The Capsule of Death

IMAGINE ONE’S FAMILY member is ill and the doctor has prescribed him a course of antibiotics. One goes to the nearest chemist and buys the said medicine in the hope that it will work and that the patient will get well. What if the capsule that the patient takes twice a day for a week does not even have a trace of the drug it is supposed to contain? This is what happens to a large number of people in India on a daily basis. In Nagpur, for example, patients who should have received a course of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin were deprived of it. In February 2023, Nitin Bhandarkar, an inspector with Ma­harashtra’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), picked up random samples of ciprofloxacin from a government health centre in Kalmeshwar tehsil, about 23km from Nagpur. These were sent to a laboratory in Mumbai. Almost a year later, in De­cember, the test report revealed that the capsule samples were counterfeit and contained no drug at all. Since the supply to the health centre came from the Nagpur-based Indira Gandhi Government Medical College and Hospital, the FDA raided its premises and seized over 21,000 tablets from the same stock.

As the police began their inves­tigation, they first quizzed the civil surgeon who had solicited the supply of this medicine under a tender that year. The spurious stock, it turned out, was supplied by Jaya Enter­prises, a Latur-based drug company. When its owner Hemant Mule was questioned, he further claimed that the drug had been supplied to him by another company based in Bhiwandi. The police then went on to question that company’s owner, Mihir Trivedi, who told the police that he had procured the drug stock from a Thane-based company, Caphis Generic House.

When the company’s owner Vijay Shailendra Chowdhary was brought in for questioning, he produced receipts for the purchase of the drug from KP Medical Agency in Ladwa, Hary­ana, near Kurukshetra. But Chowdhary could not provide any further detail; he told the police that he had lost his mobile phone due to which he had lost all contact details and communication with the KP agency’s proprietor. He said the man’s name was Gagan Singh and that he had made Singh an advance of  ₹14 lakh for procurement of drugs which he had not sent.

As the police investigated, they realised that there was a case registered against Chowdhary in Thane in a similar matter. But in the absence of a proper investigation, the case had not pro­ceeded any further.

“We sent a team to Ladwa to further investigate. The address of the KP agency provided by Chowdhary turned out to be that of a barber shop,” said Anil Mhaske, assistant superintendent of police, Nagpur (Rural), the investigator in the case. As the police began trawling through the evidence, they realised, aided by tech­nical surveillance, that nobody called Gagan Singh had ever been in touch with Chowdhary. They realised that he had invented this character to mislead the police.

By this time, Chowdhary had filed for anticipatory bail in a lo­cal court which was granted. After its Ladwa investigation, the po­lice moved for the cancellation of his bail. As soon as it happened, Chowdhary went missing. “We were told that he has gone off on the Char Dham yatra and was carrying no phone with him,” said Mhaske. For a week or so, Chowdhary remained absconding. Then he applied for bail again with the High Court of Bombay, which was granted. But the police im­mediately made the court aware of the seriousness of the case upon which the bail was cancelled yet again.

Meanwhile, the police kept ques­tioning Chowdhary’s family, including his father who is based in Mumbai. As Chowdhary realised that the pressure was not easing, he finally returned to Nagpur on June 22 from Jaipur where he had been hiding. As his flight land­ed, he was picked up by the police and brought in for questioning.

“We used a special team of interro­gators, including psychologists to question him,” said Mhaske. Chowdhary at last confessed that he had purchased the sup­ply of spurious drugs from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh from two brothers, Robin and Raman Taneja. They were arrested by Mhaske’s team and brought to Nagpur. In Saharanpur, the po­lice team were told by people in Robin’s locality that in the last two years he had suddenly begun to flaunt his wealth and had amassed several properties.

As the brothers were interrogated, they reportedly con­fessed how they came to manufacture the counterfeit drugs. They told the police that the idea came to their mind during the Covid pandemic as they realised how much money there was to be made from the pharmaceutical business. Robin Taneja, according to the police, met Chowdhary and Mihir Trivedi (who had led the police to Chowdhary) in a Mumbai hotel; it is there that the trio made plans to get into the counterfeit drug business. But they did not have a facility to make spurious drugs. That’s when Robin spoke to a friend of his who, according to the police, knew Amit Dhiman, a resident of Haridwar, Uttarakhand. Dhiman, it turned out, had a facility for the manufacturing of veterinary drugs in Roorkee. After negotiations with Dhiman, the police say, they began producing the drugs in that facility.

In the beginning, these drugs would be transported directly to chemists’ shops by courier. Later, as the business grew, the gang organised private transport to supply drugs directly from Uttarakhand to Maharashtra. As the money started coming in, Robin and Amit Dhiman would send it to multiple accounts to evade suspicion. These included accounts of their family mem­bers and, in at least two cases, bank accounts of two individuals in Saharanpur, perhaps poor, whom the accused knew and were not knowledgeable enough to keep track of their transactions. In fact, Chowdhary purchased an SUV from Saharanpur and then brought it to Mumbai. At the interrogation it was revealed that he chose to do so as the dealer there was willing to take cash— cash generated from his new business. The transactions run into crores, and there is evidence of use of hawala channels too, say the police. The details are still being worked out, but so far, a profit trail close to ₹4 crore has been established.

But how did the gang manage to fool drug controllers? Ac­cording to the police, since Chowdhary and the other accused knew the pharmaceutical business, they knew how to get around the system. On the carton of the drugs in Kalmeshwar, for instance, police found a certificate of two pharma compa­nies based in Kerala. Both turned out to be non-existent. Fur­thermore, when they questioned the officers who had signed the GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) certificate for the stock, the signatures were found to be fake. Again, it was dis­covered that the officers in question were not even posted in Uttarakhand and Kerala on the dates these certificates were signed. When the computer hard disks and drives of the accused were searched, several forged certificates (downloaded from the internet and then forged) were recovered.

The police suspect that the gang may have sold consignments in Jharkhand as well. How many ill-fated people there have taken these capsules thinking they were getting the right medicine will come to the fore, but it may be too late for some of them.

The Nagpur case is just the tip of the iceberg. There are over 4,000 manufacturers in India, almost half of them in Uttara­khand and Himachal Pradesh. A drug inspector who did want to be named said that it is difficult even for them to ascertain which drug is fake and which is not. “Till a proper qualitative and quantitative analysis of the sample is not done, it is impos­sible to find out,” he said. India’s domestic pharmaceutical in­dustry’s annual turnover in 2021 reached over $42 billion, with an annual growth of about 10 per cent. There is no definite data on what percentage of drugs sold in India is spurious—it varies a lot. But going by the fake drug busts, from Delhi to Nagpur to Telangana, it is not an exaggeration to say that the percentage is significant. In response to a question in Rajya Sabha in 2023, the minister of state for health had said that between April 2021 and March 2022, among 88,844 drug samples, more than 2,500 were found to be substandard while 379 samples were found to be spurious. The representatives of pharmaceutical companies have been urging that a distinction be made between spurious drugs and those which are NSQ (not of standard quality). But it does not offer any explanation as to why people should settle for substandard medicines. In the past, various committees have made recommendations, but, as the Mashelkar Committee re­port of 2003 observed, the core issues have remained unresolved. The Nagpur case, for example, is a startling revelation about how easily criminals can fudge essential certification like GMP. Till the government shows seriousness about the problem, those playing with the lives of people will largely go unscathed.

fake drugsFDAmedicinesNagpurNSQpharmaceutical industryspurious capsules