Department of Pharmaceuticals will meet the leaders and representatives of leading pharma associations for the second time on the subject of sales promotional expenses and unethical practices with a view to hammer out some mechanism to check the unscrupulous trade practices.

The meeting will be held here on April 15 between the CEOs of member companies of the associations and senior department officials including pharma secretary Ashok Kumar. The first meeting was held on January 13, after a spate of newspaper reports on the unethical practices of inducing doctors invited public wrath and the pharma department took a bold initiative to intervene.

The department has already sent invitations to major associations like IDMA, IPA, OPPI, SPIC and CIPI to take part in the meeting which is likely to finalise some concrete steps including a set of common guidelines binding on all pharma companies or a joint mechanism by the industry to curb the practices by themselves, sources said. The associations may also share the same platform to issue joint and sterner directive to their members in discouraging such unethical practices.

At the first meeting, the associations had agreed to finalise own code of conduct for their members and send them to the government. Pharma secretary has taken strong exception to the practices by some companies, citing his own experiences, putting the associations in a spot to act tough with their members.

Sources said the associations have informally interacted between them already and are ready with their own code of conducts. Spokesmen for OPPI and IDMA said they had well-set code of conduct being implemented for the member companies. They also claimed that the promotional expenses by them fell below 9 per cent on average.

SPIC spokesman said the marketing expenses of branded medicines were above 22 per cent on average and it was understatement by the big companies to claim that promotional expenses were just 9 or 10 per cent.