New allopathy panel to replace IPC

The Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission, instituted recently by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, will replace the Indian Pharmacopoeia Committee (IPC).

While this commission would only be looking into allopathic drugs, the ministry is also mulling a pharmacopoeia for Ayurveda to standardise the manufacturing standards of its medicines.

The commission, which has already been registered under the Societies' Act, would be updating and publishing specifications for drug manufacture pertaining to quality, composition and therapeutic strength.

"So far, this work has been done by the IPC, but we wanted a more formal structure in place. With this commission in place, there would be greater accountability, autonomy and financial flexibility in the process," said a senior health ministry official.

The Pharmacopoeia Commission, which had its first meeting early this year, would have its governing body headed by the health secretary.

The scientific body of the commission has already been constituted.

"We have been working on pharmacopoeial standards for Ayurveda for sometime. There is a need for true formal standards in all streams of traditional medicine," said the official.

While no corpus has been set aside by the ministry for this, the commission, set up under the "Capacity Building" initiative of the World Bank, would receive financial support. "It would also be raising some resources by selling reference material and pharmacopoeial text," added the official.

A pharmacopoeia is a book of standards and quality benchmarks intended to ensure uniformity in medicinal substances. Every country has such a set of specifications pertaining to kind, composition and therapeutic strength of drugs, which have to be conformed to.