Aamir appears before House panel,pitches for generic medicines

The chairman of the committee,Rajya Sabha MP Shanta Kumar,called Aamir’s interventions “very educative,informative and well researched”.

“We were on the same page on how MNC drug companies are looting people and luring doctors with gifts and foreign tours to prescribe their medicines. Seven Indian companies have been bought over in the recent months at three-four times the price just to ensure that they go out of business. Aamir said that the only way to make drugs available to India’s poor is to go generic,and I agree with him,” Kumar said.

Doctors have been critical of Aamir’s endorsement of generic drugs citing a thriving spurious drug industry in the country,as reported by the WHO,and that the issue of overpriced drugs is one of regulation and not a branded versus generic debate.

The RS petitions committee has recently started probing into a petition that quotes WHO statistics stating that 35 per cent of the world’s spurious drugs are manufactured in India and has urged Parliament to put a stop to their manufacture. Bhagat Singh Koshiyari,who heads the petitions panel said: “We have received this petition from a resident of Faridabad and have convened the departmental secretaries to find out the extent of the problem.”

Kumar said he wasn’t aware of the petition,and the issue of spurious drugs did not figure in his panel’s deliberations with Aamir. The panel will submit a report before the monsoon session.