By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Aug 14 2003 (IPS)

The death penalty again hangs over the denizens of Bhagirath Palace, a sprawling mediaeval structure in the old quarter of the Indian capital, once infamous for political intrigue and now home to the buccaneers who run a sizeable chunk of the world’s industry for spurious pharmaceutical drugs.

Every day in the warrens that make up Bhagirath Palace and the surrounding markets of Chandni Chowk (Moonlight Square), deals worth millions of dollars are struck for consignments of such drugs as ranitidine, used for ulcers, and paracetamol at a fraction of what chemists would sell them across the country.

But tired of complaints from patients who have suffered the ill effects of consuming chalk instead of medicines, the Indian government announced this week plans to usher in laws that include the death penalty for people caught dealing in fake drugs.

”The death penalty is certainly not too great for people who are interested only in profiteering, the result of which is mass murder,” Union Health Minister Sushma Swaraj told IPS.

Swaraj’s hands were strengthened by the report of a special committee drawn from several ministries and chaired by the director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSI), R A Mashelkar, which called for stringent action.

”The penalty for sale and manufacture of spurious drugs that cause grievous hurt or death should be enhanced from life imprisonment to death,” the Mashelkar Committee recommended in its report.

If the committee’s recommendations are followed in the promised legislation, offences related to spurious drugs would be made non-bailable – and no bail would be granted inside of three months.

Ravi Kant, a senior official in the drugs control department, thinks that the new laws might just provide the right deterrent. ”Over the last 20 years we have not been able to make single case stick.”

One of the best known cases is that of P K Mehngi, owner of the Duefil Laboratories that runs out of Bhagirath Palace but has manufacturing units in Jaipur city, capital of western Rajasthan state.

Mehngi was first arrested in 1979 on charges of manufacturing fake drugs. But he not only managed to get out on bail, but also resumed business while the case has remained pending in the courts. The new legislation could be bad news for Mehngi.

Kant said one of the many difficulties with prosecuting the robber barons of the industry lay in the near impossibility of proving that the death of a patient was caused by the use of a fake drug – especially if it is made out of harmless chalk.

There were other problems too, such as the inadequacy of India’s existing Drugs and Cosmetics Act of 1940. It does not use the word ‘counterfeit’, which is commonly used to describe spurious drugs across the world.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), counterfeit medicine is that which is deliberately or fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity and/or source.

Counterfeiting can apply to both branded and generic products and counterfeit products may include products with the correct ingredients, with insufficient active ingredients or fake packaging.

The committee noted the existence of counterfeit drugs that are exact copies of known brands and which have, so far, been regarded as a problem of the pharmaceutical industry rather than consumers who benefit from their cheap prices.

Not surprisingly, the main drivers behind the Mashelkar Committee and the proposed legislation are 11 major players grouped together as the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA).

In a presentation made to the committee last month, Harinder Sikka, a senior executive from the 250 million U.S. dollar pharmaceutical major Nicholas Piramal, estimated the size of the spurious drug industry to be around a billion dollars. That would make it about a fifth of the genuine industry.

Sikka also said that more than half of the country’s spurious drug trade was conducted out of the Bhagirath Palace, a fact unknown to most tourists and local visitors who visit the walled city to gawk at the massive Red Fort and Jama Masjid and savour treacly recipes in a maze of narrow bylanes.

Nicholas Piramal owns the ‘Phensidyl’ brand of cough syrup, made popular among students and young people by counterfeit versions such as ‘Phensidyl Plus’ that are laced with extra doses of the narcotic codeine.

Lalit Kumar, an executive from Wockhardt, another industry leader, says fake or substandard drugs from India are finding their way to countries as far afield as Vietnam and Nigeria.

India already cooperates with Nigeria in tracking down and curbing the trade in spurious drugs originating in this country.

According to P V Unnikrishnan, campaigner for the People’s Health Assembly (PHA), what has really got the big names of the industry going is the fact that the purveyors of fake drugs were now getting sophisticated enough to enter the lucrative sector for lifestyle drugs.

”The point is that the fake drug industry has been growing steadily even if we have been campaigning against it. This could not have happened except for poor enforcement and the outright corruption of the inspector of the Drug Control Authority (DCA),” Unnikrishnan said.

In Unnikrishnan’s opinion, the death penalty will not make any dent on the Indian drug market, which has some 90,000 brand names floating around.

”In the end, the major pharma companies are creating artificial demands with their lifestyle drugs and the competition (spurious drugs) is taking a bite out of this new market – while nobody gives a hoot about affordable medicines for ordinary illnesses that afflict ordinary people,” he said.

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