Health Budget: No customs duty on 36 life-saving drugs

In a move that will ease financial burden on families grappling with high-treatment costs, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday fully exempted 36 life-saving drugs, including anti-cancer therapies, from basic customs duties.

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Apart from this, six additional life-saving medicines are proposed to be added to the list that attracts concessional customs duty of 5 per cent.

Among therapies set to get cheaper are — cutting-edge anti-cancer immunotherapy drug Pembrolizumab; Lorlatinib and Dacomitinib, used to treat non-small cell lung cancer; Inotuzumab ozogamicin (InO), a chemotherapy drug used to treat B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in adults and children.

Also in the full Basic Customs Duty (BCD) exemption list is Olaparib, a medication with annual costs per patient often exceeding $1,00,000 making it one of the most costly cancer drugs available. Olaparib is a medication for the maintenance treatment of BRCA-mutated advanced ovarian cancer in adults.

Bortezomib injection used to treat multiple myeloma (blood plasma cell cancer) in patients with or without a previous history of treatment; Cetuximab, a targeted cancer drug used to treat head, neck and colorectal cancers are also proposed to be fully exempted. Cetuximab is a very expensive drug, with the cost often reaching tens of thousands of dollars per treatment cycle, making it a significant financial burden for many patients; this high cost is a major factor in discussions regarding its cost-effectiveness in various cancer treatments.

The cuts in customs duties on top-end anti-cancer drugs come at a time when the estimated incidence of cancer cases in India has been rising — from 14,26,447 in 2021 to 14,61,427 in 2022 to 14,96,972 in 2023. ICMR has attributed the rising incidence to an increase in risk factors such as tobacco and alcohol consumption, low physical activity, unhealthy diets and consumption of high salt, sugar and saturated fats.

Specified drugs and medicines under Patient Assistance Programmes run by pharmaceutical companies are also fully exempted from BCD, provided the medicines are supplied free of cost to patients, she added.

Overall, the health sector outlay today, for the first time, touched Rs 1 lakh crore with the FM allocating Rs 99,858.56 crore for the sector as against Rs 90,958.63 crore in the Budget of 2024-25 — a raise of 9.78 per cent.

Another major budget announcement for cancer care relates to the decision to establish daycare cancer cntres in all district hospitals. India has 759 district hospitals.

“Our government will facilitate setting up of Day Care Cancer Centres in all district hospitals in the next three years and 200 centres will be established in 2025-26,” the FM said, further unveiling plans to create 10,000 additional MBBS seats in the next year towards the final goal of 75,000 seats over five years.

Although the government has added almost 1.1 lakh UG and PG medical education seats in 10 years, an increase of 130 per cent, gaps persist.

The Economic Survey yesterday flagged the need to ramp up medical education infrastructure.

“Since 2019, the number of medical colleges grew from 499 to 648 in 2023 to 780 in 2025, during which the MBBS seats increased from 70,012 to 96,077 in 2023 to 1,18,137 in 2025 and postgraduate seats increased from 39,583 to 64,059 in 2023 to 73,157 in 2025,” the survey said, calling for greater access at a time when Indian students are looking offshore for medical instruction.

The survey also spoke of the high cost of private medical education — Rs 60 lakh to Rs 1 crore for the course — as a key reason for thousands of students annually going abroad to 50 countries to seek undergraduate medical degrees. These countries include China, Russia, Ukraine, Philippines and Bangladesh.