PESHAWAR, Dec 27: Owing to ever-increasing prices of drugs, manufactured by the multinational pharmaceutical companies, the Indian-made smuggled drugs have flooded the local market and are doing a roaring business, inflicting heavy losses to the national kitty, doctors and chemists told Dawn on Thursday.

Chemists, specially in rural areas, are making huge profits by selling all sorts of preparations smuggled from India, due to their low prices. Antibiotics, analgesics, sedatives, tranquillisers and other medicines have been pumped into the market on such a large scale that the MNCs, local companies or their agents are finding it difficult to cope with the situation.

Doctors argue that the rising cost of the drugs produced locally or marketed by the MNCs had paved the way for the Indian drugs. In some cases, the drugs smuggled from India are being sold at 10 times lower prices than those marketed by the local or the MNCs, containing the same ingredients. Most of the drugs are those which are manufactured by the same MNCs in both Pakistan and India, but due to huge difference in their prices, chemists prefer to sell Indian-made drug to earn more profit.

Patients also prefer to buy the Indian-made drugs due to their low rates, thereby giving a boost to the trade.

In rural parts of the province, chemists deal only in smuggled drugs, some of which do not carry literature and other necessary details, like manufacturing and expiry dates and price.

These drugs find their way to Pakistani markets via Afghanistan which, according to an agreement, imports drugs worth millions of rupees from India.

A drug analyst at the Federal Quality Control Board, Islamabad, told Dawn that they had found most of the drugs smuggled from India as safe, therefore, they didn’t harass the sellers, because people were getting cheap drugs.

He, however, added that some of the drugs smuggled from India were marketed by unnamed companies which was the cause of immense concern.

The big difference in the prices of some of the drugs marketed locally by the MNCs and those smuggled from India will show the difference.

Markets in the city and elsewhere in the province are replete with the Indian drugs. The prices of these drugs are even lower in the tribal areas from where these are smuggled to Peshawar and other parts of the province. The issue of Indian drugs is not a new one. It has been debated several times in the National Assembly but without any tangible outcome. It has also been argued that the MNCs were selling their products on higher prices in Pakistan than they did in India.

The Pakistan-based MNCs are importing raw materials from their mother countries which caused increase in prices. On the contrary, the Indian government, according to an agreement with the MNCs, had been preparing raw materials locally, which cut down the prices substantially. Moreover, the Indian government, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, also gives subsidy on drugs which has further declined their rates.