Commonly used medicines to get 12% more expensive from April

The hike in medicine prices will be effective beginning April 1 and is likely to be notified anytime now.

This will be the second year in a row that the costs of essential medicines go up by more than 10 percent. Last year, the annual hike in the prices of these drugs was about 11 percent.

Scheduled medicines

Last September, the Union government released NLEM 2022, comprising 384 drugs and over 1,000 formulations across 27 therapeutic categories.

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The list, which replaced the previous one released seven years earlier, included some of the most commonly used medicines in the country.

NLEM drugs are used to treat common conditions such as fever, diabetes, infection, cardiovascular diseases, blood disorders, tuberculosis, hypertension, skin diseases. cancers and anaemia, among others.

It includes paracetamol and antibiotics such as azithromycin, as well as anti-anaemia prescriptions such as folic acid, vitamins and minerals.

Of the nearly 6,000 formulations available in the Indian market, nearly 18 percent are scheduled drugs, which means that they are under price controls or for which the maximum retail price is fixed by the NPPA.

For the last few years, several medical devices such as coronary stents and knee implants, too, have been brought under the ambit of price controls.

Before 2022, the prices of these medicines used to rise by only 2-3 percent and seldom exceeded 4 percent, industry insiders said.

Prices of non-scheduled drugs, on the other hand, are set to go up by up to 10 percent as per government rules, despite an industry demand to ease this norm in the wake of rising production costs and active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) prices.