In a bid to reduce in-pocket health expenses from 71% to 50% in next four years, the government will distribute free generic medicines through its hospitals. It also plans to take its Jan Aushadhi (people medicine) stores to every block of the country.
In a bid to reduce in-pocket health expenses from 71% to 50% in next four years, the government will distribute free generic medicines through its hospitals. It also plans to take its Jan Aushadhi (people medicine) stores to every block of the country.
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For the plan, the Centre will set up a national body — Central Procurement Agency — to specify uniform standards for procurement of generic medicines and help states procure the medicines at cheapest possible rates.
“Transparent systems should be built to ensure that all procurements adhere to the highest standards,” said plan panel deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia.Tamil Nadu has shown the way by ensuring free medicines to all in-house patients in government hospitals. The Tamil Nadu Medicines Supply Corporation procures generic medicines in bulk up to 1/20th of the market price and supplies them to the government hospitals.
Ahluwalia said the Tamil Nadu model should be replicated in other states for managing procurement and logistics for “free medicines for all” programme for which the Central government was willing to provide financial assistance.
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The model is demand based, instead of traditional supply driven and needs adequate preparatory work.
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The model is demand based, instead of traditional supply driven and needs adequate preparatory work.
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The Centre will provide money for the same through to be launched National Health Mission, subsuming the existing National Rural Health Mission.
The Central Procurement Agency at the Centre and similar ones at the state governments will also supply “rational drugs” to Jan Aushadhi stores to be opened in each of 6,000 blocks in the country to provide medicines at reasonable price.
As of now, there are only a few hundred stories running in a few states such as Punjab, Orissa and Himachal.
With the plan panel suggesting the stores to be transferred to health ministry from department of pharmaceuticals, the government believes that the expansion will be feasible in next three to four years.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
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