The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) will soon have a centralized drug import monitoring facility in place at its headquarters in New Delhi. In order to facilitate the change, the CDSCO is in the process of computerizing the functioning of its port offices situated in various parts of the country. The networking of computers would be done within two months, thereby operationalising the facility, it is learnt.

While the CDSCO, the sole agency authorized to permit import of drugs into India, has been maintaining proper records of the drug import sanctions, it never had a system to keep track of the actual imports based on these sanctions. The regional offices of CDSCO in the airports and seaports at Chennai, Cochin, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Nhava Sheva are all being networked with the HQ as part of this exercise.

The CDSCO officials feel that the new system will bring in a stricter regulatory mechanism in place thereby leaving no room for the misuse of the import registrations cleared by the apex drug regulatory authority. The system is already operational in Delhi Airport.

The CDSCO has also made much progress in computerizing the functioning of drug testing laboratories. While the computer linkage of all central labs is almost complete, the authority expects to add a few state testing laboratories also to the network in the coming months. Officials informed that the status of pending drug samples and test results would be instantly known at the CDSCO HQ once the system is in place. They informed that the data entry in all these laboratories are reaching the final stage and will be complete within two months.

Although the computerization of CDSCO offices and drug testing labs were initiated as part of the national level computerization networking of the entire drug control administrations both at the state and central level, the zonal offices and the testing labs were faster to adapt to the new changes. The computer-linkage of state drug administrations with the CDSCO is still far from complete, though the pilot project is under implementation in the state of Tamil Nadu. It is known the central authority is planning to call for a meeting of all state drug controllers to review the situation and also sensitise them to speed up the computerization programme in their respective states.

While the central government has been pro-active to provide necessary funds, hardware, software and also facilitate training, the response to the modernization programme from several states have not been upto mark, it is feared.