Data on export of drugs being streamlined to resolve discrepancies

Pharmaceutical Export Promotion Council (Pharmexcil) is streamlining data collection mechanism on drug exports.

“We feel that the data on exports has some inadequacies and we want to build a robust mechanism for data–gathering on exports. The perception among the captains of the industry is not always matching with what the numbers say,’’ PV Appaji, Director General, Pharmexcil told BusinessLine here.

Elaborating further, the official said while captains of industry do not see any alarm in export performance in the last year, the same confidence was not reflecting in some provisional data obtained by the council.

“Some parts of data for last year is yet to come but we are individually approaching exporters to submit data to us for corroborating and comparing with other channels of data providers,” Appaji said.

The council is also of the opinion that the last year, ended March 31, 2015, was a challenging year for the pharma exports, the impact of which needs to be examined in detail.

“There was a lot of crisis last year on the external front in FY 2015,” he said.

For example, there was tightening of norms pertaining to neutraceuticals in South Africa as it made them equal to all other pharma products with regard to regulatory approvals and manufacturing practices.

The Pharmexcil had also given a representation seeking relaxation of norms.

The other challenges include the Ukraine crisis, the impact of the Russian Rubble and increased regulatory issues for the Indian manufactures with the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA).

There was also a higher incidence of intellectual property rights or patents litigations.

As per the expectations, pharmaceutical exports are to cross the ₹1-lakh-crore mark in 2014-15 by formulations’ exports. During 2013-14, they stood at about ₹90,000 crore.

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