FROM THE MEMBER SECRETARY’S DESK

I welcome all visitors to the NPPA’s website.

The National Common Minimum Programme, as adopted by the Government envisages taking steps to ensure availability of life saving drugs at reasonable prices. The Government is committed to ensuring availability of medicines at reasonable prices. In order to ensure availability of medicines the Authority monitors production, imports, and price movements.  The authority regularly interacts with the State Health Department and Drug Control Agencies in order to ensure that its pricing decisions are implemented. The action taken by NPPA on prices of various bulk drugs/ formulations is briefly mentioned below :-

a) The NPPA has fixed/revised the prices of scheduled bulk drugs in 315 cases, which includes 170 bulk drugs and 145 derivatives of scheduled bulk drugs and 4642 formulation since its inception.  Of these, the prices of 8 scheduled bulk drugs and 2 derivative and 735 formulations were fixed/revised during the period from 1^st April, 2006 to 20^th November, 2006.

b) As part of its monitoring activity, NPPA monitors and analyses month-wise price movements of non-scheduled medicines based on ORG-IMS reports.  The prices of these formulations are fixed/determined by manufacturers themselves depending on various factors like the cost of production, market competition, company’s profitability status etc.  NPPA with very limited staff available to it, monitors the prices of non-scheduled formulations through various methods like (a) scrutiny of price lists submitted by manufacturers (b) analysis of monthly “Retail store audit reports’ published by ORG-IMS, and (c) complaints/references received from official and non-official sources. Wherever substantial price increase is noticed, letters are sent to the manufacturers of such formulations to clarify the reasons for such price increases.  The manufacturers are also invited to NPPA to attend a Personal Hearing before the competent authority wherever replies received are not satisfactory.  The manufacturers are impressed upon to bring down the prices voluntarily.

I invite all users of the NPPA’s website to provide their useful suggestions for improving the contents of and information provided in this website. I also invite them to seek clarifications as well as further information relating to the scope of work dealt with by the NPPA.

(ARUN JHA)
Member Secretary