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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Nov 28, 2018, 07:05 AM IST
That several district hospitals in Maharashtra have acute shortage of medicines shouldn’t come as a surprise. With an emergency-like situation artificially created, hospital authorities will now be forced to buy branded medicines at a much higher cost.
Generic drugs which are much cheaper will be given the short shrift. This form of procurement will appease powerful cartels who do not want transparency in the purchase of medical stocks. It’s not restricted to Maharashtra. The war against generic medicines spans across the length and breadth of the country and goes far beyond national boundaries.
Access to low cost generic drugs has been an old argument and Indian pharma companies have often stressed that they are good at it and can make a difference in the field. But despite huge success — India’s generic drugs account for 20 per cent of global generic drug exports in terms of volume — the country is facing tremendous challenge from global pharma majors.
China, on the other hand, has woken up to the possibility of importing less expensive generic anticancer drugs from India. This apart from a wide range of medicine - from the ones used for colds and fevers to those meant for serious diseases.
Pharmaceutical giants, which spend billions of dollars in research and manufacture, depend on the patent rights of drugs to do worldwide business. They want to kill all competition. But high quality generic Indian drugs serving huge swathes of global population have opened up new possibilities.
At the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership summit, South Korea and Japan tried pushing for proposals to extend drug and vaccine patent terms to thwart competition from India. There is a fierce fight to control the manufacture, sale and distribution of generic medicines
