The new draft of the proposed National Pharmaceutical Pricing Policy (NPPP) has evoked a mixed response as far the official reactions are concerned.

According to sources in the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP), it received 'quite a lot' of responses and feedbacks from the stakeholders and the responses were mixed in nature with both 'negative and positive' remarks sent.

The Department would go into the suggestions with 'due respect' and do the needful before finalising the policy and forwarding it for approval, sources said, but without going into details on the contents of the responses it received after the draft was made public in October.

The last date for receiving the feedbacks had been put as November 30. It is learnt that most of the industry organisations, apart from a number of public interest groups and individuals, have sent in their comments about the draft.

The draft policy that seeks to replace the now aborted national pharma policy 2006 aims at controlling the prices of 60 per cent of formulations, based on the national list of essential medicines prepared by the Union Ministry of Health. The draft says the policy will cover nearly all the 348 medicines in the list. Based on updated data, the list will be expanded to cover about 400 drugs to increase access and availability of essential medicines.

As per the responses made by the stakeholders in the public domain so far, the draft has gone down well in general. The suggestions like introducing market based pricing (MBP) instead of the cost based pricing (CBP) have found some takers in the industry as well. The system of taking the weighted average of the top three prices of a single ingredient medicine of a specified dosage to decide the ceiling price is also finding acceptance.

However, there were lots of resentments among the industry about the new proposals which they claimed that the draft would bring nearly 75 per cent of drugs under price control from the present levels of 20 per cent.