Mumbai is set to become the country’s first city to have mobile generic medicine shops. These aim at providing low-cost, but effective, medicines to needy people. Goregaon-based NGO, Prabodhan Aushadh Pedhi (medicine bank), has got an in-principal approval from the Centre to start at least two mobile shops, one each for the western and eastern suburbs.

These will have an outdoor patients department, with a doctor, who will examine patients and prescribe generic medicine. A proposal to this effect was first moved two years ago (in the UPA regime), but it has got a positive response from the Union minister of chemicals and fertilisers (which controls the pharmaceutical department), Hansraj Ahir, only recently. Ahir is a BJP MP from Chandrapur, Maharashtra.