In the eyes of political parties and governments, the lives of common people in the country have no value. The new proof of this is the deaths due to contaminated cough syrup in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Eleven children died in Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh and three in Rajasthan after drinking adulterated syrup. This is not the first time that a case of tampering with health services has come to light in the country. Even before this, cases of deaths due to cough syrup exported abroad have been reported. If the country’s pharmaceutical department had taken strict action at that time, deaths of children due to drinking poisonous syrup could have been prevented.
The surprising thing is that the governments of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh kept refusing to accept that the children died due to drinking poisonous syrup, when the number of deaths started increasing, then somewhere in the government they reluctantly accepted this accident. After the death of 11 children due to poisonous cough syrup in Chhindwara, the administration arrested Dr. Praveen Soni. After registering a case against the company and the doctor, the government banned the syrup and all the medicines of Shreson Pharma. Despite this, the Rajasthan government was not alert. The BJP government in Rajasthan was seen whitewashing the cases of deaths of children.
Read this also: So that the medicine does not become poison and cause the death of innocent people again.
Lab testing by the Tamil Nadu Drugs Control Department confirmed Coldrif syrup to contain 46.2% diethylene glycol. This poisonous chemical causes kidney failure. At the same time, Nextro-DS and Meftol P syrup were reported safe. The central government has advised caution in giving cough syrup to children. To investigate this matter in depth, central and state agencies jointly conducted a major investigation. Investigators have confirmed that no toxic chemicals were found in the cough syrups that were suspected. The investigation is not yet complete and investigation into other possible causes is ongoing.
This is not the first case when there has been an uproar over deaths due to cough syrup. In the year 2022-23, children in Gambia and Uzbekistan also died due to Indian cough syrups. 70 children were killed in Gambia. The World Health Organization had linked these deaths to the syrup, saying that the level of toxins in the medicine was found to be unacceptable. This was denied by both Maiden Pharmaceuticals and the Government of India. India had said that the syrups were found to be in compliance with quality standards during domestic testing.
The Uzbekistan government has accused a company that distributed contaminated cough syrup that killed 65 children in December 2022 of paying $33,000 in bribes to local officials to avoid the country’s mandatory quality testing. The company had denied the allegations. Similarly, in December 2022, Nepal blacklisted 16 Indian pharmaceutical companies. The 16 blacklisted companies have not responded to these claims. In 2013, Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to seven counts of criminal offenses in a US court and agreed to pay a fine of $500 million (445 million pounds), after the Indian Commerce Ministry claimed that vested interests were raising sporadic issues over manufacturing quality in India.
The US and European countries were not the only ones to complain about the quality of Indian pharmaceutical exports. In 2014, Vietnam blacklisted 45 Indian pharmaceutical companies and then blacklisted 39 more companies in 2016. Sri Lanka, Ghana, Nigeria and Mozambique had complained about the quality of Indian pharmaceutical exports. The central government’s response in these cases has been to portray it as a conspiracy by foreign pharmaceutical companies to defame competing Indian companies. Thousands of cases of failure in quality testing of medicines in Indian government laboratories have been reported in our country. This is recorded in the official records. A database run by the Indian government lists more than 8,000 medicines that failed quality tests.
India is the world’s largest exporter of generic medicines, meeting most of the medical needs of developing countries. But allegations that its drugs have caused tragedies like the one in Gambia and other countries like Uzbekistan and the US have raised questions about manufacturing practices and quality standards. India then took steps like making it mandatory for companies to test cough syrup samples in government-approved laboratories before exporting them. India exported medicines worth $25.4 billion ($20 billion) in the fiscal year ending March 2023. Of these, $3.6 billion were exported to African countries.
Despite the Gambia controversy and other cases of allegedly toxic or ineffective drugs, the industry is thriving.
The question is that for how long will political parties and governments continue to see people becoming victims of the corrupt system. After one incident gets extinct from memory, when will the recurrence of such incidents stop? Despite so many laws in the country, how do such incidents happen? Political parties need to move away from their vested interests and think for how long will the lives of common people continue to be put at stake by handing over red tape and corruption.
– Yogendra Yogi
(This article expresses the author’s own views.)