Union Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal has urged the global scientific community to develop a mechanism that would make available life-saving drug technologies at cheaper rates as the Third World countries were going through economic crises and the people in those countries could not afford costly medicines.

He was inaugurating an international conference with the theme "Innovations and Technologies for India's Public Health System", organized by ICMR in association with other organizations, here on Thursday.

He said that the companies should develop world platform on which they could initiate R&D to develop cheaper medicines as there was acute shortage of life-saving medicines at affordable rates in developing countries.

He advocated for public-private partnerships to lay platform to ease the health related problems in poor countries. According to him there was no crisis of intellectuals and a pool of scientists was waiting for a platform from where they could explore their further innovations.

"The world community must get together to tackle the drug crisis," he said while suggesting that the mechanism should include information technology along with required healthcare technologies.

On the occasion, ICMR director general Prof N.K Ganguly lamented that there was no strong structure in the country to handle the ethical concerns of the medical sector. Though technologies were available in the country, they are costly and the need of the hour was to make them available at low cost levels.

Noting that doctors and scientists in the country should join the process of making health policies in the country, he rued that many of them however did not pay attention to fulfilling that mandate. This would harm the prospects of public private partnerships too, he added.

The two day meet, The India Health 2007 Conference, was jointly sponsored by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), RTI International, and TCG Life Sciences. Leading practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers from India and the United States attended the event, which was aimed at exploring public health challenges faced by India.