25-Jan-2018: Affordable Medicines and Reliable Implants for Treatment scheme

In a bid to make low-cost medicines more accessible, the health ministry is working to increase the number of AMRIT pharmacy stores by four times by this year end from the existing 111 outlets.

The flagship programme of the Union Health ministry – AMRIT (Affordable Medicines and Reliable Implants for Treatment) aims to provide affordable life-saving cancer, cardiac drugs and medical disposables. The AMRIT pharmacies offer an average discount of 63% on medicines.

The AMRIT programme was launched in November 2015 and is being implemented through mini-ratna PSU HLL Lifecare Ltd (HLL) which has been setting up pharmacies at major hospitals across the country to dispense the medicines.

The primary goal of AMRIT is to make available and accessible, at very affordable rates, all drugs, implants, surgical disposables that are not dispensed free of cost by the hospitals.