BY MADHU AGRAWAL
Madras High Court has directed to Income Tax Department to submit details of claims made by pharmaceutical-companies towards tax-deduction for gifts made to doctors, names of doctors and penalties paid by these companies for drug-overpricing.
Observations made by the Court made it clear that pharmaceutical-companies overprice drugs where prices of same medicine different multiple times according to popularity of brand-names owned by different pharmaceutical companies. Even World Health Organization WHO established that even essential drugs in India with lowest printed Maximum-Retail-Price MRP are exorbitantly priced over manufacturing-cost followed by abnormally high trade-margin between ex-factory price and MRP.
National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority NPPA at regular intervals announcing of capping on profit-margins on some drugs. Instead NPPA should have a profit-formula uniformly for all drugs at a time when even generic medicines considered to be a cheaper version of respective branded medicines have exorbitant trade-margins of several hundred percent. Price-revision of any medicine must be allowed only once in a year say on First January unless approved as special case by NPPA.
Gimmick packaging other than in units of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 and 500 gms, mltrs or units must not be allowed unless approved by NPPA for dose-wise administration. Rule should be to emboss or print name of medicine in a manner that name is there on every capsule or tablet thus ruling out possibility of wastage of drug in case name-portion of strip is consumed.
MADHU AGRAWAL is a freelance writer