MP News: Medicine Market Brims With Drugs, Government Tests 6k Samples Per Year

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): The medicine market in Madhya Pradesh is teeming with thousands of pharmaceutical products, from common syrups to specialised drugs. However, the capacity of government labs authorised to test these syrups and drugs is only around 6,000 samples per annum. 

A senior from the Office of the Controller, Food and Drugs Administration, on the condition of anonymity, said to the Free Press that so far, there is no methodology to determine how many kinds of syrups and drugs are prevalent in the medical market of the state. At the same time, it is nearly impossible to test all such products due to the shortage of manpower and the limited testing capacity of government labs. 

The law mandates that drug manufacturing companies should themselves test their products and get necessary certification before releasing them into the market. It is under this law that companies face the heat in case of violation.

At the same time, the state government’s Drug Inspectors are also responsible for checking samples of syrups and drugs at regular intervals. As they cannot check all the drugs being sold in the market in one go, they go for a random selection of drug samples for testing. If any sample of a certain batch fails the test, it is put into the “Not of Standard Quality” category and banned for sale. 

The same happened in the Chhindwara incident, as after the death of 16 children, Coldrif cough syrup was banned and put in the NSQ category. Before this, it was being sold in the open market. 

With the state lacking the mechanism to screen every drug doing the rounds, patients are effectively left to their fate.

4-5 drug samples failed last year in Bhopal

One of the drug inspectors said that last year, around four to five samples of different drugs failed to clear the mandatory test and were put in the NSQ category. One drug test process requires 12 to 18 hours.

3 labs in state

Madhya Pradesh has drug test lab facilities in Bhopal, Indore, and Jabalpur. One more is coming up in Gwalior. 

[Story by Rajan Raikwar]