With the Group of Ministers (GoM) formed to finalize new drug policy, planning to meet the members of Pharma industry soon, the Organization of Pharmaceutical Producers of India has expressed desire to come together with the Small Scale and Medium Scale pharma industries in order to resolve the price fixation issue.

The OPPI wanted to join with the organizations like Confederation of Indian Pharmaceutical Industries (CIPI), Indian Drug Manufacturers Association (IDMA) and Indian Pharmaceutical Associations. While the GoM is holding talks with all the pharmaceutical industry associations, the SME's and SSI's too feel that there was no point in projecting their views individually. They feel that by highlighting their concern to the GoM in a united manner, there would be some impact, said T S Jaishankar, chairman of CIPI.

But, this would be done only after OPPI sends a memorandum to the CIPI. If there is a conflict of view points, then a meeting would be called to resolve them and then decide to come together.

He said, that the SME's and SSI's have also asked the big companies to highlight the problems of the small players to the GoM while discussing the price issue. He said, that for the Small and medium players the procurement of raw material was a costly affair and the production cost was also high as their batch size is small. Hence, according to him the price had to be fixed keeping the SME's and SSI's woes in mind.

"While the big players buy raw material in large quantities, the small players buy only limited quantities and therefore it turns about to be a costly affair for the small and medium players. Moreover, we only produce medicines in small batchers so the cost of production, labour, power, is also more. Hence we want the GoM to formulate the Drug Price Control Order (DPCO) on the basis of problems faced by the SME's and SSI's," said Jaishankar.