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The Government of India has called upon the pharmaceutical industry to make available life saving drugs including those for Cancer and HIV at affordable prices to the consumers.
Shri Ram Vilas Paswan, Union Minister for Chemicals, Fertilizers and Steel said that government has to ensure availability of such medicines at reasonable prices. He was addressing an interactive session with representatives of major pharmaceuticals industry association here today. He expressed the concern of the Government about the high prices and trade margin prevailing in case of some of the drugs. He drew attention of the industry to the poorer sections of the society and people living in rural areas who have limited income and can ill afford to purchase the expensive medicines. He expressed his concern about wide disparity between wholesale and retail price in case of many medicines and said that the issue was very serious and needed to be addressed in right earnest.
Major issues discussed in the meeting today were making available essential drugs at reasonable prices, high trade margin prevailing on some of the drugs, problems of spurious drugs, R&D, supply of medicines to hospitals, etc. There was a near consensus on some of the issues like keeping reasonable trade margin of drugs, MRP inclusive of taxes (after introduction of VAT in April, 2005). Industry agreed for maintaining a reasonable trade margin.
Amongst others, Union Secretary for Chemicals and Petrochemicals Shri Pratyush Sinha, was also present.
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