The Indian pharma industry has always responded to the urgent calls of our Government, both in Center and in States, in times of disaster and natural calamities by providing free medicines anywhere in India, without minding the production costs and expenses involved in reaching the medicines to those affected victims. Notwithstanding this, it is sad that despite its repeated requests, the Government continues to tax these voluntary free medicines by imposing excise duty and sales tax on them.
Further, most of the pharma companies have shown decline in growth in the first half of 2011. The slowdown is widely visible in the chronic and acute categories. The pharma companies have started facing challenges in domestic market due to increase in competition from unlisted MNCs in this segment. Companies like Cipla, Torrent and IPCA which are mainly focused on Indian market are already feeling the heat. Growth rates of companies such as Cadila, Dr. Reddy and Ranbaxy have already come down. On the other hand, Lupin and Sun Pharma are showing growth due to the shift of focus towards specialty therapies, where competition is relatively low.
One of the enormous challenges faced by the Indian pharmaceutical and healthcare industry is delivering affordable healthcare to India’s billion-plus people despite no reduction of costs in development and manufacturing of drugs. Also, a major challenge faced by life sciences industry, biotechnology in particular, is dearth of talent. Moreover, regulation is getting more stringent and in some areas it is obscure, as with regenerative medicine and biosimilars.
Moreover, India still needs to generate enough credible data to convince itself and then to establish that counterfeit drugs are posing a growing menace to the humanity. All stakeholders should join hands to address this public health issue, leaving aside petty commercial interests, be it generic pharmaceutical companies of India or research based pharmaceutical players across the world.
Also, we have been witnessing for quite some time that ethical concerns related to the pharmaceutical industry, spanning across clinical trials to ethical marketing practices, are hugely bothering a large section of the stakeholders, solely for the interest of the patients.
Points to remember – Major challenges
- High ‘Out of Pocket (OoP)’ expenditure limiting access to medicines
- Public & government pressure to make drug prices more affordable
- Inadequate penetration of current health insurance schemes
- Pricing of patented drugs
- Fostering innovation & Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
- Counterfeit Medicines
- Dearth of skilled talent
- Requirement of Stringent Regulatory Practices
- Ethics & Compliance
If remedial measures are not taken, sooner than later, to overcome these nine major challenges bothby the pharmaceutical industry and the government working in tandem, it will be difficult for the industry to take a quantum leap in the foreseeable future, as is being envisaged by many.
