The central government has decided to ensure availability of low cost anti retroviral drugs for all official anti-AIDS programmes in the country. To begin with, the centre would commit approximately Rs 200 crore to make drugs available to about one-lakh HIV/AIDS patients of the total estimated 4.58 million affected persons in India.

The drugs would be sourced from Indian manufacturers at a special rate, which is likely to be the lowest in the whole world.

States like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland where the prevalence of AIDS is on the higher side, would be first to be covered under the scheme.

Informing this to the media on November 30, Sushma Swaraj, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare said that the government has had discussions with all major anti-retroviralss manufacturers and has been able to secure a promise from them to bring down the prices lower than that offered to the Clinton Foundation recently. "They have sought the same incentives that are given to exports. It will be a pre-budget exercise and we will ask the finance minister for budgetary support to help this initiative take-off," she told presspersons.

The Clinton Foundation had reached an agreement with companies like Ranbaxy, Cipla, Matrix and Hetero to supply anti-retrovirals (ARVs) to countries at about $140 (about Rs 6,419) per patient per annum. This costs a patient about 38 cents per day as opposed to $ 1 per day.

The Health Ministry had recently constituted a high-power working group with representatives from both the government and the drug industry to bring down the prices of anti-retroviral drugs in the domestic market. The terms of reference of the group were to recommend suitable fiscal and other incentives to achieve reduction in prices, to recommend the logistics for distribution of antiretroviral drugs to healthcare facilities so as to access people living with HIV/AIDS.

The industry representatives who were part of the group had informed that ARV prices could be reduced by 5-10 per cent if the government would waive the excise on the several active pharmaceutical ingredients used in making ARVs.