A high-level delegation of the European Directorate for Quality of Medicines (EDQM) will visit India to hold talks with top officials in the Union health ministry and the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) on April 14 and 15 as part of talks to bestow observer status on India.

The delegation led by EDQM director will visit the office and lab of the IPC at Ghaziabad near Delhi on April 14 and will hold talks with the senior officials of the ministry next day. Union health minister Dr Ambumani Ramadoss is also likely to have interaction with the team, sources in the IPC said.

This will be part of the ongoing efforts to forge a mutually-benefiting collaboration between the IPC and the European Pharmacopoeia. Both the agencies had been in touch with each other for sometime and held many rounds of preliminary meetings.

After its meetings with the ministry, a high-level Indian delegation including the officials of the ministry may visit Europe to further chalk out the details of the collaboration, sources said. Countries like China and Japan now enjoy the observer status with the European standard-setting body.

The European countries have been looking at India with keen interest because of its rapid growth in the pharmaceutical sector. The observer status is expected to facilitate the exports of Indian drugs to the Europe in a big way as the European Pharmacopoeia represents 34 nations in the continent.

The EDQM publishes the European Pharmacopoeia and is involved in harmonization and coordination of standardization, regulation, quality control of medicines, blood transfusion and organ transplantation in Europe. It is also setting up a separate and dedicated unit under its directorate to deal with the issue of counterfeiting and India may also be taken as a partner in the effort. The European agency is also mulling on adopting some of the herbal monographs from the Indian Pharmacopoeia. This will also come in for discussions during the meeting with the scientific body of the IPC, sources said.

India already has collaboration with USP Convention of United States and a similar agreement is also being worked out with British Pharmacopoeia.