The Mumbai Police raided a local pharmaceutical company’s office in Uttar Pradesh’s Agra on Sunday. According to Mumbai police sources, the Agra-based company allegedly supplied spurious Orofer ferric carboxymaltose (FCM) injections to a Delhi-based pharmaceutical firm, which in turn, supplied them in Mumbai, where they were found to be fake.
Assistant Commissioner (Drugs) Atul Upadhyay said the injections were confiscated in Mumbai. A three-member team of Mumbai Police, accompanied by Drug Inspector Kapil Sharma raided the office of the primary supplier ‘Golu Pharma’ in Agra, where they surveyed the entire paperwork available in the premises, along with the medicines stored there.
The owner of the Agra-based company, Sanjay Singh, said the firm sold two injections of Orofer FCM to Delhi-based Kanha Pharma. He denied having any more stock of the injections and the police team also could not find them stored in the premises. The team has confiscated the records of the company and taken samples of some medicines that were found to be suspicious.
The police team found purchase bills for eight types of medicine, but there were no bills of sale. All these medicines were found to be stored on the premises and the owner could not provide a satisfactory answer as to why the medicines had not been sold to date. Golu Pharma received its licence in 2021, said Sanjay Singh.
This is not the first such action taken by police departments from other states in Agra. Earlier, police teams from Delhi, Mumbai, and even Punjab have conducted raids on other pharma companies in Agra and recovered spurious and narcotic medicines worth over Rs 250 crore in the past five years.
The city’s pharma firms have been charged with supplying such medicines to 11 states and other countries, including Bangladesh. Some raids have also uncovered a racket of repackaging and supplying substandard surgical equipment to Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra, Haryana, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.
Expressing concern over the situation, social activist Vijay Upadhyay said that the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) should not just be concerned with issuing licences to pharma companies. He stressed the FDA should also conduct regular surveys of the manufacturing and storage facilities of these firms to ensure that they are producing and selling quality drugs.
