Mansukh Mandaviya asks pharma industry to tackle spurious drug menace

In a bid to address the menace of counterfeit drugs in India, Union Minister of Chemical and Fertilizers Mansukh Mandaviya on August 29 said the pharmaceutical industry needs to act against firms involved in manufacturing substandard and falsified medical products in the country.

“It feels absurd when fake and spurious drugs are detected by the drug controllers in the country; the pharma industry needs to act on these incidents. If there is bargaining at quality of medicines by any company, then firms involved in malpractices should be ousted from the associations,” Mandaviya said while addressing the Silver Jubilee Celebrations of the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA).

The Union government informed parliament last month that various state and union territories’ drug controllers tested over 84,874 drug samples last year, out of which 2,652 drug samples were declared not of standard quality while 263 samples were declared spurious or adulterated.

According to a report by Authentication Solutions Providers’ Association (ASPA), a non-profit organisation dealing in the area of anti-counterfeit awareness, the incidents of sub-standard and falsified (SF) drugs and other medical products related to COVID-19 increased by almost 47 percent just within a year – from 2020 to 2021.