NPPA's move to put price control on more drugs to hurt pharma industry

National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) move to bring diabetes and cardiovascular medicines under price control regime is likely to have adverse impact on the Indian pharmaceutical industry, which has urged the government to hold the move till the industry have a detailed study on this. The market of anti-diabetic and cardiovascular drugs is around Rs 6,000 crore and the fresh move to reduce the prices of these drugs would impact to a loss of around Rs 600 crore to the industry, said S V Veerramani, President, Indian Drug Manufacturers Association (IDMA), on the sidelines of Pharmac South 2014, a trade exhibition of South Indian Pharmaceutical Industry.
 
More than the loss, the industry is worried that this would be a trend in the coming days. The price control is by invoking a clause in Paragraph 19 of DPCO, 2013, which empowers NPPA to fix a ceiling or retail price of a drug ‘in extraordinary circumstances’, for the public interest.
 
“It came as a shock to us. We are afraid that this would set a precedence and the government can bring in control on more drugs using the clause in future, which would leave us in a situation where we don’t have a breathing space,” said Veerramani. He said that the association has submitted a representation to the Department of Pharmaceuticals and approached NPPA, asking them to hold the decision till the association would look into it.
 
He added, “We are trying our best to convince the government that this will affect the industry badly. Otherwise we might have to look at other options including legal. The prices for these medicines has seen an average reduction of 10-12%.”
 
The DPCO 2013, which came into effect in the second half of last year has resulted in a loss of around Rs 1000 crore and the industry was slowly recovering from its impact, when the new price control decision hit it again, he said. The industry growth has come down from 12-15% to 6% last year owing to the drug price control across 348 formulations under the DPCO.
 
The NPPA has fixed the prices 108 non-scheduled formulation packs 50 drugs in antidiabetic and cardiovascular segment, in respect of under Paragraph 19 of DPCO, 2013 through an order dated on July, 2014.