The Haryana Chapter of SME Pharma Industries Confederation (SPIC ) has demanded to reserve the entire government purchase of medicines for small scale industries (SSIs) without any preventive clauses like turnover criterion imposed by various government agencies and some state governments.


President of Haryana Chapter of SPIC, Vinod Gupta said that the association will soon call on the Haryana state health minister Rao Narendra Singh in this regard, demanding that the procurement of medicines by all the government agencies should be exclusively reserved for SSIs as the SSIs are struggling to survive as a result of various government policies.


Gupta also said that the association will also demand to the government to segregate the SSIs from medium industries for all government schemes as the SSI units are being killed not only by the MNCs and large industries but also by the medium scale units. The problems of SSIs and that of medium units are entirely different. So, the government should identify the SSI units and reserve government purchase of medicines exclusively for the SSIs to save them from the present crisis, he said.


If the state government is not taking any positive steps in this direction, the association will approach the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) for a solution in this regard, Gupta said.


The SSI units in Haryana, for that matter in most of the states, have been in real crisis for quite some time since some of the government agencies like Railways, SAIL and RITES and some of the state governments including Delhi and Haryana had fixed qualifying turnover as Rs.35 crore for participating in government tenders. This turnover criterion for medicine procurement virtually disqualified the small and medium pharma companies from participating in the tenders for supplying medicines to these departments.


Moreover, some state governments like Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, etc stipulated that CoPP, which is issued by the drug authorities only for export purposes, is a requirement for eligibility for participating in tenders or rate contract applications.


Till some time back, the central and state governments and the public sector undertakings have been procuring medicines through open tender applications without any restrictions like turnover criterion. However, during the last 2-3 years, some of the state governments and some public sector undertakings imposed several conditions which have literally barred the Indian companies from participating in the tenders. The new conditions are based on extraneous considerations like the size of the company, its market share and turnover, etc, rather than the issue of quality, efficacy and affordability of medicines.