The Business of Pharmacy in India

The word Pharmacy refers to drug store or chemists.

From wikipedia,

Pharmacy is the health profession that links the health sciences with the chemical sciences and it is charged with ensuring the safe and effective use of pharmaceutical drugs.

I had a big respect with pharmacists because they are the ones who knows what medicine, that the doctor has prescribed. He / she can also provide the alternative medicine from the different company.

the most common drug i take is Dolo 650 or Crocin Cold & Flu generally. Otherwise, if i get serious diseases like chronic bronchitis, i need to take medicine as prescribed by the doctor. Based on the chemicals needed by my body, doctor prescribes it.

Recent days i have bad experiences with the pharmacy in many parts of the country most notably in Chennai and Bhopal. My doctor had prescribed few number of drugs  in combination in order to tackle the bronchitis. I had taken the prescription to two of the big pharmacy in Bhopal. One provided the medicine for almost all drugs except one. with the other one i had the following conversation.

Bala (B): Do you have this medicine? Rest of  them i have bought near my doctor house.

Pharmacists (P): if you have bought all from them, go get this medicine from there. why did you come here?

B: ????? (stunned on getting this response) what’s your problem? i would have bought it if its available. This particular is not available there. Hence came here.

P: if you want to buy all, then you can get it. other wise, we wont give you the medicines.

B: (end of conversation and came back without purchasing. Frustrated. F..k!)

Some pharmacists would simply say “Drug not available” even though if it is available. This is the bad state in which Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical industry operates. This is not one simple case.

Right from childhood, we trust our doctors. Next person ….? is our pharmacists. some times we directly go to our pharmacists for drugs. I think those good old days have gone. Now its all about Money! Money! Money!

Another incident which you can replicate with your pharmacy nearby. doctor will prescribe only  for e.g 6 vitamin tablets. but the tablets comes as a strip i.e 10 tablets.  You will definitely hear this conversation like i have heard.

B: Do you have these tablets? just this one? for six days as prescribed by doctor.

P:  sir, it comes as a 10 table strip. we can’t give you six.

B: But doctor prescribed only 6

P: yes sir. doctor will prescribe like that. people won’t buy just 4 tablets. also these tablets won’t sell after.

B: what will i do with extra tablets?

P: these are (vitamin) tablets. it wont harm if you have it more.

B: (Frustrated by the responses and went to another pharmacy.) !!!

Now, again the same conversation and ended up buying 10 tablet strip which costs 104 INR whereas i should have spent only 60 INR as prescribed by the doctor.

I started to think about the business around Pharmacy! Before going into it, we would see these most popular chained pharmacy in the Chennai city.

• Apollo Pharmacy
• Muthu Pharmacy
• Himalaya Herbal Healthcare
• Kerala Ayurveda Pharmacy
• Lifeken Medicines

Like this, there are many more in various cities in India. You would see one nearby and wherever you go, they follow. It is called Branding i guess. the thing is we prefer branded shops because we believe they provide quality drugs. For e.g. Apollo Pharmacy because of Apollo Hospitals.

Apart from selling drugs, they also sell Beauty care products, Health care devices and many more of the products they brand.

Lets see about Pharmaceutical industry in India.

The Pharmaceutical industry in India is the world’s third-largest in terms of volume and stands 14th in terms of value. Its going to touch USD 50 Billion by 2020 in India

It can touch USD 100 Billion in India if all pharmacists sell any drug for e.g. Dolo 650 or Crocin in a strip rather than 1 or 2. Soon we will face this type of situation.

The Good or Bad? :

The Indian pharmaceutical industry directly employs around 500,000 people and is highly fragmented. While there are around 270 large R&D based pharmaceutical companies in India, including multinationals, government-owned and private companies, there are also around 5,600 smaller licensed generics manufacturers, although in reality only around 3,000 companies are involved in pharmaceutical production. Most small firms do not have their own production facilities, but operate using the spare capacity of other drug manufacturers.

Opportunities for B.Pharm graduates and a small request:

May be after graduating B.Pharm or necessary degree,  you can be a small business owner i.e Start your own Pharmacy. The business will never go down. One thing i request you to keep in mind.

Provide people the prescribed tablets rather than overdose. Help people cure their illness. In this way, you will get repeated business and Good names.

What’s your take? Did you experience the same bad from your nearby Pharmacy? Add it in the comments.

StartUp Idea #5: Forms online

Back in Dec 2010, i have written few posts related to StartUp Ideas. It took me one year to write a new one. 2011 was a great year for me because I finally quit my job at Amazon and (re)started my company http://www.chennaishopping.com/

Let me write about the new start-up idea which i had been grinding in my mind. It may exists or may not. i am not sure. most of the ideas i have written are problems that exists currently.

Now,  Forms  Online

What are forms?

Forms is a document which you use to fill up with pen and apply form some thing. checkout out Forms at wikipedia. I am not talking about HTML forms here.

what is the problem?

The problem is simple. collect all these application forms and provide them as pdf downloads to get it printed or make an HTML form out of it and present a printable form with customer data in it. You can store customer data for later use.  This solves the following list of problems

• user will not type / write duplication information like name, address, phone etc etc etc.
• user will just type the “new-not found information” that are asked in forms.

This gives the following advantages

• user knows exactly the form to use to apply for certain things. need not search here and there.
• all forms at one location. saves time for the user.
• user is not frustrated to fill the same details, 1000 times.

Different types of Forms

I am going to list the types of application forms available in general public.

• School/College Application forms
• Government Application Forms
• Job Application forms
• Bank Application forms
• Applying for Gas connection, ration card, DL, passport
• so and so…. hell a lot of it.

School/College application forms:

there are around 1.6m schools in india as per SchoolofEducators.com. see if you can help these schools, get their application forms online for just download for that academic year.  some schools / colleges do make money even in these application forms. you can make a cut out of it.

Government application forms:

Hell a lot of it. just browse through various states respective .gov.in website and collect their PDF link and provide them for download at one location. provide a easier way to find and download.  I spent lot of time in figuring out marriage certificate registration form online. Even though i found the site, i am not sure whether it is updated or legitimate. if you can assure it, your website is a HIT.

Job Application Forms

I am talking about Non-tech jobs. Get the job application forms for non-tech jobs that comes in paper or what ever and get it filled

Bank application forms:

Check deposit slips pre-filled or what ever loan application or what ever. Do tie-up with major banks and get their forms in pdf format to be downloadable at your site. List it by category, banks etc.

Gas connection, ration card, passport, DL:

Just get the gas connection form online. or what ever it is.

Miscellaneous forms

• BB plan change letter for BSNL
• BANK letter format for update of any information to ICICI, SBI et all.

Note: Do add more in comments if you have any.

Hell a lot of forms:

There are lakhs of forms to be filled by a user. every time he/she fills the following information multiple times

• Full name – first, middle, surname
• DOB
• Father’s / Guardian name
• Permanent Address
• Residential Address
• PAN
• Passport

and many more

Privacy issues and Trust factors:

what ever the information forms online get its, it will be too personal information. one should take care to protect the user’s privacy and get user to trust the website. It’s very difficult to achieve the trust factor in short run. but overtime, if you provide good service, users will trust these kinds of forms service, because it saves their time.

Business model:

More downloads. More Users. Your traffic and download is your source for revenue. you can get sponsors for various form channels say bank or get the advertising revenue. You can also get a revenue share with school/college application.

You can add premium service by providing few forms at a paid price etc. may be this will work or not. not sure though.

Conclusion:

whether this idea will work or not, the problem of filling offline forms exists. the problem of searching forms to apply for certain things exists. You have million opportunities to solve for the main stream users….. do share your thoughts at the comments below.

Update 1: there is a startup nopaperforms.com which is trying to solve this. Do give a try.

SBI – Stupid Bank of India?

I have been hit many times with SBI – the largest nationalized bank in India but operating with stupidity.

Here i am going to list out few things which i feel SBI should do it to understand newer generations.

• Stop charging annual fees for Debit Card. Giving it first year for free and charging is a stupid thing in this new internet connected age.
• Having enabled Core Banking across branches, still if i have any problems with my account, i should be able to go to nearby branch and get help. in this case, SBI should learn from ICICI rather than saying go to your branch which is in different metro city.
• SBI should stop charging for inter-branch fees since they have become one bank – virtual branch anywhere kind of due to connectivity. They should help their customers anywhere in India
• SBI should enable a customer who forgot his onlinesbi.com login / password to be renewed online rather than giving/sending letter to the branch where the account is maintained.
• SBI should remove the concept of having an account w.r.t to branch. they should make it easier for their SBI customers not for their SBI branch customers.
• SBI employees should be user friendly. They respond to elder people but not young people.
• SBI employees should think “Customer First” rather than “Work First” attitude. This “work first” attitude is there with most nationalized banks.

If you find any stupidity, please let me know.

Customer Service in India

I am being a customer / consumer using many of the services in the country. I have been doing lots of observations related to customer services in INDIA and i will be writing about them.

I have come across lots of services both online and offline. the moment you go online, there are different set of tools for customer services. In offline, there are different set of tools.

Let’s see what is customer service?

From wikipedia

Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase.

Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation

A Customer, always expects Value for Money or more for the money. For e.g. A Digit magazine associated with a Free CD / DVD.

Best Customer Service is one of the main reason in every successful companies we see. Providing customer care service is not that difficult. It is how we see it, matters a lot. When companies listen to their customers, they can build great products / services. Thats how many companies have become big and mints money.

Here are some of the questions i too ask myselves….

• How do successful big companies handle customer services?
• How are they able to engage with people?
• Are people sticking to these companies because they don’t find the better alternative?

I think there are lots of things like this if we want to discuss about customer service. Companies have to do lots of work if it wants to provide better and good customer service. Here is what i feel what a good customer services a company should provide to its customers.

• Respect and communicate to customer politely.
• Understand and listen to customer’s problems.
• Solve customer’s problems first than concentrating on the company revenue.
• Followup with customers with new services and value add services.
• Transparent in billing, update about new products / services.

our country is transforming into a consumer market, slowly i.e consumerism. we as consumers, need better consumer protections from companies who are cheating us. Going forward, i will write about companies in india and their customer service from my own experiences.

If you have any comments / suggestions, please write to me. Add your comments below too…

can VIPs violate the traffic law?

Question: can VIPs violate the traffic law?
Answer: Yes. They will. For SECURITY Reasons.

What are those Security reason?
i don’t know.

Today i was travelling from Parrys to Adyar in the evening. there was heavy traffic after foreshore estate upto Andhra Hospital. I was driving between the gaps where ever i could, to overcome the traffic so that i can reach home early.

suddenly i saw the siren sound. some 6 to 7 cars + 2 jeeps went. Its none other than chief justice of high court (chennai). Although police could clear up traffic upto ayyappa temple, they were not able to after that….

Immediately, police vehicle found a way out to the other side i.e opposite side and all vehicles got diverted on that side. I too saw, Judge is inside the car.

few questions i got at that instant

• Chief Justice of High court has violated the traffic rules by travelling in the opposite direction with the help of the traffic police. is it violation?
• I also know that due to security reasons (i am not sure what it is clearly), Police are clearing traffic for the judge. what about the people? why cant police clear traffic for people? so, Police will work only for VIP’s ?
  why does these kind of VIPs commute at peek hours of traffic when common people commute?
• why cant they travel late? this can help people i guess.. because here the entire path from office to home is blocked for them. this happens when our hon’ble Chief minister’s do such actions.
• is there any law or constitution bill that states “People should pave the way for the VIPs who are ruling in the government / Law etc ?”… if so, please let me know

I have heard people like Kamarajar who hate to use such kind of things for personal use. my guess is this will continue for ever and i / we have to live with it…

what’s your take on it?