"The partners will work closely to develop a blueprint with a specific timeline to design a strategy to implement the use of detection and authentication technologies to make spurious and unsafe medicines
easily detectable and take prompt action against all such manufacturers who violate the laws and standards of our country by working closely with the State Regulators and law enforcers," said Mr Bejon Misra, founder director, Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) India.

Mr Jeffrey Gren, director, office of health and consumer goods, US Department of Commerce, said that, "No doubt technology can play a major role to track and trace the menace of spurious drugs but the need of the hour is to evolve a more holistic approach that ensures involvement of all stakeholders in the supply chain."

WHO clarifies on media reports
Denying that it had ever released a report on the spurious drugs in India, the WHO made it clear that no survey has been carried out by it. The denial came after the issue was repeatedly highlighted by various speakers at the international workshop. A section of Indian press had earlier reported while quoting WHO, that the spurious drugs in India stood somewhere between 35 percent-to-40 percent of the total available medicines in the market.

Dr Madhur Gupta, representative, WHO India Country Office while reacting to the same commented, "WHO has not issued any such figure on Indian spurious drugs and that infact is not possible without an extensive survey. The clarification in this regard has been communicated to the ministry of health."

Although there are contradictory reports on the fake drugs, there is no consensus at the mechanism to tackle the menace. Therefore WHO is working closely with the government on host of issues such as GMP, Audits and other things. After the Mashelkar committee report, now the Tandon committee report has also pointed out that there is no authentic figure on the number of manufacturing labs and something requires to be done on that front." added Dr Gupta.