In the aftermath of the reorganisation of the state to create seven new districts, the Gujarat Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) has made a strong representation to the state government requesting to allot funds for setting up new drug regulatory offices in these places. Through this initiative, the drug regulatory body wants its presence felt in the area to ensure not only good governance to the people of these districts but also effective monitoring and implementation of the Drugs and Cosmetics (D&C) Act.

The state drug regulatory body hopes that the state government by next financial year will earmark funds to set up district offices and other logistics, while creating additional posts of assistant commissioners and other requisite official staff for better and timely delivery of duties in the new districts. It is understood that for the time being all the drug related regulatory work in the newly created districts are performed by drug regulatory department of the neighbouring districts from which it has been bifurcated.

Gujarat government on August 15 last year had created seven new districts for better administrative process, with this the total number of districts in Gujarat is now 33.

The seven new districts created were Aravalli split from Sabarkantha; Botad created from parts of Ahmedabad and Bhavanagar districts; Chhota Udaipur split from Vadodara district; Devbhoomi Dwarka split from Jamnagar; Mahisagar created from parts of Kheda and Panchmahal; Morbi created from parts of Rajkot, Surendranagar and Jamnagar districts and Gir Somnath split from Junagadh.

Interestingly, Gujarat state which had 26 districts prior to the bifurcation, has 26 assistant commissioners, meant one for each district. The equation of which falls short of seven since the creation of new districts. Dr H G Koshia, commissioner, FDCA informed that, while there is no administrative work pressure in the present structure, with work being shared smartly through existing offices, they do not want to take any chances in compromising their work quality by delaying the process of having own administrative set up in these places.

He pointed out, “Today we are equipped to share the work of these newly created districts, mainly because its been only an year since they have been created. But over the years, we foresee it will become more cumbersome process for our existing workforce to deal with in the wake of increasing work load. Rather than wait and watch, we want to be prepared by setting up our won base with its own stronghold to deal with the challenges and work pressure aptly without compromising on quality by over-stressing our resources.”