The Pharmaceutical Department has created a separate environment cell in an attempt to ease the hassles in issuing clearances for pollution certifications and biomedical waste.

The cell will interact with Ministry of Environment and Forest and other related departments and institutions on all environmental issues pertaining to the pharmaceutical sector. Joint secretary in the department, Neelkamal Darbari, will head the cell, and will be assisted by deputy secretary Paresh Johri, official sources said. Besides, two deputy industrial advisers - D N Mathur and V K Tyagi will also be in the cell, with separate secretarial support.

The delay in getting approval for non-pollution and hassles being put up by the officials have been some of the major worries of the new units and the associations have been calling for an effective coordination and intervention by the newly-created pharma department. The active pharmaceutical ingredient players in the country, especially in the northern region, have taken up the matter several times with the government.

"We hope that it would help us to sort out the issues in a smoother and better manner, with least hassles. We can now resort to the pharma department on the issues related to environment and seek intervention for necessary approvals," an industry leader said.

At the same time, the new cell will also actively look into the issues like biomedical waste released by the pharma companies. Lack of concentrated effort in the management of biomedical waste has been highlighted by several reports and non-government organisations in the past.

Researchers at Gothenburg University (Gothenburg, Sweden), led by Joakim Larsson, had sometime back identified pharmaceuticals, some at levels unprecedented anywhere in the world, in wastewater discharged from pharmaceutical manufacturing plants near Hyderabad. The researchers' findings are based on an analysis of effluent from a wastewater treatment plant operated by Patancheru Enviro Tech (Patancheru, India), which serves manufacturing plants owned by about 90 drug manufacturers including Dr Reddy's (Hyderabad), Nicholas Piramal (Mumbai), and Mylan Laboratories (Canonsburg, PA) at Patancheru, near Hyderabad. The report had evoked widespread response from the activists.