The department of pharmaceuticals (DoP) has called an urgent meeting on August 18 to formulate a common strategy to address the issue of spurious drugs from China being sold in the African countries with a 'made in India' label.

Senior officials from ministries of health, commerce, industrial policy and promotion and external affairs will be present in the meeting to thrash out the issue. Besides, major industry associations like IPA, IDMA, SPIC, CIPI, FOPE, etc have also been invited to share their views to formulate a strategy to address this rather grave issue.

Interestingly, the DoP has also circulated a study conducted by International Policy Network (IPN) on ways and means to control fake drugs in the context of export of fake drugs from China with made in India label. IPN is a multinational frontal organization supporting greater IP protection in developing countries.

Recently, Nigeria had seized a large consignment of fake anti-malarial drugs with the label of 'made in India' but was later found that the medicines were in fact produced in China and were imported into the African countries. The Nigerian authorities had then maintained that the incident was not an isolated incident.

All this was happening at a time India was initiating measures to counter the multinational drug companies' campaign against the Indian generic drugs in the African countries, some unscrupulous Chinese firms posed new threat to India by producing fake drugs with label of 'made in India' and exporting them to African countries.