 drugs which are under the price control of the NPPA, drug makers substitute them with new ingredients just to escape price control. The matter has taken a serious turn now with multinational drug companies increasingly trying to dominate India’s domestic pharmaceutical market by taking over major Indian companies. This is going to continue as India’s current foreign investment policy allows such acquisitions in this sector also. The concerned ministries and industry organizations have already raised objections to this dangerous trend but the Central government is in no mood to make any policy change.

In a situation like this, other options to control the prices of life saving drugs need to be thought of. The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion has taken some initiative in this regard and brought out a discussion paper in last August. DIPP also took note of the concerns expressed by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health & Family Welfare over the non availability of life-saving drugs at affordable prices in its report sometime back. The Standing Committee has felt that possibility of capping profit margins of all medicines need to be explored as most of the MNCs and large Indian companies are making huge profits by selling their drugs much above the production costs. DIPP's suggestion to go for compulsory licensing is an appropriate option in this regard. Although India can issue compulsory licenses under the new patent regime, it has not issued any CL so far whereas 52 developing countries have already done so. The Department of Pharmaceuticals has started discussions with all the stakeholders to gather views on CL provisions after the DIPP released the discussion paper. It is extremely urgent that DoP come to a conclusion on CL and issued a policy direction so that patented life saving drugs are produced in the country at reasonable prices without any further delay.