Mumbai : The Gujarat Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) has issued a total of 2,267 fresh manufacturing licences from April 1, 2020 till March 31, 2023. This includes 1682 allopathic licenses, 172 ayurvedic licenses, 409 cosmetics licenses and 4 homoeopathic licenses. Most of these manufacturing units are based out of Ahmedabad, Baroda, Bharuch, Gandhinagar, Vapi, Valsad, Rajkot, Morbi and Mehsana.
“These units also include big units which are WHO-GMP compliant and Schedule M compliant MSMEs. As of today, Gujarat has a total of 3,533 allopathic manufacturing units, 835 ayurvedic manufacturing units, 826 cosmetics manufacturing units and 9 homoeopathy manufacturing units. Besides this, Gujarat today boasts of over 1,081 WHO-GMP units and 140 US FDA approved drug manufacturing units in the country,” informed Dr HG Koshia, Gujarat FDCA Commissioner.
Since its development in 2011, the Gujarat FDCA online platform for drug manufacturing license application (DMLA) software has enabled regulators to deliver efficient paperless services on time for granting product licenses for APIs and formulations under the allopathic segment. There is also an online Extended Licensing Node (XLN) system set up in the state in 2007 for online grant of retail and wholesale sales licenses.
Online ayurvedic licensing came into force from December 25, 2020 onwards and online cosmetics licensing from December 25, 2022 onwards.
The Gujarat FDCA is also all set to graduate from its e-governance model to m-governance model as it is likely to launch a mobile application for all the stakeholders including the manufacturers and retailers towards ease of doing business (EODB).
As per the m-governance, all applications will be on mobile which will also include mobile testing to bring in effectiveness of governance/vigilance at grass root level. This will also bring in effective utilization of capacity and instruments and also real-time connectivity for monitoring and governance.
The m-governance will merge all the online platforms at one place for faster and real time access towards getting status of the application in a seamless manner.
Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel on December 1, 2022 had launched the cosmetic manufacturing license portal to make the licensing process transparent, accountable and less time consuming as part of Gujarat government’s good governance initiative.
As of today, there are about 826 firms manufacturing cosmetic products in the state of Gujarat. In addition, these manufacturing firms are given various types of certificates like GMP and free sale certificates among others. Until recently, all operations were done offline for which the applicant had to come in person to apply in the office, follow up the application and get the license. To do all the above operations online, the officials of Gujarat FDCA and National Informatics Centre (NIC), Government of India (GoI) have created a web portal by the URL -cosmla.gujarat.gov.in.
