After keeping the proposal in the cold storage for over three years, the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) is reviving the Pharmaceutical Technology Upgradation Assistance Scheme (PTUAS) to assist medium enterprises (MEs) through soft loan for making these units WHO-GMP compliant, subject to the final approval by the Planning Commission.

The Department is learnt to have submitted the proposal in the desired format to the Planning Commission, based on the suggestions by different stakeholders and an expert panel on the list of equipment and machinery required for WHO-GMP and other international certifications.

The proposal of Small Industrial Development Bank of India (SIDBI), which was appointed as the nodal agency, on soft loans was submitted to Planning Commission first in January last year. However, the panel then asked the DoP to submit the proposal in the revised format. The department then published the draft proposal in May for the suggestions from different stakeholders.

Department has also constituted a technical committee comprising members from Karnataka Antibiotics and Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (KAPL), Small Industrial Development Bank of India (SIDBI), Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), Drug Controller General (India), Indian Drug Manufacturers Association (IDMA), Confederation of Indian Pharmaceuticals Industry (CIPI) and National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER).

The committee had reportedly submitted its recommendations on the list of equipments and machinery and also worked out the estimated cost of procurement and installation. The new proposal has been prepared based on the recommendations, sources said.

As per the proposal, SIDBI will provide need based soft loan to pharma MEs at concessional rate of five per cent per annum and proposed Rs. 500 crore interest free corpus fund to be kept with them for disbursement of loan to 250 MEs at the rate of  Rs. 2 crore per unit. According to the original plan, the PTUAS scheme was to come into effect from July 1, 2010 and the date was later postponed to January 1, 2011. But, the DoP could not launch the ambitious scheme so far mainly due to objections raised by the planning commission.

The prolonged uncertainty over the scheme has also been cited as one of the reasons for the declining budgetary allocation for the Department in the recent year. The  budgetary allocation of Rs. 188 crore for the year 2012-13 was drastically reduced to Rs. 85 crore at RE stage, after several schemes like PTUAS did not take off.