The employees of the Pasteur Institute of India (PII), Coonoor, which is among the three public sector vaccine and sera manufacturing units whose manufacturing licenses were suspended by the government in January this year for non-compliance of GMP norms, will resort to indefinite hunger strike at the PII premises from July 7 till their demands are met.

The PII employees union has written a letter to the Union Health Secretary informing him about the decision of the employees, most of whom are SC/ST people, to resort to the Gandhian model of protest to meet their demands of reviving the century old unit, which was among the leading institutions in the country producing anti-rabies and DPT group of vaccines.

It may not be out of place to mention here that the country is facing a severe shortage of vaccines after the closure of these three public sector vaccine units in the country. Instead of reviving the units with additional fund allocation to meet the GMP quality norms, the government closed down the units, literally leaving both the vaccination programmes and the employees in the lurch.

The employees are demanding that the government should revoke the suspension and permit them to continue the production of DPT group of vaccines (DPT, DT and TT) and Tissue Culture Anti Rabies Vaccine in the century old unit. Finding non-compliance of GMP norms, the health ministry had suspended the manufacturing licenses of the Pasteur Institute, an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, along with other two vaccine production units in the public sector (BCG Lab, Chennai and CII, Kasauli) on January 15, this year.

A senior officer from PII told Pharmabiz that the institute was not getting any non-plan grants from the government and it would create grave problems in the near future. Seventy per cent of the employees in the Institute belong to SC-St categories, he said. Apart from the demand of release of the required grants to the company, the employees are also opposing the government move to relocate the Institute.

The Institute, which lacks a regular director, is presently controlled by the director of the BCG Lab, Chennai. So the demands of the employees include a regular director for the institute also. They sought the intervention of the authority to initiate action against the director who had bought non-functional equipment worth crore of rupees and demanded a CBI inquiry into the alleged misdeeds done by Dr N Elangeswaran.