ISLAMABAD – Fearing devastating consequences for the local pharmaceutical industry when the Indian industry will be allowed to export their products to Pakistan by the yearend, the local industry has demanded of the government to allow only the imports of products approved by the international drug regularity bodies to save the local industry.
As Pakistan has agreed in principle to give India most-favoured nation (MFN) status and under the agreement the Indian pharmaceutical industry will be allowed to export their products to Pakistan by the next year, it will ruin the budding pharmaceutical industry of Pakistan. The Chairman of Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association (PPMA) Muhammad Asad expressed theses fears while talking to a select group of journalists Wednesday who were also facilitated a visit of Global Group of Companies to receive a briefing about the operations and improvement of pharmaceutical industry in the country.
The Chairman said the local industry is not against the import of medicines from India but only those medicines should be imported that are not manufactured locally or approved by the European Union and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of USA.
He said though Pakistani medicines are expensive due to energy crisis and import of raw material from China and India, still the quality Indian medicines have the same rates as local products has in Pakistan. He also quoting a World Health Organisation report said majority of medicines manufactured in India are not up to international standards and 60 per cent of total counterfeit drugs used in the world are manufactured in India only.
He said the decision of giving permission to Indian industry to export to Pakistan be taken carefully and the local industry should also be taken on board as the Indian industry is not regulated by the federal government and every province has its own standards and bodies.  And though there are good companies in India competing internationally but many have been producing spurious drugs too.
He said, though, the local industry has improved a lot in the last 30 years on their own and with out any government support and 95 percent medicines in the country and in various hospitals are used of national companies still it cannot compete with the Indian pharmaceutical industry of 40,000 companies.
Pakistan is among those 15 to16 countries where the medicines are locally manufactured despite that only 10 percent of the raw material is available in Pakistan due to which the cost of production of the medicine in Pakistan increases 40 to 50 times more than India, the Chairman added.
He informed that over 500 national companies have been manufacturing various drugs in the country and of them 25 are multinational contributing 60 percent to the national economy while multinationals have 40 percent share. The companies have been exporting their products to 60 countries mainly in Africa, Middle East and Afghanistan.
But for the last one-and-a-half years due to absence of any drug regularity body, the process of registration of new drugs and companies have come to a halt causing billions of rupees loss to the industry. He said the process of import and export of the raw material is also at a standstill and only hardship cases have been processed by the government. After the devolution of health ministry the Drug Regularity Authority had ceased to exist and, though, the Drug Regularity Agency of Pakistan (DRAP) has been established through an ordinance but it has not been made functional yet.
According to him due to non-functional of the agency, the licenses of various companies have not been renewed and about 30 new factories have been awaiting their registration causing losses to the investors.
Talking about the ephedrine and Pakistan Institute of Cardiology (PIC) scandals, he said both the issues are sub judice and the court will decide about the companies but the association will also cancel the membership of the companies if found involved in the scandals.
He said the issues of pharmaceutical industry are of technical nature thus they should be dealt technically instead of being politicized. Due to the hype created by the media in the scandal, the manufacturers even stopped manufacturing of the ephedrine medicines used by Asthma patients to avoid any involvement in the issue and ultimately the patient suffered due to unnecessary publicity.