Gujarat Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel has recently inaugurated the new drug testing lab facility at Vadodara. With this, the Gujarat Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) will now have a new state-of-the-art NABL accredited lab at Vadodara built at a cost Rs.50 crore which can test over 10, 000 samples annually.

The Central government has contributed 60% of the funds as part of the Centre’s scheme for capacity building of the state regulator and state government has contributed 40% of the total funds.

Further to this, as part of the larger plan, labs at Bhuj, Rajkot and Patan are also in the process of getting upgraded to international standards.

Gujarat has been leading in the country in terms of collection and analysis of drug samples through its post-marketing surveillance programme as part of its ongoing crackdown on spurious drugs.

Informed Gujarat FDA Commissioner Dr H G Koshia, “The new state of the art testing lab at Vadodara which was inaugurated recently will house advanced testing modalities run by a qualified staff. We will soon start operating as Gujarat FDCA is equipped with a lab staff of around 450 well qualified lab personnel.”

Gujarat FDCA through its ongoing random sampling surveys at retail and wholesale stores, hospitals and manufacturing sites registered a collection of 13,800 samples last year which is the highest in the country followed by Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh.

Vadodara-based drug testing lab had also tested the maximum number of 6,025 drug samples as part of a pan India spurious drugs survey which concluded last year to assess for the first time complete testing of not-of- standard quality (NSQ) drugs as per Indian pharmacopoeia and other pharmacopoeias.

This was followed by Central Drug Testing Lab (CDTL) Hyderabad which tested 5,461samples, CDTL Mumbai which tested 5,418 samples, CDTL Chennai which tested 5,257samples, CDTL Bengaluru which tested 2,033 samples and Maharashtra which tested 186 samples.

Done at an estimated cost of Rs.8.5 crore, the Union health ministry had entrusted the job of National Drugs Survey in July 28, 2014 to Noida based National Institute of Biologicals (NIB) which came out with a survey based on the pan-India sampled field data to the tune of 48,000 samples.