India calls for affordable access to medicines, easier movement of health specialists across borders
New Delhi/UNI: India has called for working towards creating a global framework for further enhancing affordable access to medicines for fighting pandemics and facilitating easier movement of health professionals across national borders.
In his Interventions at the meeting of the Trade and Investment Ministers of the G20 countries, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Monday stressed on the need to uphold our multilateral commitments and improve upon its effectiveness to meet current challenges.
Goyal said despite many challenges, India has been a dependable and affordable source of efficacious and high quality medical and pharma products to nearly 190 countries around the world.
'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 security of the poorest,' he said.
The Minister expressed solidarity with the world and expressed India’s support to all frontline health professionals, sanitation workers and all those involved in maintaining essential services to fight the pandemic.
He said that the Developing countries and LDCs are particularly vulnerable as they may not have matching resources, infrastructure and technical capacities to face this unprecedented pandemic, according to an official statement on Tuesday.
Goyal said that such unprecedented challenges 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. 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.'
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