Goa Pharmaceutical Manufacturer's Association (GPMA) is organising a one day seminar on March 4 to sensitise the industry about compulsory bar coding of all the exporting pharma products that is to be mandatory from July 1 this year.  This seminar will be presided over by Dr Avi Chaudhuri, India head of Kezzler AS, a Norwegian company which is a leading solution provider of barcoding, serialisation and track and trace technologies. Chaudhuri will be speaking about the technological know how of this particular technique, its benefits and the process involved with implementation.

It has been notified by the DGFT that all the exporters of pharmaceutical products will have to build track and trace capability for their exported medicines using bar code technology as per GS 1 global standards. The same is needed to be done at primary, secondary and tertiary level packaging labels as well.

“Having bar codes for exporting is a novel idea which will benefit the industry by decreasing the incidence of spurious or counterfeit drugs. But there is a need for the industry to understand it and support it for the successful implementation of the same. Our main aim through this seminar is to sensitise the industry about the impending implementation of barcodes for pharma exporting. Most of the company do not know about the essentiality of it nor about the expenses associated with it and we hope that this seminar will help change this scene,” said Naik.

Naik stressed that with proper awareness the industry would be able to make the necessary adjustments for the change-over that the government is planning to bring more effectively. He pointed out that lack knowledge can be an issue since it may cause inordinate delays and other related issues.

Interestingly, there have many notification and implantations that the government had undertaken recently for the pharma sector. However lack of understanding and knowledge about the same in the industry has been a hindrance for effective implementation of the same. There have been concern in the industry, especially the small scale and medium scale units, about the proposed implementation of barcodes for pharma exporting because of the high cost associated with it couple with ignorance on the subject.