Karnataka government has now created a total of 77 posts for the state drugs control department. The government went on sanction for 50 inspectors, 21 assistant drug controllers, five deputy drugs controllers and one system analyst. This takes the total number of enforcement officials from the existing 109 (62 DI, 39 ADC & 8 DDC) to 185 (112 DI, 60 ADC, 14 DDC & 01 System Analyst).

“This is the highest number of posts approved by the state government. While, we had proposed for 100 inspectors, the government went on to consider and sanction half of our request giving us 50. Since drugs control administration is expertise intensive, we need the required qualified enforcements teams in place and this move by the government comes in as a big relief to expand our inspections besides issue drug manufacture and pharmacy sales licenses,” Dr BR Jagashetty told Pharmabiz.

“We need to see where the officers can be posted. Either the new posts could be created in the existing drugs control offices at the 30 districts of Karnataka or there would also be efforts to increase the number of regional offices in other districts. Currently the five regional offices are at Bengaluru, Mysore, Hubli, Bellary and Gulbarga,” he added.

While the inspectors who would be need to be recruited through the Karnataka State Public Service Commission, the assistant drugs controller and deputy drugs controllers will be through promotions. The state has 236 pharma units and around 28,000 pharmacy outlets. “So long we were working with a bare minimum number of officers and this was hampering the speed of the operations especially, when one inspector had to cover a larger number of pharmacy outlets during an inspection drive,” he said.

Moreover, the initiative by the government seems to have come in at the right time when the state drugs control department is looking to increase its laboratory infrastructure which include both mobile drug test labs and new laboratory for testing biological drugs, vaccines, blood,” said Dr Jagashetty.

Further, now with the additional posts there will be promotions of existing officials and this would only allow more candidates to serve at the drugs control department which is seen as an important, enforcement and knowledge-intensive government department keeping tabs on the quality drugs and approving manufacturing – sales licenses of the same, he said.

Dr Jagashetty, early this year had been recommending to the Drugs Control General of India (DCGI) to upgrade its status from sub zone office to zonal office, which is also likely to come though.