Indian government pushes generic drug sales
Number of Jan Aushadhi retailers will be increased and they will hold more generic medicines
The Indian government is targeting retail drug prices in the country through mandatory prescribing of generic medicines and facilitating the availability of cheaper generics for patients.
In the first instance, 'all the doctors and residents of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi have been advised…to prescribe generic medicines as far as possible/practicable,' Jagat Prakash Nadda, India’s Health Minister, told the upper house of the Indian parliament last December.
The order is expected to be extended to all Indian medical practitioners, Dr Krishan Kumar Aggarwal, Secretary General of the Indian Medical Association said.
'Doctors will prescribe generic names and in brackets write “Jan Aushadhi”,' he said.
Jan Aushadhi means ‘public medicine’, and is a retail brand created under a central government scheme in 2008, which is now being strengthened. Such a prescription means that the medicine will need to be sourced from a Jan Aushadhi retailer.
Nadda said the government would increase the number of Jan Aushadhi stores and have more generic medicines available in them.
The scheme will function through a central procurement system
The scheme will function through a central procurement system, where tenders will be issued for the bulk supply of those drugs and this would make the drugs cheaper by 70–80%, said Kumar.
'Heart attack treatment medicine costs US$400 but is sold at US$800 [to the customers],' he said.
Kumar said the Indian Medical Association supports the scheme as the government has promised to maintain good quality and ensure wide availability of Jan Aushadhi medicines, which are the main concerns of the doctors.
'We also want devices and every drug to be included,' he added.
Another reform floated by the government would expand the mandatory approval process to all new medicines, including combinations of existing ones. The aim, said a health ministry official, was to stop pharma companies circumventing government price restrictions on specified essential drugs by developing substitutes which involve the combination of two or more approved medicines.
