Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilisers raised concerns over excessive profiteering, delayed policy reforms, and the absence of effective legal mechanisms to ensure affordable access to essential drugs.

Key Findings of the Report

• Medicines are costly due to huge profit margins: Many commonly used medicines have extremely high markups sometimes between 500% and 1800% making them unaffordable for ordinary citizens.
• Price control applies only to some medicines: Only medicines listed as essential under the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) are price-controlled. Other medicines (non-scheduled drugs) are not regulated at the initial pricing stage, allowing companies to set very high MRPs.
• Weak transparency in pricing: The government and NPPA do not have access to real cost data such as Price to Stockist (PTS), which hides how much profit is added at each level.
• Trade Margin Rationalisation (TMR) delayed: Although TMR for capping trade margins was tested earlier and showed good results in reducing prices of cancer drugs, it has not yet been made a permanent policy, despite years of discussion.

Key Recommendations

• Trade Margin Rationalisation (TMR): Make TMR a legal and permanent tool so that drug prices cannot be inflated across the supply chain.
• Control non-scheduled drug prices: Put a mechanism in place to check runaway pricing of commonly used medicines that are currently outside strict regulation.
• Reduce and monitor stent prices: Ensure that stents are never sold above NPPA-fixed prices and take steps to lower their cost further.
• Make cancer drug pricing transparent: Create a system to collect real-time pricing data from companies, hospitals, and online sellers. Regulate online platforms to ensure genuine products and fair prices.