"Broad Daylight Dacoity": Supreme Court Slams ₹27,000 MRP on ₹2,700 Cancer Drug
EduLaw EditorialLandmark JudgementsA cancer patient's family sells the house. They sell the jewellery. And the medicine they are begging for was handed to the chemist for ₹2,700 but stamped with a price of ₹27,000. On 22 September 2026, the Supreme Court of India refused to call this a "market." It called it dacoity. Title: "Broad Daylight Dacoity": The Supreme Court and the ₹2,700-to-₹27,000 Cancer Drug Scandal Case Name: Kishan Chand Jain v. Ethics and Medical Registration Board (EMRB) (Erstwhile Medical Council of India) & Anr., with Dr. Sanjay Kulshreshtra v. Union of India Case Number: W.P.(C) No. 794/2023 (Diary No. 25176/2023), tagged with W.P.(C) No. 717/2026 (Diary No. 25121/2026) Court: Supreme Court of India Judges: Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta Judgment Date: Order/observations dated 22 September 2026 (hearing part-heard; matter listed for further hearing on 29 September 2026) Citation: [Reportable order — neutral citation to be updated on final disposal] ABSTRACT This analysis examines the Supreme Court of India's sharply worded observations of 22 September 2026 in the connected public interest petitions of Kishan Chand Jain and Dr. Sanjay Kulshreshtra, which challenge the adequacy of India's pharmaceutical price-control regime. A Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta expressed shock at the yawning gap between the Price to Retailer (PTR) and the Maximum Retail Price (MRP) of essential medicines, citing a cancer drug supplied to retailers at ₹2,700 but printed with an MRP of ₹27,000 — a ten-fold markup the Court branded "absolute rampage and carnage and broad daylight dacoity." The core legal issue is the regulatory vacuum surrounding the initial price-fixation of non-scheduled drugs under the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013, which reportedly leaves roughly 82% of medicines outside meaningful price control. This piece sets out the facts, the arguments of the parties, the Court's principal observations, the statutory framework under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 and the Essential Commodities Act, 1955, and the wider public-health and public-finance implications — including the burden inflated prices place on schemes such as Ayushman Bharat. It concludes that the case may prove a watershed for consumer-protection and right-to-health jurisprudence in India. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: A Number That Should Not Exist Factual Background and Procedural Posture The Regulatory Framework at a Glance The Petitioners' Case: The Missing First Price The Court's Observations: "Broad Daylight Dacoity" The Industry and Government Response Legal Analysis: Right to Health, Essential Commodities and Consumer Protection Conclusion and the Road to 29 September INTRODUCTION: A NUMBER THAT SHOULD NOT EXIST Few figures capture the crisis in Indian healthcare more vividly than the one placed before the Supreme Court on 22 September 2026: a cancer medicine sold by the manufacturer to the retailer for ₹2,700, yet carrying a printed Maximum Retail Price of ₹27,000. That is not a rounding error or a distribution cost; it is a ten-fold multiplication of the price a patient must pay. Hearing petitions on the regulation of medicine prices, Justice Sandeep Mehta, sitting alongside Justice Vikram Nath, refused the polite vocabulary of "margins" and "market forces." He described the practice as "absolute rampage and carnage and broad daylight dacoity with the patients," and asked the one question the regulatory system has never satisfactorily answered: "How can a patient be cheated for a medicine which the manufacturer sells to the retailer at ₹2,700 and MRP is printed at ₹27,000?" FACTUAL BACKGROUND AND PROCEDURAL POSTURE The proceedings arose from a public interest litigation filed by Kishan Chand Jain, appearing in person, seeking regulation of medicine prices, reform of generic-prescription practices, and price control over medical devices. His petition was heard alongside a connected matter filed by Dr. Sanjay Kulshreshtra, also appearing in person, which broadly supported the challenge to the prevailing pricing regime. The petitioners tabled concrete examples of the PTR-MRP disparity: one medicine with an MRP of ₹73 against a PTR of ₹22.75; another with an MRP of ₹61 against a PTR of just ₹9.65; and, most strikingly, the cancer drug priced at ₹27,000 against a PTR of ₹2,700. Dr. Kulshreshtra added the example of the antibiotic "TG-BEX," where the gap between the printed and actual sale price was said to reach 1,500%, and a medicine printed at ₹4,196 that was actually available for ₹980. The matter was not disposed of on 22 September; it was adjourned to 29 September 2026 for further submissions from Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal and the Union of India. THE REGULATORY FRAMEWORK AT A GLANCE The governing instrument is the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013 (the "DPCO"), issued under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955, and administered by the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA). The DPCO fixes ceiling prices only for "scheduled" formulations listed in Schedule I — roughly 1,000 medicines derived from the National List of Essential Medicines. For scheduled drugs, the ceiling price is worked out by averaging the prices of brands holding at least 1% market share and adding a 16% retailer margin. Critically, non-scheduled medicines face no control on their initial launch price; the only fetter is Paragraph 20 of the DPCO, which caps annual price increases at 10% once the price is set. Paragraph 19 of the DPCO empowers the Government, in extraordinary circumstances and in public interest, to fix the ceiling price of any drug for such period as it considers necessary — a provision Dr. Kulshreshtra urged the Court to activate. Medicines were classified as "essential commodities" following the 2007 amendment to the Essential Commodities Act, and Section 3(b) of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 defines "drug" without distinguishing between scheduled and non-scheduled formulations — a point central to the petitioners' constitutional argument. THE PETITIONERS' CASE: THE MISSING FIRST PRICE Jain's central submission was elegant and damning: the law regulates the increase of a price but not its origin. "A manufacturer wants to launch a medicine today. It can fix ₹1; it can fix ₹1,000. No regulatory regime controls price fixation. Only after he has fixed it, there is a restriction that he cannot increase it by more than 10%," he argued. He submitted that around 82% of medicines by number, and roughly 83% by value, fall in the non-scheduled category — some 60,000 brands in the market against fewer than 5,000 covered by price control. He further contended that the very distinction between scheduled and non-scheduled drugs is legally unsound, relying on Section 3(b) of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act and Section 2A of the Essential Commodities Act, and on a Parliamentary Standing Committee report observing that a medicine becomes "essential" to the patient who needs it, whatever its commercial popularity. He also sought price regulation of medical devices, which were notified as "drugs" under Section 3(b)(iv) of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act with effect from 1 April 2020, and alleged that the NPPA holds PTR and price-to-stockist data but does not publish it on its portal. THE COURT'S OBSERVATIONS: "BROAD DAYLIGHT DACOITY" The Bench's language was extraordinary for its directness. Beyond the headline phrase, Justice Mehta asked why the disparity should exist at all: "A medicine which is, as a matter of fact, sold by the manufacturer to the retailer at 10% of its MRP, why has it got this high MRP?" He framed the human cost without euphemism: "People sell their houses, people sell their ornaments for getting the medicines... If that is not extortion, what else is it?" The Court pointedly noted the silence of the regulators: "It is very surprising that the authorities who are supposed to take the decision on this are absolutely silent. We need not spell out the reason for that." Justice Mehta also exposed a structural absurdity through the statin Rosuvas : a strip costs around ₹214 as a non-scheduled drug, but the same molecule combined with aspirin falls within the DPCO schedule and costs around ₹70 — "though a combination should be costlier, the disparity is there." Perhaps most significantly for public finance, the Court identified inflated pricing as a fraud on the public exchequer where treatment is reimbursed under schemes like the Ayushman Bharat / PM-JAY programme: "Hospitals are buying medicines at these prices and then being reimbursed by the government. It's ultimately the taxpayers' money. There is a clear-cut case of fraud." The Bench even floated a structural remedy: "If all medicines are brought within that umbrella of price fixation, we may not need even a system of generic medicine. Everything will be at par." THE INDUSTRY AND GOVERNMENT RESPONSE Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), sought to shift the focus down the supply chain, arguing that manufacturers were not the ones extracting the huge retail margins and that the real question was the price at which medicines are sold to stockists. The Bench countered with the decisive legal fact that the manufacturer, not the retailer, prints and fixes the MRP — locating primary responsibility at the point of origin. For the Union, Additional Solicitor General K.M. Nataraj adopted a conciliatory stance, stating that the Government did not regard the litigation as adversarial and was open to strengthening the framework, and pointing to the Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana as an existing low-cost channel. That answer met a sharp rejoinder: Jain submitted that against a pharmaceutical market of about ₹2.5 lakh crore, Jan Aushadhi sales stood at roughly ₹2,200 crore — under 1% of the market — prompting the Bench to ask where a patient is to go for the medicines those Kendras do not stock. LEGAL ANALYSIS: RIGHT TO HEALTH, ESSENTIAL COMMODITIES AND CONSUMER PROTECTION The case sits at the intersection of several established constitutional strands. The right to health has long been read into Article 21 as part of the right to life, notably in Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samity v. State of West Bengal , (1996) 4 SCC 37, where the Supreme Court held that the State's obligation to provide adequate medical facilities is an inseparable facet of the right to life. Access to affordable essential medicine is a logical extension of that principle, since a right to treatment that a patient cannot afford is illusory. The Court's characterisation of the PTR-MRP gap as "extortion" and "fraud" also resonates with the drug-pricing jurisprudence in Union of India v. Cynamide India Ltd. , (1987) 2 SCC 720, where the Supreme Court upheld the Government's power to control drug prices as a legislative-type measure in the public interest and firmly located price fixation of essential drugs within the domain of legitimate State regulation. On the classification challenge, the petitioners' invocation of Article 14 is significant: if the statutory definition of "drug" draws no line between scheduled and non-scheduled formulations, an executive order that leaves 82% of medicines outside effective control may be vulnerable to the charge of an unreasonable classification bearing no rational nexus to the object of ensuring affordable medicine. The intellectual-property dimension of drug access — familiar from Novartis AG v. Union of India , (2013) 6 SCC 1, where the Court protected access to affordable cancer treatment by refusing evergreening under Section 3(d) of the Patents Act — supplies a strong policy backdrop: Indian courts have repeatedly treated affordable access to life-saving drugs as a value the law must actively protect. Finally, the practice attacked here squarely engages the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, particularly the concepts of "unfair trade practice" and the display of a misleading price, since an MRP set at ten times the actual supply price arguably misrepresents the true value to the consumer. CONCLUSION AND THE ROAD TO 29 SEPTEMBER The strength of these observations lies not merely in their rhetoric but in their diagnosis. The Court has identified that India's price-control architecture polices the ceiling on price increases while leaving the initial price entirely to the manufacturer's discretion — a gap through which the overwhelming majority of medicines escape scrutiny. Whether the Bench ultimately issues binding directions, invokes the latent power under Paragraph 19 of the DPCO, or directs the Government and NPPA to frame a mechanism for initial price-fixation and for the transparent publication of PTR data will determine the case's lasting significance. If the Court converts its moral clarity into an enforceable framework, this litigation could reshape pharmaceutical regulation as decisively as Novartis reshaped drug patenting. For now, the phrase "broad daylight dacoity" has done what years of policy debate could not: it has named the problem in a language every patient understands. The matter stands listed for 29 September 2026, when the submissions of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance and the Union of India will be heard.