The union ministry of chemicals and fertilizers has decided to earmark Rs 40 lakhs out of the budget of the department of chemicals and petrochemicals towards advertisement expenses for public awareness on drug prices during the current year. The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) would prepare the advertisement and issue it after getting necessary approval from the department.

While the current year's budget would be limited to Rs 40 lakhs, the NPPA would be seeking additional budget for the purpose from 2006-07 onwards. Efforts would be made to get some budget under CMP allocation by Planning Commission. The union minister for chemicals and fertilizers has also given in principle approval to grant financial assistance to NPPA to carry out studies for intensive monitoring of prices, price index etc.

It should be noted that the need for establishing consumer sovereignty was one of the major points highlighted in the discussion note that was prepared by Dr Pronab Sen task force on pharmaceuticals. The single most important characteristic of the pharmaceutical sector is that it is perhaps the only class of products in which the consumer, ie, the patient has virtually no choice. The doctor or druggist makes the decision on what medicine must be taken. Thus the normal dimensions of consumer choice – product, price, quality— simply do not exist, the discussion paper had noted.

It pointed out that the most durable and effective method of ensuring that competition plays the same role in the drug industry as in other sectors is to establish consumer sovereignty by creating conditions for proper exercise of consumer choice.

The committee had also preferred the establishment of a prescription monitoring system whereby the trends in specific brands or formulations being disproportionately prescribed either nationally or even regionally could be tracked. It had also suggested the setting up of a system to measure the availability of drugs on an ongoing basis in order to assess whether artificial scarcities are being created.