Drug makers to get 15 days to respond to price revision: NPPA

Pharma companies will get 15 days to respond after the price revision notification is made, NPPA has said as it moves towards a strict enforcement of the new drug pricing policy.

The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) said it has been receiving representations from manufacturers seeking clarifications and corrections mainly with regard to applicability of price notifications on their products as well as regarding errors of omissions and miscalculations.

"However, as this exercise cannot be open ended, the authority has decided to fix a time limit. It has been decided that representations received within 15 days from the date of notification may be accepted and these will be dealt within 15 days of the receipt of the representations," NPPA said.

The representations received after 15 days will be treated as 'time barred' and will be rejected as 'non entertainable' without actually going into merits, it added.

Prices of 348 drugs included in the national list of essential medicines are to be fixed under the new drug policy that came into force last year.

"Ceiling prices of 338 scheduled medicines have been notified so far," NPPA said.

It has held seven meetings since June 2013 and approved fixing the ceiling prices based on data furnished by IMS Health, under DPCO 2013.

 NPPA said it has been collecting information from manufacturers wherever the data provided by IMS is incomplete.

 Before the new pharmaceutical pricing policy was approved, prices of only 74 bulk drugs were regulated under the Drug Prices Control Order 1995.

According to the new policy, prices of medicines are now being capped by taking simple average of all brands which have more than 1 per cent market share instead of input costs.