A vigilant consumer is half the battle won

Manoj Kochar, President, Authentication Solution Providers' Association (ASPA), in a frank conversation with Viveka Roychowdhury, urges pharma companies to publicly acknowledge the problem of counterfeit medicine, and invest in multi-layered authentication solutions - overt and covert, physical and digital - to deter counterfeiters.

- Viveka Roychowdhury

Agreeing that QR codes, while useful for tracking, are not foolproof authentication tools and are easily cloned, he firmly believes that a vigilant consumer is half the battle won, and hopes that pharma companies can spur consumers to scan QR codes, search for anti-counterfeiting features like holograms etc. He hopes the Ministry of Consumer Affairs takes up ASPA's recommendation to have a medicine-focused Jago Grahak Jago campaign

What are the major findings of ASPA - CRISIL State of Counterfeiting in India Report 2022 on the state of counterfeiting in India with respect to the high-risk pharma sector?

The second edition of the new report on counterfeiting is still a work in progress. It is expected to be launched around September 11, 2025. There were a lot of pretty startling findings in the first edition. Firstly, if you look at the problem of counterfeiting in an overall situation, the Indian pharma industry as per the fiscal 2023 estimates, was about Rs 3 trillion which is clearly one of the largest in the world. Most of it is meant for domestic consumption.

Coming specifically to the counterfeits, which includes spurious and substandard drugs, CDSCO did a survey in 2009 and they estimated that at that point in time, counterfeits or spurious and substandard drugs are about one per cent.

As per WHO, it was around 10 per cent. When we did the State of Counterfeiting in India 2022 report, 20 per cent of the consumers felt that there is counterfeit medicine in the market. The same study also discovered that 25 per cent of the people willingly purchase counterfeit medicines due to nonavailability of the original product and obviously lower cost. OECD did a report in 2020 where they said that India was the origin of 47 per cent in value terms of the total counterfeit value of the goods that was seized by EU custom authorities. This obviously suggests that India is a major hub.