ISLAMABAD: The Capital Development Authority’s employees are still awaiting the implementation of upgradation of pay scales, despite the fact that other federal and provincial departments had implemented the same. The federal government had announced to upgrade the pay scales of Assistant to BPS-16, UDC to BS-11 and LDC to BPS-9 in the budget 2016-17. The CDA employees said that despite a passage of seven months, “We are pursuing our file, in this regard, but the finance division and HRD DTE raise objections on the file on one pretext or the other.” The CDA employees are of the view that the administration is adopting a dual policy towards them and appealed that they should be given perks and privileges at par with other federal and provincial employees from July 2016. Surveillance laboratory: The Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) on Sunday said a federal drug surveillance laboratory would soon start functioning in the country. According to an official of DRAP, under the reforms/transformation strategy, the authority had been focusing on four aspects including registration, licencing, quality control and price control of medicines. He said an international standard of registration was being developed in the country to make it at par with the standard of WHO specific format called Committee on Trade and Development (CTD). He said there would be international standard accredited central drug testing laboratory while labs would also start working at the provincial level. He said these laboratories would be pre-qualified from WHO in order to improve the credibility of these labs. So far three levels had been achieved while pre-audit would start by end of this year. He added under WHO assessment scheme DRAP would observe gaps and potentials while its transparency would be checked by WHO. He said that after achieving this international standard, Pakistani pharmaceutical companies would be able to get registration of their medicines from major countries’ authorities concerned. He added with this achievement of international standard on which the DRAP was working, Pakistani companies would be able to get membership of the Pharmaceuticals Inspection Cooperation Scheme (PICS) that would help these companies for easy registration in every country of the globe. This step would help increase the figure of the country’s medicines export which at present stands at the volume of Rs 167 million against India’s figure of Rs 20 billion and Bangladesh Rs 1.8 billion. He said that after joining PICS not only the country’s export would touch the highest figure in the export of medicines but local pharmaceutical exporters who were looking to export their products to less explored countries would succeed. He said that PICS would endorse Pakistani pharma companies as reliable exporters of quality medicine. This would help improving the quality of local companies and people would get quality medicines. He said that under the drugs pricing policy, the government had strictly controlled the prices of drugs in regard to hardship cases. Under the policy it was the prerogative of the government to fix the prices of those medicines that fall under the hardship regimen. He said there was a set procedure to increase prices like submission of request (certified data) with the government by pharmaceutical companies to raise the prices as fixed at a ratio of 4% to 6% and up to 8% in accordance with the Consumer Price Index (CPI).