Regulator may also keep track of drug availability

The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), the central agency that controls medicine prices, may also start tracking the availability of essential medicines.

The move is aimed at discouraging drug companies from withdrawing the price-controlled medicines from the market on account of reduced profitability.

The authority is expecting to track about 53,000 medicines every month to see if they are available in retail stores or not. If a particular drug is found missing from the retail shelves for three months, the NPPA officials will find out the importance of the drug in terms of its life-saving nature. If the drug has no therapeutic alternative, or if it is in the National List of Essential Medicines, 2003, the NPPA will request the manufacturer to re-introduce the drug.

"We are planning to introduce a system to monitor the availability of medicines in the country. We will use the ORG-IMS data to capture the price and availability of the medicines," said Ashok Kumar, chairman, NPPA.

The move assumes significance in the context of the authority's recent directives capping the price increase at 10 per cent in a year.

The authority's decision to revise the price of Carbamazapine, a crucial epilepsy drug, is a recent example where fixing of the price led the companies to reduce supply.

The authority's mandate is to monitor the prices and availability of medicines. It has no power to compel a company to re-introduce a drug. With the authority becoming more active in fixing the prices of the entire gamut of medicines marketed in the country, chances of withdrawal of medicines for which profit margins are thin, are becoming high.

The drug industry associations have always been sighting non-availability of drugs as one of the major adverse impacts of price control.