The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health has urged the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) to put in place an effective mechanism to regulate the price of imported molecules within a time-frame of six months.

“The Committee feels that the issue at hand is too urgent to be left open-ended and,  therefore, recommends that DoP resolve this issue within a period of six months. The Committee would also like the Department to put in place an effective mechanism to enable the use of international price benchmarks in such cases and limit the price of an imported drug by comparison with the price of the same drug in other countries and thus check windfall profits made by importers on selling imported molecules at exorbitant prices in the country,” a recent report of the panel said.

The recommendation of the panel comes despite the claim by the DoP that the patented medicines were not under the price control. “The prices of non-patented imported drugs which are included under DPCO, are controlled. On being asked as to why there was no mechanism to ensure that the price of the same patented drug was not significantly high in India than in other countries and international manufacturers do not sell their drugs in India at supernormal profits, the Secretary of DoP replied that no country regulates cost pricing in the open market; however such drugs can be purchased at lower prices by the government  for its public health programmes,” the report said.

“The Committee notes that as of now there is no mechanism in place to regulate the prices of new patented drugs which are imported in the country and sold at supernormal profits, whereas prices of the same medicines are considerably lower in other countries.  The Committee does not accept the submission made by the Secretary (Pharmaceuticals)  that there is no price control of a patented drug for open market,” the panel said.

“The Committee would like to observe that India as a sovereign country has every right to decide the prices of a drugs which are sold in the open market. The Committee therefore recommends to evolve an effective mechanism to control prices of imported patented drugs being sold in Indian market,” it said.