PESHAWAR, June 12: Local pharmaceutical firms are facing problems in getting new drugs registered as their applications are unnecessarily delayed.

“We have to wait for two to three years for registration of new drugs. Apparently, the government does not want to encourage local manufacturers to produce drugs that are already being marketed by multinational companies,” said a source at a local pharmaceutical firm.

“This is done at the behest of the MNCs who want to maintain their monopoly over production and marketing of certain drugs,” said an office-bearer of the Sarhad Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (SPMA).

According to rules, the director-general health at the Ministry of Health was bound to decide about applications for registration of new drugs within three months. However, the government avoided to refuse the requests within the stipulated time because in that case, the applicants could file an appeal with the federal secretary of health.

“We can only file an appeal if our application is rejected by the director-general, health,” he said, adding that that was why their applications were delayed indefinitely.

He criticised the Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PPMA), which represented 65 units in the Frontier province, and said it was doing nothing to address problems faced by local manufactures.

According to him, a total of 550 local production units were unable to compete with only 22 multinational companies because of what he termed ‘connections’ in the federal ministry of health.

Sources said that 55 per cent of raw materials for local manufacture of drugs were imported, of them 35 per cent from China and only 10 per cent from European countries. He said that cheapest raw material was produced in India, adding that it was priced 500 times lower than European products.

Citing an example, an office-bearer of the SPMA said that the price of a pack of drug manufactured by an MNC was Rs700, but the same drug was sold for Rs100 by local companies. The local companies imported raw materials from India at $150 a kilogramme while the MNCs purchased raw material at $3,000.

“Drug prices are fixed at the level desired by the MNCs because of their connections in the federal ministry of health,” he said. In some cases, he said the MNCs also bought raw material from India through their parent country.

The government had imposed restrictions on the MNCs in 1960s that they would only produce products with adequate research on locally producing raw material but the MNCs had never abided by these restrictions, sources said. While the Indian government, which had also imposed similar restrictions on the MNCs, had now become a huge global market for generic drugs.

The government, he said, had allowed direct import of Indian raw materials through an SRO in 1998. However, the Indian industry had been exporting more researched salts to other countries, he said, adding that the government was still not allowing the import of these salts.