The Gujarat Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will launch a fully computerised data management and licensing system within a week. With this, the state FDA will be the first drug control machinery to implement a fully automated licensing system in the country, according to sources.

The FDA is in the final stage of data entry operations with information on around 1500 sales licenses has to be entered into the system hereafter out of a total No. of many 23,000 sales licenses, according to the officials. The FDA has issued arround 676 licences through the system since January 2007. The collective data on sales license of drugs in the state will have more than 50,000 entries with multiple product licenses for the total number of licensees.

The commissioner of FDA has also issued a circular to its district level offices to provide sales licenses through computerised system earlier from the beginning of 2007, as it has ensured networking between the offices within the time.

The facility will constitute a centralised monitoring system in which the actions from the entire district licensing offices could be verified from the headquarters itself. The head of the authority will be able to avail details of the activities like the number of applications filed for license, total number of licenses issued, license applications on pending, reason for delay of process, duration of licensing process in each application and the number of applications rejected.

Currently, the sales licensing is a process executed by individual district drug control offices with a chronological order for each districts. With the introduction of new system, the licenses will be issued with a central chronological order, uniting the processes under the umbrella of FDA head quarters, according to Dr S P Adeshera, commissioner, Gujarat FDA.

"Even the licensing officer may not be able to predict what chronological number the license would have under the new automated system. Issuance and re-issuance of sales license will be exclusively through the network from now onwards," Adeshera told Pharmabiz. The computerisation programme was supported with technical support from National Informatics Centre, Gujarat State and with the financial support of capacity building programme under the central government.

The system has also linked data from the Gujarat State Pharmacy Council, central medical store officers and district offices to cross check the working status of each registered pharmacists. The facility is designed to reject a second application for job from a pharmacist while the applicant is working in another pharmacy anywhere in the state.

"The system will not only provide the current working status of each pharmacist, it will also reject to register their name in a separate firm as long as the first one remains valid," he explained. The formal inauguration of the system will be carried within a week.