The price of controls

Price caps on sanitary products and hand washes are counterproductive

The National List of Essential Medicines (NELM) committee would be ill-advised to bring sanitary products, adult diapers and hand washes under price controls. As with the caps imposed on essential medicines and consumables, the NELM committee is probably motivated by the praiseworthy objective of making these products more accessible to poorer households. On the face of it, this move makes sense: The National Family Health Survey (NHFS) of 2015-16 shows that about only 57.6 per cent of Indian women of reproductive age use sanitary products (48.5 per cent in rural India and 77.5 in urban India). As for hand washes,