Small Pharma Industries Confederation (SPIC) chairman Jagdeep Singh and managing director of Delhi-based Arbro Pharmaceuticals Vijay Arora have been elected co-chairmen of the Small and Medium Pharmaceutical Industry Centre (SMPIC), a body set up at NIPER, Mohali to help the SME sector.

The two co-chairmen were elected at the consultative committee meeting held at the NIPER on April 2. The meeting was attended by 10 of the total 23 members of the consultative committee, which was reconstituted by the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) recently.

Dr Arvind Bansal of NIPER is the convenor of the consultative committee. Other members of the committee include Dr Manjinder Singh Gill from NIPER and industry representatives BR Sikri, Ramesh Arora, GD Chiber, Janak Mittal, PS Chatwal, Rajesh Madan, Aprajita Takkar, Umesh Basin, Sanjiv Singh, Anil Arora, Ashok Windles, Sanjiv Aggarwal, KL Sarin, Jagir Singh, Dr RK Mann, GD Chidper, Ramesh Khurana, Sunil Goel, DP Soni, Sanjiv Singla and Rajesh Chopra.

Since its inception, SMPIC has been organising numerous training programs on GMP/GLP for drugs and pharmaceuticals, SME pharma companies. Apart from these training programmes, SMPIC has also been continuously imparting hands-on practical training on the essential analytical instruments like HPLC, GC, AAS and Spectroscopy, to the analytical staff from SME companies.

The DoP announced the setting up of dedicated centre for small and medium pharmaceutical industry at Pharmaceutical Advisory Forum (PAF) on April 23, 2008. Keeping the stakeholders demand in view, NIPER had set up a dedicated SMPIC which was aimed at creating synergy between industry and academia, and furthering the spirit of cooperation between NIPER and SME pharma companies.

To better utilize the facilities at NIPER by SME pharma companies, NIPER has constituted a Consultative Committee for SMPIC in March 2010.