PM Narendra Modi forced NPPA to relax essential drugs norms: Congress

NEW DELHI: The Congress on Friday charged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, before undertaking his trip to the US, had forced the National Pharmaceuticals Pricing Authority ( NPPA) to withdraw its May 2014 guidelines for fixing the prices of life-saving drugs with an aim to appease the big pharma companies and multinational companies.

The Congress said the NDA government’s decision will hit India’s poor patients in a big way as the prices of life-saving drugs will shoot up.

The Congress leadership fielded Srikanth Jena, during whose term as minister of state for chemicals and fertilisers in the UPA regime the NPPA guidelines were issued to make prices of life-saving drugs affordable for the common man, to hit out at the NDA government’s move. Jena alleged that “by forcing the NPPA to withdraw its guidelines, the Prime Minister has extracted a heavy price from the country’s poor and ailing for his PR exercise in USA”.

Pointing out that the UPA-framed NPPA guidelines had sought to widen the ambit of drug prices regulation beyond the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) by including lifesaving drugs such as anti-cancer medicines, HIV drugs, anti-tuberculosis, anti-malaria, cardiovascular, antidiabetes... among others so that no company could price the products at more than 25% markup over the simple average of the products in the court, Jena said by getting the guidelines withdrawn “he (Modi) has not even spared the children – immunological cover the cost of vaccines’.

Jena further charged “while this move will get Modi good PR and earn the corporate houses underserved profits, the common man will be left devastated by the insensitivity of the move” as India has a large number of people suffering from cancer, coronary heart disease, diabetes, tuberculosis… among others.

Jena said the NPPA guidelines had been a sore point with pharmaceutical companies particularly MNCs.

“Modi is carrying to America as a gift the hard-earned money of the country’s poor. The beneficiaries of his unprecedented anti-poor move are going to be the American pharmasectical giants, India drug manufacturers and US administration even as crores of TB, cancer, AIDS, malaria and heart patients and their families will be made to pay through their nose for sustaining treatment,” Jena maintained.