Acting tough on the government for its failure in bringing down the prices of medicines included in the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM), the Supreme Court has sent notices to Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) and the ministry of health, asking them to file an affidavit within four weeks' time stating that whether the government intended to bring the essential medicines under the ambit of price control.

The supreme court bench consisting of Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya asked the secretaries of ministry of health and ministry of chemicals and fertilizers to file the  affidavits in four weeks.   The NLEM has 348 drugs, of which the prices of only 37 medicines are controlled by National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA).

Acting on a petition filed by All India Drug Action Network, an NGO working in the health sector, the court took note of a 2010 parliamentary standing committee report as well as a 2005 standing committee report of the ministry of chemicals and fertilizers which had admitted that essential medicines were not available to the poor at reasonable prices in the country.

The petitioner All India Drug Action Network, through senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, had cited parliamentary committee reports, which said that poor patients were not getting the essential medicines because of ever increasing prices of these medicines. The reports had also noted the sharp increase in prices of these drugs and expressed concern over the gradual decrease in the number of essential medicines, which were put under the price control regime.

In the last two decades, the number of essential medicines under price control dropped from 347 to 76. The court also referred to a letter of the ministry of health, which recommended bringing all essential medicines under price control.

In its notice, the court wanted to know from the government how serious it was in bringing essential medicines, used by the common people of the country to fight diseases like diarrhoea, malaria, heart diseases and tuberculosis, under the ambit of price control.