200 life-saving drugs to see price reduction

The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has decided to revise the prices of over 200 life-saving medicines of wide-ranging therapeutic categories.

While prices of a majority of these medicines would fall, sources said the authority had allowed multinational pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Sanofi Aventis to charge more for their imported insulin formulations.

An official notification announcing the change is likely to be issued later this week. According to informed sources, the prices of some multi-vitamins and antibiotics would rise a bit.

The medicines whose prices have been reduced belong to therapeutic categories, like dexametozone, betamethazone, ampicillin and ranitidine. The NPPA's decision came after a price-revision meeting on September 21.

This is the fourth such exercise carried out by the NPPA this year. Before this, the authority had announced changes in prices of a number of medicines in May, June and July. With the latest revision, the number of medicines whose prices have been reduced by the authority this year is around 1,000.

With the NPPA deciding to hold price-fixation meetings every alternate month, the number of medicines whose prices it has fixed in 2007 is expected to be the highest ever. Last year, the NPPA had fixed the prices of 1,020 medicines.