Imagine your loved one is in the ICU.
The doctor scribbles a prescription.
You rush downstairs to the hospital pharmacy…
and realise the bill is double what the medical store outside is charging.
You ask if you can buy it elsewhere.
The answer? "Sorry, in-house pharmacy only."
For years, that was the quiet rule in many Maharashtra hospitals.
Not anymore.
Maharashtra FDA Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe has dropped a directive that's making patients exhale for the first time in a long while.
👉 Hospitals cannot force you to buy medicines from their in-house pharmacy.
👉 Doctors and hospitals must hand the prescription directly to the patient or their relative.
👉 You can walk out and buy those medicines from any licensed pharmacy you want.
"Patients can buy medicines wherever they wish," Mundhe said, after a flood of complaints about hospitals quietly cornering the captive market inside their own walls.
Hospital pharmacies have long been accused of marking up prices on a captive audience.
Families in crisis don't negotiate.
They just pay.
This order, on paper, breaks that monopoly.
Patient groups are calling it a real win for patient rights.
Activists are clapping… cautiously.
Because freedom of choice only works if choice actually exists.
The problems on the ground:
So the order opens the door.
But the room outside it… is still half-empty.
Kailas Tandale of the Maharashtra Registered Pharmacists Association put it bluntly:
Choice has to be practical, not just legal.
Jan Aarogya Abhiyan's Abhijit More wants every prescription to carry both the brand name and the generic chemical name — so patients can swap confidently.
Health activist Sharad Shetty added the missing piece:
The government must make sure quality generics and commonly prescribed brands are easily available in the open market.
This is the first crack in a system that quietly normalised gouging the most vulnerable people in the room.
A grieving family. A scared spouse. A father in the ICU.
A directive on paper is step one.
A real, functioning ecosystem of trusted alternatives outside hospital walls — that's the actual finish line.
Maharashtra just took the first step.
Now the rest of the system has to catch up.
That's all for now!
