TN has till now blacklisted 35 drugs and 5 cos for lack of quality

 

C Shivakumar

Chennai:

Tamil Nadu government has enhanced its quality checks and during the current financial year has blacklisted 35 drugs and five companies without compromising on competitiveness and pricing of drugs, according to managing director of Tamil Nadu Medical Services Corporation managing director R Ratnoo.

Speaking to Express on the sidelines of Drug Pricing seminar, organized by Consumers Association of India here on Saturday, Ratnoo said that TNMSC is also planning to introduce new quality parameters like Bio-equivalent and Bio-Availability certificates for drugs.

TNMSC sources said that not all drugs will be covered under the new parameters. “It will focus only on certain selected drugs,” the sources added.

Earlier during the seminar, Ratnoo highlighted that the government is spending Rs 7,000 crore to provide quality drugs in the government hospitals but yet people are preferring the private hospitals.

“This is mostly due to the improvement in the cost of living and rise in income levels besides mushrooming of private hospitals and medical colleges,” Ratnoo said.

C P Singh, the chairman of National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority highlighted NPPA’s role in regulating the prices of essential drugs. He said NPPA has asked state drug regulators to provide information on 108 drugs in order to fix the ceiling prices.

“We have written to state drug controllers for information on these 108 drugs. We don’t have any information about these as such the prices for these could not be fixed,” Singh said.

Interestingly, a study states that 60 per cent of the population in India does not have regular access to essential medicines. This despite the fact that India produces eight per cent of the medicines available in the global market in terms of volume.

“Out of pocket expenditure is the main source of health funding and has remained above 90 per cent for more than a decade. About 60 to 90 per cent of healthcare spending by poor people is on medicines,” the study states.

G Rajan, secretary general of CAI and R Desikan, chairman and founder trustee of CAI also spoke on the occasion