Let me try to enter in a doctor’s clinic, Let me have a peep into his prescriptions and let me check the stocks of our druggists in India. Why they prescribe us a particular medicine? Why for a trivial running nose, our prescriptions run into four to five medicines? Why druggists are always eager to sell us a substitute?Let me turn back some boring but very important pages of history. In 1970s, Hathi Committee was commissioned to study the operations of multinational drug companies vis-à-vis indigenous companies and public sector undertakings. The committee's recommendations, released in 1975, very strongly recommended issuing licenses for formulations of only 117 drugs which the committee considered sufficient for the treatment of the majority of diseases in India. Very recently WHO has added to the list based on the current scenarios of diseases in Indian environment and now that list contains around 450 essential drugs, which are sufficient for medication for all the possible diseases in Indian environment. BUT still today, In the absence of a clear, comprehensive and rational drug policy, we continue to see a distorted pattern of drug production and the proliferation of non-essential, irrational and harmful drugs. Indian markets are flooded with over 100,000 formulations; there is no system of central registration of these formulations.
Pharma sector is the only sector near to the “arms trade sector” to register profits of the order of thousands of percentages. Where do these profits go? Pfizer says it goes into the R&D. Do you believe this? I don’t. Apart from some proportion going in the R&D of new drugs, it goes into greasing the druggists and the doctors to prescribe these tons of non-essential and obsolete medicines in the huge unregulated markets like India.
A country where around 84 crore people live below Rs 20 a day, where only 35% of the population visit any form of formal medical practitioner, where even WHO has said that about 450 formulations can cover all the prevalent diseases in India, we have allowed more than hundred thousand formulations in the market. Even small and developing countries like Bangladesh, Nepal and Brunie have tough regulations for non-essential medicines to be sold in their market let alone US and EU, which have banned them decades back. But we are a super generous nation. We welcome all and we have very kindly allowed all those obsolete and non-essential formulations to be sold in our Indian market. There is a huge list of these obsolete medicines which are banned in the international markets and even in the home countries of many pharma MNCs operating in India, but are being openly prescribed and sold in the Indian market.
Many steering and standing committees have been established to study and report the anomalies in the Indian drug market. All of them have recommended to stop this flood of non-essential and obsolete medicines immediately in the Indian market. Many of the reports have stated to the extent that these non-essential and obsolete medicines are killing more people in India than the diseases. But pharma companies with their huge profits have enough money to stop and twist these reports before they even reach to the roads leading to the Indian parliament.
I don’t know when and which government will have the guts to take any action on this powerful pharma lobby. Doctors of my country! Let’s defeat this lobby by killing the demand for these non-essential and obsolete drugs. Please don’t prescribe me these drugs, next time I come to you with a sour throat. Doctor, I always see a life saver behind that white coat. Please don’t kill me.
