The Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) will soon take up the long pending issue of drug procurement policies of some of the state governments and other various central government departments like the Railways, ESIC, Defence, etc which had increased manifold the turnover criterion for medicine procurement, virtually disqualifying the small and medium pharma companies from participating in the tenders for supplying medicines to these departments.

While the Haryana government had raised the annual turnover criterion for participating in drug purchase tenders from Rs 3 crore to Rs 35 crore, the central government agencies like Railways had increased the turnover limit to Rs 50 crore.

Sources said that the union chemicals minister will soon write a letter to the Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda on this issue and if the problem persists, the minister may pay a visit to the chief minister to personally meet to convince him the need to revoke the order which raised the turnover criterion from Rs 3 crore to Rs 35 crore. Similarly, the DoP will also take up the issue of creation of barriers for SSIs by the Railways, Defence purchases, etc using minimum turnover condition, sources said.

The government agencies hiked the turnover criterion on the plea of ensuring quality of the medicines supplied to the hospitals across the country run by them. But the industry pleads that purchase of medicines based on annual turnover of companies would on its own never guarantee quality. Turnover alone cannot guarantee quality of medicines when many manufacturers get their products manufactured from different factories and on contract from small scale and medium scale units. Besides, the industry says that most of the small and medium companies in the country comply with strict GMP norms set by the regulatory authorities.

In the case of Haryana, the government's new policy comes immediately after the government's decision to provide free medicines to all patients visiting government hospitals - right from district hospitals down to rural dispensaries all through the state. The SSIs in Haryana had volunteered to provide all the commonly used medicines at much cheaper rates than the popular brands to the Haryana government for this project if the government will source all the medicines from the SSIs. But, the revised drug purchase policy has left the SSIs in the lurch in the state.

Ever since these government departments changed the drug procurement policy increasing the turnover criterion, the drug manufacturers, especially the small and medium drug manufacturers, have been running from pillar to post to make the government see reason. The industry's repeated pleas in this regard were so far ignored by the concerned authorities.