India to further enhance affordable access to medicines

India is on battle mode against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. The country is moving towards panning out a global framework for further enhancing affordable access to medicines for fighting the current crisis and facilitating easier movement of health professionals across country borders.

In accordance with this, Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal at the recently held meeting of the Trade and Investment Ministers of the G20 countries talked about the need to uphold multilateral commitments and improve upon its effectiveness to meet current challenges.

The minister said that India has been a reliable abad affordable source of efficacious and high quality medical and pharma products to over 190 countries across the globe.

"We are confident that with improved regulatory and R&D cooperation, India can further enhance its capabilities to serve the world in crisis like this. We must ensure that suitable instruments stay in place to address these inabilities and preserve the life, livelihood, food and nutritional sec urity of the poorest," he was quoted as saying in a ministry statement.

Apart from this, Goyal said that unprecedented challenges like these necessitate innovative, collaborative and proactive response from the world.

"Our collective act must reflect and uphold the centrality of the rules based multilateral system with development at the centre of any action in trade as well as other areas. We must ensure that the supply of goods, and services most importantly that of vital medicines and food products are not disrupted consistent with national needs," minister said.

"Trade Facilitative responses need to be in place, and wherever required by doing away temporarily, the requirement by authorities like Customs, Banks of producing original documents by importers for various clearances. Additionally, we need to think of a suitable framework under which critical pharma products, medical devices, diagnostic equipment and kits and healthcare professionals can be deployed at short notice across territories under a pre-agreed protocol."

This meeting was held through video-conferencing and described the deadly coronavirus pandemic a global challenge, needing a coordinated global response.