evidence: In this chapter, we begin with a historical overview of India’s efforts to design a price regulation mechanism for essential medicines and how such efforts culminated in the latest episode of price controls in 2013. The chapter documents how India began regulating nearly 350 medicines in 1970, steadily lowered the scope of regulation to 74 in 1995, and then expanded the number again to nearly 350 in 2013, completing the full circle. The historical account shows how the same set of issues have arisen during the design, implementation, and enforcement of each of the episodes of price control regulations. [...] LOCOST (2006) argues that many essential drugs were systematically deregulated leading up to the 2002 Pharmaceutical Policy, while many non-essential or sometimes dangerous medications remained under price control (for an overview, see Table 1, p. 135). The organization emphasizes the downfalls of using only economic criteria, such as company turnover in the 1995 DPCO, to establish what drugs should be regulated. Until 2002, economic criteria dominated essentiality of medicines, contrary to what the Kelkar Committee recommended in 1984. Therefore, the debate surrounding price control included discussions around the principles of selection for price-controlled drugs (The Sen Committee 2005). [...] Mathew, J. C. (2005f). Price control to be brought down to 35 drugs in Pharma Policy 2005, monitoring on 319 others. PharmaBiz [online]. Available from http://www.pharmabiz.com/NewsDetails.aspx?aid=30592&sid=2