The Union minister for chemicals and fertilizers Ram Vilas Paswan has added two more industry representatives to the committee to review the new drug policy draft. Now, the committee with 13 industry representatives and three officials from the ministry, will be deliberating on the policy draft, and submitting the report by October 2, 2006.

Speaking at the first meeting of the committee in Mumbai, he said that "Chemical sector including pharmaceutical and petrochemicals has an annual turnover of Rs.1.3 lakh crore and India has emerged as the 12th largest producer of these products in the world and 3rd in the Asia. Its share in total exports of the country is about 14 per cent. The Centre government of India has taken several steps to promote development of pharma industry.

The pharmaceutical policy 2006 focus on R&D, greater thrust on pharma exports and putting in place a forward looking and hassle free pricing mechanism for essential medicines. The draft policy has proposed several fiscal and non-fiscal incentives to promote investment in the industry. In addition to strengthening the regulatory framework such as introduction of products patents, the Government is also striving to expand availability of quality manpower in pharma industry.

The committee will review five controversial aspects of the pharma policy 2006, which is also mandated to suggest the role competition that can play in containing drug price rise. Replacement of the existing cost based price control model for price monitoring, public-private partnership model for supply of medicines to Below Poverty Line (BPL) families and concessional drug procurement by Government institutions are other points to be discussed by the committee. Committee is investigating, that whether the legal implication of the SC order was to bring all 354 drugs on the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) under price monitoring.

Paswan urged the industry representatives to print MRP inclusive of taxes on medicine packs and implement bi-lingual labelling on drugs effective from October 2, 2006.He also clarified that MRP inclusive of all taxes does not mean Uniform MRP on medicines. "There may be different MRPs in different states for the same medicines due to variation in rates of sales tax, VAT, tax holiday, etc", he said. He wanted the industry to approach all state governments to persuade them on the need for uniform MRP at least on life saving medicines, which are exempted from VAT and other taxes.