HYDERABAD: Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday confirmed that drug price controls were here to stay and that the government would continue to cap prices of essential drugs and medical devices to ensure affordable healthcare services to the public.
Goyal’s remarks come amid the pharma companies expressing concerns about the price control policy denting the margins of drug makers across the country.“It (price control) has hugely helped patients in the areas of medical devices. The number of patients getting high-end knee and stent implants has gone up in a big way,” he said.
During an interactive session chaired by Industries Minister KT Rama Rao at the 17th edition of BioAsia event here on Tuesday, Goyal said that price controls were needed in an economy like India. “We might not give a patient the best of advanced knee implant, but at least we can help a patient walk with a less best product,” he said.
Rao, who was moderating the session, stressed there was a need for higher tax exemptions for Research and Development (R&D) as ‘discovering in India’ was equally important as the Centre’s ‘Make in India’ programme. Sharing similar views, another panelist Satish Reddy, chairman of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd, too sought a relook of slashing of incentives, such as, weighted average deductions to 100 per cent from the earlier 150 per cent and 200 per cent available for R&D, as it can fuel innovation and drug discovery.
However, Goyal observed that though income tax breaks incentivises innovation, they weren’t the only way to grow an industry. “The huge market of India itself is an opportunity for companies,” he said.
Stating that such exemptions come with a sunset clause (meaning they’ll have to phased out), Goyal said there was a need to de-bottleneck challenges, and make clinical trials robust and easy to conduct. “The Prime Minister spoke about making clinical trials easy to operate in the country,” he said, adding that the Centre was ramping up the department concerned with intellectual property. “There are concerns about evergreening of patents, it’s still an area where we have not reached a consensus. But we are open to talk,” he said.
Meanwhile, in a reply to Rao’s question about what the industry needs from the Indian government to encourage innovation, Dilip Sanghivi, MD, Sun Pharmaceuticals was direct: “Piyush bhai has to reconsider his thinking about India. India might be large, but in global pharma innovation market we are just 2 per cent,” he said.
Likewise, Ajay Piramal, chairman of Piramal Enterprises said the success of Indian generics drug makers exporting to the US was a thing of the past. “The pricing pressure is hurting industry. We need to move from manufacturing generics to making innovation drugs for other firms,” he said.
‘Development incomplete without healthcare’
The government’s $5 trillion economy by 2024 will remain incomplete if people don’t have quality of life due to lack of affordable healthcare, said Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal. He added that a meeting of pharma industry leaders will be held in the second week of March to discuss the sector’s problems. “Innovation will provide you an opportunity to reach out to the remotest corners of the country to all the people that we saw yearning for a better quality of life, for better healthcare, longer life expectancy... In that sense the $5 trillion economy will be incomplete if our people do not have quality of life if you’re not able to provide affordable healthcare to every single citizen of the country,” he said.