With mounting pressure from the small and medium pharma industries to stall the introduction of barcoding for exports, which is to become mandatory in phased manner from October 1 this year, the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) will once again take up the issue with the union commerce ministry to sort out the issues arising out of the mandatory implementation of barcoding.


According to sources, the DoP has asked the industry to provide more inputs on barcoding and the problems being faced by the industry to implement the new system, which is being implemented by the commerce ministry to check the export of spurious (fake) drugs from the country.


Sources said that the industry has driven home the point to the DoP that if the barcoding is made mandatory in its present form, it will tantamount to handing over thousands of crores of export business to China, just the way India lost the entire bulk drugs business to it due to the government's bad policies, as the implementation of barcoding will not be financially viable to the small and medium companies here.


Proving its point, industry explained that an SME with exports of around Rs.15-20 crore would need to invest Rs.2 crore on barcode machines (one for each blister machine and one each for syrups and injections) and spend another Rs.1 crore annually on consumables like ink, etc, plus registration with GS1. This would make SMEs unviable for exports and hand over the market to China in case of generics and to MNCs in case of patented drugs.


Besides, the industry has apprised the DoP the futility of introduction of barcoding, which the industry termed as a 'fake solution to a fake problem'. The customers for affordable generics are third world poor countries who neither have computers nor barcode readers at each stage of sale which is essential to facilitate the mandated barcoding. Power condition is worse than India in these countries. And fakes is not an issue with them either.


“When the importing country is not insisting for barcode, why should the Indian government insist on implementing it”?, asks SME Pharma Industries Confederation (SPIC) secretary general Jagdeep Singh, who had earlier sought Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh's intervention on the issue which is claimed to have resulted in the postponement of the introduction of the barcoding by few months.


“We, the small scale industry in the country, want the government to dump the introduction of barcoding which is a futile exercise as there is no bar code reader in the countries where the SSIs export their products,” Singh said and added that the industry wanted that the implementation of barcoding should be left to the individual companies as per the needs of the importing country.