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FMRAI to focus on campaign for reduction of medicine prices; to pressurise govt to make UCPMP mandatory
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Gireesh Babu, New Delhi
April 21 , 2023
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The Federation of Medical and Sales Representatives’ Associations of India (FMRAI) has said that it will focus on launching massive campaign amongst the people for reduction of prices of medicines and compel the government to make the Uniform Code on Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (UCPMP) mandatory, as the apex body of sales representatives is in its diamond jubilee year.
The Federation has raised opposition against the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority’s (NPPA) move allowing a 12 per cent hike in prices of several essential medicines in tune with the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) increase.
The Federation in the editorial of its newsletter for the month of April, 2023, said that the central government has approved a 12 per cent hike in prices of several essential medicines and their formulations with effect from April 1, 2023 with the alibi of higher input costs linked to inflation.
“FMRAI opposes this anti-people decision which tantamount to a direct attack on the ailing people and their family members. FMRI demands withdrawal of this decision,” it said.
It may be noted that the organisation has approached the Supreme Court last year to make the code mandatory and the Central government has constituted a high-powered committee on the subject. The Federation said that however, there has been no further progress, under the influence of the pharmaceutical lobby.
“To create awareness and desired impact on the Union government, all states shall hold conventions in the pattern of the National Convention of Delhi which will be then carried over to the sub units,” it added.
The unethical practices being adopted by the employers and the management to market their products has a substantial impact on the prices of medicines, it alleged.
As medicines are mostly marketed by indirect method, where the consumers cannot choose the products, it is this area the companies focused their activities through offering various freebies to generate higher business. This expenditure that are spent in such offers are then recovered through increasing the prices of medicines.
The government noted this flaw and promulgated the Uniform Code on Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices, but there has not been any reversal of these practices by the industry as it was kept voluntary, it said.
“So, the focus is to launch a massive campaign amongst the people for reduction of the prices of medicines and compel the government to make UCPMP a statute. This responsibility awaits us in this Diamond Jubilee Year,” added the apex body.
The NPPA has recently justified its move saying that even though the prices were allowed to increase by 12.12 per cent as per the WPI increase, the prices of 651 essential medicines under the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM), 2022 has seen a reduction of 6.7 per cent following the ceiling price revision that has started in the second half of last year, even after the WPI price increase.
Looking back at the past years of its operations, the Federation observed that in addition to raising demands for establishment of legal rights of the field workers, the then leadership also decided to include certain rights of the common people of the country in the union manifesto.
These rights entailed the health policy-related demands for the people of the country, where medicines played a crucial role.
“The leadership of that time understood that the sales promotion employees working in Pharma industry are the best people to bring forward the issues related to the chicanery played by the pharma companies by selling medicines at high prices and thereby extracting profits from people of a country ravaged by plunder of foreign rule for more than two hundred years. Over the last sixty years, FMRAI never lost vision of this vital area of movement and the demands were formulated accordingly, were consistently raised in various fora, taken to the people through numerous meetings on the streets, holding seminars with like minded organisations and placed before the Central government for enacting a people centric health policy in India,” said the editorial.
The major demands pursued throughout these years were to reduce the prices of medicines, bringing in zero taxation on medicines, reviving the public sector pharma and vaccine companies, and urging the government to allocate 5% of the GDP for health care of the people. The reality of these demands also caught the imagination of many other organisations in India working towards the same goal and FMRAI joined hands with the People’s Science Networks, Jana Swasthya Abhiyaan etc to make the voices louder in favour of its demands.
However, the distinguishing area of FMRAIs involvement was that FMRAI intertwined its own movement with the people’s demands in such a way that over a period of time it became inseparable to identify medicine related movement with other movements meant for the interest of the fieldworkers in the policy related area.
Continuing with this tradition of movement, FMRAI again launched a campaign amongst the people with three core demands in the previous year, reduction of the prices of all essential medicines and medical devices, zero GST on medicines and allocating 5% of GDP in health care, it said.
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