Move to establish drug information centres by regulatory and pharmacist bodies is a recent phenomenon in most parts of the world. The objective is to provide vital unbiased, evidence-based and critically evaluated information about medicines to improve patient care. Although it is a discipline developed in early seventies, the need for such information is being increasingly felt in the wake of availability of a large number of medicines and complexities in their use. Considering the ongoing pace of growth in pharmaceutical sciences, it has become a big challenge to keep abreast with the most recent developments for making appropriate decisions in healthcare delivery. Drug information centres are being established in the developing world today to meet the demand for evaluated independent information. It is to be appreciated that the importance attached to evidence-based medicine is fast growing. A person managing a drug information centre has a wide spectrum of activities that include answering enquiries, proactive provision of information, adverse drug reaction reporting, provision of a medicine helpline for public, support for drug and therapeutic committees and training and education. Such centres are expected to provide information to physicians and patients. And now the paradigm is shifting to provision of information to drug discovery and development departments in the pharmaceutical industry as well. The end users of medicine information, therefore, are also the pharmaceutical industry's own staff, notably in R&D, sales, marketing and medical functions. Medicine information services in the pharmaceutical industry are well established in many countries such as the US, UK, EC, Canada and Japan. In Europe, the industry is bound to provide non-promotional information services about the medicines they market. The EEC directive on advertising of medicinal products for human use requires that the companies should establish within the undertaking a scientific service in charge of information about the medicinal products marketed by it. In India, Drug information is an emerging discipline and availability of authentic drug information to patients is almost non-existing. At present, there are 15 medicine information centres providing clinical pharmacy services in India. Appropriate medicine information departments in pharmaceutical companies in India are not yet functional. Often the responsibility of providing information is assigned to the department looking after product management or the clinical activities. Responsible pharmaceutical companies should not venture into any misinformation and should provide all information of the product in question. A recent WHO sponsored study has brought out the inadequacy of drug information available to patients in the country. Availability of unbiased drug information to patient community is extremely poor and it is mainly directed towards medical practitioners. In a country where almost any drug is available in a pharmacy store without a prescription, free access to drug information is extremely critical. But this is not happening in India and that calls for a critical evaluation of the whole concept of drug information and lay down specific guidelines or rules at the earliest.