New Delhi, Nov. 17: The Supreme Court today asked the Centre to ensure that drug prices go down, not up, if and when a new price control policy comes into force.

“Prices may go down but should not go up because of policy,” Justice S.J. Mukhopadhyay, sitting alongside senior judge G.S. Singhvi, said. “Bring it down, don’t escalate it in the name of policy,” the bench told additional solicitor-general Parag Tripathi, who was speaking for the government.

Justice Singhvi asked several leading lawyers, representing a pharma producers’ association, the cost of a blood test. When all fumbled to come up with a figure off hand, he said: “We have become very mechanical. The doctor prescribes and we buy and claim reimbursements. We have become insensitive to the concerns of the common man.”

He said a blood test by a standard laboratory in the good old days used to cost Rs 60. Now it costs so much more. “If there were no institutions like RML (Ram Manohar Lohia hospital), Safdarjung and AIIMS, at least 10 per cent of the population would be finished,” the judge said.

The bench was hearing a PIL, filed in 2003 by the All India Drug Action Network, seeking court intervention to ensure that essential medicines are made accessible to all. The NGO has since drawn the court’s attention to the government’s draft national pharmaceutical pricing policy, 2011, which it claims will see a further escalation in essential drug prices.

Colin Gonsalves, the lawyer for the NGO, pointed out during arguments that the new draft policy delinked drug prices from the cost of their production. The government, under the proposed policy, would also remove bulk drugs from the list of medicines whose prices need to be controlled. This would lead to a rise in prices of all formulations based on the bulk drugs, he pointed out.

The Centre assured the court that it was highly “unlikely” that prices would escalate. The policy would most probably be placed before a group of ministers, and given the sensitivity of the issue, would also be placed before the cabinet, Tripathi said. “It would take three months at least,” he said.

In an affidavit to the court, the government said the new policy would bring all 348 medicines that figure in the national list of essential medicines, 2011, and other associated medicines under price control.

Currently, 74 bulk drugs are under price control.

The bench adjourned the hearing till January.