NPPA Organizes Workshop on “Affordable Medicines for All”

National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) should come out with upto date compendium price of schedule drug both fixed and revised which will be helpful to the Drugs Inspectors while inspecting the license premises for easy verification and should provide a specific percentage of the recovery amount as penalty and interest from defaulting agencies, said Sri Atanu Sabyasachi Nayak, Minister, Health &Family Welfare.

Inaugurating a Workshop on “Affordable Medicines for All” organized by NPPA in collaboration with State Drugs Controller, Odisha here Sri Nayak emphasized on price control and enforcement there on to make drugs available to the people without any problem. He also called upon the Drug Inspectors working in the state to be more aggressive on the matter, assuring all possible infrastructural facilities for them.

It was revealed that the state of Odisha has 16044 sale licensees, 55 drug manufacturing units. The turnover of allopathic medicines in the state is around 3.24% of the total market share. About 500 companies are marketing their drug formulations in the state with annual turnover of 1500 crores.

Rupa Mishra, Mission Director NHM underlined on State Medicine Corporation, procurement operations, suitable inventory management, licensing process, enforcement management. Sri I Srinivas, Chairman of NPPA suggested prescribing drugs in generic name in order to have less brands and easy laboratory testing.

Among others Shyam Sundar Agarwal, Assistant Director, NPPA, H K Mohapatra, Drug Controller, Odisha, Deputy Drug Controller (Admn) M Patnaik, Nilamadhab Dash and T. V Rao also spoke.

NPPA is empowered with recovery of penalty with interest from the defaulting manufacturer those who have charged higher MRP at par with the ceiling price fixed. Technical sessions were followed after the inaugural programme.