To harmonize the drug licensing system in India, Union Ministry and family welfare coming out with common IT platform for the management of drug sales and manufacturing licenses for all the states and Union territories with an aim to harmonize drug management system.
NK Ahuja, Haryana drugs controller said that once the IT platform gets introduced, all the information pertaining to drugs being produced, their ingredients, producer names, brand name and manufacturing premises will be available in the public domain. This platform will also give information on medicines which have already received approval from Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) and are declared rational by Kokate committee or approved by the Supreme Court in various judgments thereby ease out the identification of irrational products.
He also added currently, indian states have online drug licensing system but without uniformity in a programming language of IT platform of their FDA’s processing application pertaining to sales and manufacturing licenses of drugs.
With the common platform, we all have complete exhaustive list of approved drugs along with their brand name thus eradicating the problem of similar drug names. Ahuja also shared that the medicines with similar names results in wrong medication thus posing a threat to patient safety.
Pharma manufacturers get license approval for formulations in generic name and can choose the brand/trade name of drugs resulting in unregulated branding. To solve all this issues, Indian health ministry proposed to amend the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules to add a provision for regulating brand names.
With the common IT platform gets ready, producers have to upload all the information of their manufacturing sites as well as manufacturing licenses on the IT platform which will be ratified by the state FDAs.
