Jan Vishwas Act 2025: Decriminalisation and penalisation of drug offences through compounding

Dr Suresh R Saravdekar, Former Assistant Director, Ministry of Medical Education & Research, Maharashtra & Honorary Consultant, Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi informs that with limited resources and overburdened courts, governments are increasingly outsourcing regulation to private or semi-private bodies. In India, this trend is visible in healthcare and pharma, where weak quasi-judicial systems often protect businesses more than the public

- By Dr Suresh R Saravdekar

Around the world, one thing that is prominent in the current functioning of democracies is that if the government system cannot control and regulate professional businesses due to inadequate manpower and insufficient resources available in the judiciary and regulatory system, the regulatory system is either fully or partially privatised. This is the overall policy of governments seen globally and locally too.

The best example of this can be seen from the constant hike in healthcare charges in private hospital services and other medical expenses. Now it has reached the sky and has become unaffordable for the common people. The Clinical Establishments Act was enacted in 2010 to standardise and regulate private healthcare services in India. But because of high pressure from the private hospital lobby, the Government of India has failed to make the Clinical Establishments Act, 2010 mandatory for private hospitals in all states.

Under such a situation, to fill up this gap, the procedure of 'Accreditation' is adopted in many developed countries. The Joint Commission is one of the most widely used accreditation organisations. The International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua) is the umbrella organisation responsible for accrediting the Joint Commission accreditation scheme in the US and Accreditation Canada International, as well as accreditation organisations in the UK and Australia. These bodies ensure the quality of health services and issue certification based on international standards which are continuously updated to accommodate needless new technological developments. This results in continuously hiking the charges to the patient by subjecting them to over-drugging and over-diagnosis.