The Bangalore police raided a nutraceutical factory in the city, which was duplicating a popular health drink powder. Spurious material worth Rs.2.5 lakh was seized. Nutraceutical manufacturers in the state are up in arms and feel that inspections by the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike’s Prevention of Food Adulteration Act division, to seize spurious products are not regular and needed to be stepped up.
The raid took place after a tip off from the British Biologicals, a Bangalore based nutraceutical manufacturer, which complained that its products B-Protein chocolate flavour was being duplicated and as a result several customers had complained of an illness.
The product which was manufactured in a makeshift factory, where they utilised the old bottles of British Biologicals but the contents were of substandard quality and label was also not from the company. The customers purchased the product from a departmental store and complained to the company following food poisoning. The company tested the contents and found they were spurious, stated sources.
The police laid a trap and followed one of the customers to an outlet Chaya Nutrition located in a busy area in the city.
The police raided the makeshift factory and seized health food powder, bottles and stickers of M-Protein, Sprotein Bee protein, B Protein, Protilac and Profood.
The police have arrested Vishwanath, Naveen Porwal and Naveen Kumar who were manufacturing the spurious products. The accused have been remanded to judicial custody.
BMP rarely conducts inspection drives at the chemists and druggists outlets in the state. There were plans to jointly conduct inspections along with the Karnataka State Drugs Control department and the BMP PFA inspectors. But the efforts are yet to begin.
Meanwhile, the BMP PFA cell officials are unaware of the spurious products. They stated that inspections were yet to be conducted and so far there were no instances of spurious nutraceuticals in the state.
Another violation by many nutraceutical companies is that they do not abide by the government of India’s Prevention of Food Adulteration Act (PFA) Rule 32 and 34 despite the orders to stop advertising the products which are claimed to be pure vegetarian when gelatine capsules shells are used.
Although BMP stated that efforts would be made to misbrand the products and prosecute the offender, the companies continued to violate the government orders.
Some of the pharmaceutical companies engaged in the production of nutraceuticals and selling the products in Karnataka are Micro Labs (Biovital), Strides Arcolabs, Zydus-Recon (Recolina), Anglo French AstraZeneca Pharma India Banner Pharmacaps (Insumin and Madonia), apart from Universal Medicare and Emcure Pharmaceuticals.