The Supreme Court on July 30 asked the Ayush ministry to consider setting up a dashboard to monitor the status of consumer complaints on misleading advertisements of medical and healthcare products.
The court made the suggestion after it was told that there was no system in place to monitor the status of a complaint forwarded by one state to another due to the location of manufacturing units.
There was no data from states on the action taken on complaints forwarded to them, leaving consumers helpless, a bench of Hima Kohli and Sandeep Mehta said, suggesting the dashboard.
Amicus curiae, who has been helping the court in the case, Shadan Farasat stressed the need to have a more centralised setup to route consumer complaints on misleading advertisements.
Farasat said a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the consumer affairs ministry and the Advertising Standard Council of India (ASCI) ended in 2020. As a result, the number of complaints by consumers dwindled from 2,573 to 132.
The court directed the ministry to file an affidavit in two weeks.
The court was hearing a plea by the Indian Medical Association (IMA) against Patanjali Ayurved over misleading advertisements.
During the hearing, the court was told that a committee formulated by the Uttarakhand government paused the ban on the sale of Patanjali’s 14 medicines. The court also said the medicines were freely available in the market now.
The Uttarakhand government told the court that the committee had sent a show-cause notice to Patanjali and was in the process of re-considering the issue. The court directed the government to decide on the ban by the next date of hearing.
On July 9, the court asked yoga guru Ramdev-backed Patanjali Ayurved to file an affidavit to confirm that posts and advertisements for its 14 banned medicines were removed from various media platforms.
In April, the court asked advertisers to file a self-declaration that the advertisement doesn’t violate the law before it is broadcast. "The ads shall be run in channels only thereafter," the Supreme Court said.
These developments arise from a contempt plea filed against Ramdev and Patanjali managing director Balakrishna for going back on their undertaking to not put out misleading ads about the efficacy of the company’s drugs.
The case has since widened to other FMCG companies' exaggerating health benefits of their products, the conduct of doctors and their role in promoting such goods.
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