Medicine price regulator National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) is exploring ways to arrest the increasing trend among pharmaceutical companies to shift their products from the drug category to the dietary supplement and neutraceutical segment. Through such a shift, pharma companies are able to escape government price regulation.
The agency is also in touch with the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) and the office of the Drugs Controller General of India for a coordinated effort to plug the legal loophole.
Incidentally, while NPPA has the mandate to monitor and fix the prices of all medicines that contain at least one of the 74 drug ingredients mentioned in the scheduled list of drugs notified under Drugs Price Control Order, it cannot take any action if the same medicine gets re-launched as food supplement.
The agency has cited examples of brands such as Evion 400, Revital, Recharge Plus and Sort Z Gold, which were initially marketed as drugs that later became food supplements.
Vitamins such as B1, B2, C, E, A, etc are all scheduled drugs and hence products that come under the price regulated category.
Instead of marketing these vitamins plus mineral (such as folic acid, niacinamide) combinations as drugs, companies prefer to sell them as food supplements due to the freedom to charge at will, an FSSAI official said.
A recent FICCI-Frost & Sullivan white paper on neutraceuticals has pegged the size of Indian food supplements and neutraceutical market to be in excess of $ 2 billion (about Rs 9,000 crore) and predicts it to reach $ 5 billion (about Rs 22,500 crore) by 2015.