In a strategic initiative to ensure that India gets more visibility and voice in the decisions and discussions that are made at international pharmacopoeial meetings, the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) has urged the Pharmacopoeial Discussion Group to extend its membership to India.

IPC recently submitted a representation to the distinguished Pharmacopoeial Discussion Group, requesting them to extend its membership to India. The aim behind initiating this strategic step is to ensure that India gets more visibility and voice in the decisions and discussions that are made at international pharmacopoeial meetings.

Dr G N Singh, secretary cum scientific director of IPC, who made the representation during the first World Pharmacopoeia Summit that was recently held in Beijing, said, “Being a part of this select group will help us in developing better co-operation and working relation with the other top pharmacopoeial commissions. But, most importantly it will give more credibility and market acceptability to the Indian made drugs at the international level.”

At present there are only five member countries who are part of this group which includes United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) Convention, World Health Organisation (WHO), European Directorate of Quality Medicines (EDQM), British Pharmacopoeia Commission and Japanese Pharmacopoeia Commission.

The main responsibility of this working group is to co-ordinate and work on newer methods to achieve harmonisation of drugs, analysing the emerging trends and issues that are affecting the quality of medicines and addressing new challenges through discussions and ideas exchange.

Dr Singh informed that India will pursue this cause further, at the next WHO meeting which is going to be held in Geneva from February last week to March first week next year. Other main agenda to be discussed during this meeting would be to stress on the suggestion to conduct the third edition of the world pharmacopoeia summit in India.

Speaking about the recently concluded Summit, Dr Singh informed that it was a grant success with the presence of standard setting authorities from across the world under the same roof with a common agenda to preserve public health by providing high quality drugs.

He informed that all of the participating countries present at the summit agreed to work together to achieve the vision where all the medicines moving in national and international commerce will have optimal public standards, including pharmacopoeial standards.