Supreme Court Reserves Order on Medicine Pricing

The Supreme Court reserved its order on October 27 after questioning the Centre about the wide gap between medicine maximum retail prices and the prices retailers pay, and the scope of government price regulation. A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta was hearing two petitions concerning medicine pricing. During the hearing, the judges asked who was monitoring prices and why the system appeared to favour pharmaceutical manufacturers. The bench described the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority, the drug pricing regulator, as apparently “totally defunct.” Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati, appearing for the Centre, said the government’s policy was not to control the entire pharmaceutical ecosystem. She also told the court that medicine prices in India were among the lowest in the world. The bench reserved its order; the petitions’ outcome and any directions to the government were not announced in the reported hearing. The dispute includes questions about trade margins and which medicines fall under price controls. In an earlier hearing on October 12, the court questioned why the Centre had capped trade margins for anticancer drugs at 30% of the...