Shri Provash Ghosh, General Secretary, SUCI(C), has issued the following statement today :
We vehemently oppose the brazenly anti-people decision of the Central Government to withdraw hitherto available import duty exemption on over 75 drugs including cancer and other life-saving drugs as a result of which these essential medicines would henceforth attract excise and import duty to the extent of over 22% and thus become highly expensive. When it is incumbent on the government to provide these medicines to common toiling people free of cost, this move declaredly taken in the interest of the domestic medicine behemoths would make the patients to either bleed white further in procuring these drugs or just die because of inability to afford the rising cost of treatment. After coming to power, the BJP has made it a practice to systematically curtail whatever little of people’s welfare is in existence while extending unlimited concessions and waivers to the industrial houses and corporates including condoning of huge bank loan defaults.
We call upon the suffering people at large as well as the doctors, nurses, health workers and all others connected with healthcare to rise up on the occasion and develop organized powerful movement to compel the government abandon this undemocratic and autocratic decision.
