Anushka

Last year I dressed "UP" 🎈🎈 my grandparents

The story behind this is very interesting. :) Let me explain. A while back, people on Reddit started discussing about Jan Aushadhi stores. Someone would post that the adapalene gel there was ₹27 while the branded tube was ₹500. Someone else would check and confirm. Then benzoyl peroxide. Then the salicylic acid face wash at under ₹50. They gave it a nickname. PM Baddie Banao Yojana. It was a joke, and it spread because the joke was actually true. That is how Reddit users in India found out that a government pharmacy sells the same acne actives a dermatologist prescribes, at a tenth of the price. So, if you look at the facts, Jan Aushadhi has stocked salicylic acid face wash for a while, in 1% and 2%, 60 ml, around ₹47 to ₹50, with a PMBI drug code. Now why a government would bother with this at all. The fundamental principle is not about face washes; Jan Aushadhi Kendras stock hundreds of essential medicines at a fraction of branded prices. Diabetes medication. Blood pressure tablets. Heart drugs. Antibiotics. Painkillers. Cancer medicines. Surgical items. This is a nationwide generic pharmacy network built for one purpose, which is to let a family manage a chronic illness without going broke. That is the goal. A retired man buying his monthly BP and sugar medicine for a few hundred rupees instead of a few thousand. The face wash just happens to be the item that went viral, because it is the one young people on the internet noticed. Having said that screen treatment is also an important piece to cover. See, skin treatment in India is almost entirely out of pocket. No insurance covers it. Dermatologists are available only in big cities. So most of the country never sees one. Because of this, cheap unregulated combination creams are sold across small towns, over the counter, used for months on end, thinning skin and causing irreversible damage. Indian dermatologists have been raising alarms about this for years. So the problem the government is trying to solve is the dangerous ₹40 tube from a chemist who told the customer it would fix everything. Basically put a regulated, cheap, boring, effective active ingredient into thousands of government stores and you give people a safe option instead. Now, Salicylic acid is a beta hydroxy acid. Its useful trick is that it dissolves in oil. A pimple is a pore blocked with oil and dead skin. Normal face wash cleans the surface. This gets down into the oil inside the pore and breaks up the plug. It is one of the most studied acne ingredients there is. 1% and 2% are the standard strengths dermatologists use. The branded versions of Salicylic acid based face washed cost anything between ₹400 to ₹700. Imported ones cross a thousand. The government sells it for ₹47. Governments worldwide have been doing this to control the prices of essential medications. Bangladesh did something remarkable in 1982. They rewrote their National Drug Policy, threw out heaps of overpriced and useless formulations, and forced the focus onto essential generics. Prices dropped hard. Their own pharma industry grew out of it and became a real exporter. It is still taught as one of the boldest health decisions any developing country has made. Thailand went further and just built the factory. Their Government Pharmaceutical Organization manufactures generics directly. When HIV hit, being able to make antiretrovirals themselves instead of negotiating with foreign pricing saved an enormous number of lives. Brazil passed a generics law in 1999 and then built Farmácia Popular, a network selling essential medicines at heavily subsidised rates. Millions of people started taking treatment they had been quietly skipping because of cost. Our Jan Aushadhi Kendras are modeled on the same principle. New Zealand does not manufacture. It negotiates. PHARMAC buys for the entire country as one buyer and is famously brutal with pharma companies. As a result, New Zealanders pay a fraction of American prices for identical pills. So, basically Jan Aushadhi is a network selling the chemicals without the brand premium. Adding skin basics to that network costs almost nothing because the stores already exist. And acne is not a school kid problem. It follows plenty of people into their thirties, it shows up with PCOS in a lot of women, and untreated it leaves scars that cost tens of thousands to fix later, if you can fix them at all. If anything, my problem is availability. Kendras are not everywhere and stock is unreliable. So if you want to be annoyed about something here, be annoyed about that. Much better complaint than government prioritising face washes. :)

@heyytal 🤣🤣🤣🤣

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