About this episode
The next time you pick up a strip of tablets at your neighbourhood pharmacy, consider this: the drug you just bought for Rs 170 may have left the factory for Rs 14. That's a markup of over a 1000%. And, it's completely legal.In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's drug pricing system works, and why the pharmacist, the doctor, and the manufacturer are all optimising for something, while the patient simply pays.This is a read aloud of Mutasim's original story, by Snigdha Sharma, on Daybreak.📖 Read the full story on The Ken: Wake up, Neo. There’s a glitch in the pharma matrixDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
🚨The Ken's Zero Shot podcast is hosting a live event! This is a speculative yet realistic discussion built around one premise: what happens when AI agents take off in India? How will they rewire existing habits, business models and profit pools? Since nobody knows for sure, we won't pretend to have all the answers. Instead we are going to break the narrative. Click here for details.
