Compulsory licensing required for essential drugs: Y K Hamied

Pragmatic compulsory licensing policy is needed to enable India to look after health of its people as it cannot afford monopoly in healthcare with the challenges it faces, Cipla's Y K Hamied said.
"The government should draw up a list of essential, vital medicines that country requires and should put them under compulsory licensing," Cipla's Non-Executive Chairman Y K Hamied told PTI.
The government should fix pragmatic licence fees for them as Canada had earlier done in 1969, he added.
"We have to have pragmatic compulsory licensing policy to enable India to look after its own people," Hamied said.
Intellectual property laws are national laws and they should be need based for the country, he added.

Hamied was speaking on the sidelines of an event organised by the All India Management Association (AIMA) on its diamond jubilee foundation day here.

Compulsory licensing is done when a government authorises a party other than the patent owner to produce the patented product or process, without the patent owner's consent.
Cipla under Hamied's leadership made generic versions of the drugs targeting serious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and cancer available to people at affordable prices.
On being asked about the key focus areas for the company going forward, Hamied said: "The key focus areas would be cancer, HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis especially the resistant TB."

In healthcare "you have to run it as a business as well as humanitarian response to the society", he added.
Indian pharma is very much dependent on China and the country must reduce the dependence, for example, India must produce its own penicillin irrespective of cost, he said.
Hamied was awarded the life-time achievement award for management, 2016.