The Central Government has constituted a 14-member committee, headed by the Secretary of Ministry & Petrochemicals, to review the contentious issues related to the Pharmaceutical Policy 2006.

The Committee, which will have to submit its report before 30th of September, will have 11 representatives from the industry and three from the Government side.

The Committee will basically review five controversial aspects of the Pharma Policy 2006, - mainly how to implement the Supreme Court Order to bring essential drugs under price control. One aspect explored by the Committee would be to check whether the Supreme Court ruling really intended to bring all the 354 drugs on the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) under price control, Ram Vilas Paswan, Minister for Chemicals &Petrochemicals told media persons after a meeting with industry associations in New Delhi.

Another area of contention to be explored by the Committee includes verifying whether increase in competition would contain prices. The Committee would also explore whether to bring in a price monitoring mechanism, replacing the existing cost based price control for drugs. The Committee would also formulate a mechanism of public-private partnership to ensure free supply of medicines to Below Poverty Line (BPL) families and to explore ways of concessional drug procurement by Government institutions.

The industry associations informed the Minister that they would voluntarily reduce the trade margins for generics, which constitute 5 to 7 percent of the domestic pharma market, to 15 percent for wholesalers and 35 percent for retailers. When the industry associations demanded the Minister to come up with this order at the earliest, the Minister assured the notification on generics margin would be issued within a week's time.

The Minister said the Government would look into the possibility of keeping all medicines costing less than unit price of Rs.3 out of the purview of price control. Further, the Ministry would recommend to keep indigenously developed drugs out of price control for ten years, said the Minister.

The meeting was attended by pharma industry and industry associations like Indian Drugs Manufacturers Association (IDMA), Organisation of Pharmaceutical producers of India (OPPI), Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), Pharmaexcil and the Confederation of Indian Pharmaceutical Industries (CIPI-ssi), Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) etc.