The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Staff shortage hits inspection of drug companies

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Sep 17, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Staff shortage hits inspection of drug companies

Divya Ramamurthi

Only 40 inspectors against sanctioned strength of 75

Chennai: The shortage of drug inspectors as well as clinicians at drug testing laboratories in the State is resulting in fewer inspections and delayed prosecution against pharmaceutical units violating standardised norms, say officials.

Against the sanctioned strength of 75 drug inspectors, there are only 40 of them.

They oversee 8,000 manufacturing units.

In the city, there is more than a 50 per cent shortfall with only 10 officials against the sanctioned strength of 22 inspectors. In fact, the last time recruitment for the post was conducted was in 1988.

Due to litigation these inspectors joined work in 1999, N. Selvaraju, Director of Drugs Controller, told The Hindu .

He says that he has written to the State Government urging it to make recruitment.

Each drug inspector is supposed to inspect seven units every month, have a selection of drugs from them sent for testing and take suitable action.

However, due to the shortfall, some of them are not able to meet these targets.

"Sometimes, I get so bogged down with routine paper work that I am not able to inspect seven pharmaceutical units," says an inspector, on the condition of anonymity, as he is not authorised to speak to the media.

Prosecution against many pharmaceutical units that have not conformed to standardised norms is slow as almost 50 per cent of the posts are vacant.

The delay ranges from a few days to sometimes weeks.

But the problem in some cases is that the expiry date of the drugs is reached by the time the testing is done.

"Because there are so few clinicians in the State, often they are not able to analyse the samples quickly enough for us to take action against the unit," says Mr. Selvaraju.

Last year, the drug inspectors launched proceedings in 150 cases.

In the last three months, proceedings were launched in more than 50 cases.

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