The Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) has backed the demand of the industry to postpone the deadline or relax the norms of proposed barcoding system that is slated to come into effect from July 1 on all exports of pharma products from the country.

The DoP, after the industry has taken up the matter, is learnt to have passed on the inputs and requests to the Commerce Ministry which had issued the notification for the implementation of the 2D barcoding and unique 'randomly generic numeric code' packaging.

“Several industry leaders and those from the associations had taken up the matter with the DoP and we have brought them in the attention of the Commerce Ministry which is the administrative ministry on the matter. The industry has cited difficulties in implementing the order in the announced format and we hope that the commerce ministry would take note of these,” a senior official of the DoP confirmed.

Meanwhile, the resentment to the proposed format in the industry has increased further, even as the commerce ministry is still to come out with any further clarification on diluting the norms. The Pharmaceutical Export Promotion Council (Pharmexcil) has also recently made a representation to the ministry of commerce highlighting various issues that have emerged following the government order.

It is learnt that the Commerce Ministry has gathered the inputs from the stakeholders on the matter and is planning to implement the same only a phased manner. Sources said the Ministry may push the deadline further, may be by a few months, though the industry was demanding for shelving it till next April.

Another suggestion under 'active consideration' is limiting the barcode system only to tertiary packaging, instead of the current proposal for making it mandatory on primary, second, and tertiary packaging, sources said. Thus, it will be introduced in a phased manner. This will be another big relief for the industry, especially the small scale and medium scale units who, otherwise, would be incurring huge additional and unviable expenses.