UPMSCL mulling penalty on suppliers who fail to supply medicine

UPMSCL supplies medicine to all government health facilities across 75 districts of the state by way of giving tenders to bidders.

In the wake of rising number of suppliers who fail to supply medicines and thereby dishonour the government tender which gives them three months for the work, the Uttar Pradesh Medical Supply Corporation Limited (UPMSCL) is now mulling a proposal to impose penalty on such medicine suppliers.

A final decision on the quantum of penalty would be finalised in a meeting of UPMSCL officials soon but this could be between 10% and 20%, as is done for non-MSME sector suppliers (FOR REPRESENTATION )

“If one supplier refuses to supply medicines after getting the tender, there is an obvious delay of at least three months. Since this happened about 100 times in the past one year, we may now impose fine on such medicine suppliers,” said Jagdish (who goes by his first name), MD, UPMSCL.

UPMSCL supplies medicine to all government health facilities across 75 districts of the state by way of giving tenders to bidders. One tender, after being allotted, gives three months’ time to finally supply the said medicine. In the past one year, at least 100 suppliers refused supply on the last week of the deadline.

All these suppliers were registered under the micro small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector and UPMSCL as a principle to promote MSME sector did not imposed fine on them. But with number of such medicine suppliers going up that eventually troubles patients across the state, the principle is likely to change.

“Any new supply will come only with tender. Hence, if one company refuses to supply the medicine, a fresh tender is invited. Again a three-month period is allotted for supply to the new firm that gets the fresh tender,” Jagdish said.

A final decision on the quantum of penalty would be finalised in a meeting of UPMSCL officials soon but this could be between 10% and 20%, as is done for non-MSME sector suppliers. The firm that fails to supply medicine faces action in tenders in future too.

“We are now planning to change the clause and introduce penalty for defaulters. Not imposing fine was a principle to promote MSME sector but we cannot do this at the cost of medicine supply,” said Jagdish. At present, the UPMSCL has listed 386 drugs for supply and rate contract has been done for 332 medicines.