Bengaluru: The Karnataka government is attempting to restructure the drugs control department and take a fresh look at current procedures in its medical facilities, including tendering and auditing, to put in place checks to avoid a repeat of incidents such as the maternal deaths in Ballari.
The efforts include the auditing of deaths of new mothers in the immediate past to probe if any of them were caused by substandard or contaminated drugs, and bringing the Karnataka State Drugs Control Department under the commissioner of food safety.
Calling the drugs control department’s functioning “non-transparent”, Dinesh Gundu Rao, the state’s health & family welfare minister, said the cabinet had decided to bring it under the purview of the food safety commissioner.
“The drugs control department is a closed organisation. It’s like those who work within the organisation stay within the organisation. We need somebody from the outside to look at it,” Rao told ThePrint.
He added that a committee led by an IAS officer has been formed to look into existing procedures that can help improve quality checks and the tendering process.
“We have changed a few things, including the tendering process. From a one-year tender, we are now shifting to a two-year tender for procuring medicines,” the minister said.
The Karnataka government has been under immense pressure to bring in more accountability after a spate of maternal deaths were reported at the Ballari district hospital last month. The role of a substandard intravenous fluid in the matter is being probed.
Even though the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) has seen a steep decline across India, concerns about the procurement of substandard or contaminated drugs have been on the rise.
According to the United Nations Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group’s 2020 report titled ‘Trends in maternal mortality 2000 to 2020’, India’s MMR has declined from 384 in 2000 to 103 in 2020.
The average annual rate of reduction in global MMR during the 2000-2020 period was 2.07 percent while India’s MMR declined by 6.36 percent, according to a government statement in February.
Maternal deaths in Karnataka declined from 662 in 2019-2020 to 348 in 2024-2025 (up to November), according to data released by the state government.
