Pills By Jugaad!

A new investigative book, bottle of lies, says that Indian cancer drugs are contaminated; cholesterol medication has shards of glass; and, blood pressure pills contain a live bug. In these excerpts, the author, Katherine Eban writes about jugaad, an indian model of aggressive shortcuts, the ability to dodge onerous rules to get the desired results

- Katherine Eban

Three months after the heparin hearing {in 2008, the US Congress debated the implications of Chinese counterfeits of heparin, a drug used to prevent blood clotting}, with the vulnerability of the American public still fresh in his mind, Nelson {David Nelson was a congressional investigator} read the prosecutors’ motion about Ranbaxy and realized that something else linked the 1980s generic drug scandal to the Ranbaxy case. Although the earlier scandal had implicated American companies, those companies had largely been run by South Asians, such as Quad Pharmaceuticals CEO Dilip Shah. Whether fairly or not, those investigating and prosecuting the initial cases had referred to the corrupt executives as the “Bengali mafia”. At the time, some of the defense lawyers had tried to justify their clients’ crimes by explaining that they were viewed as acceptable business practices in their homelands. “I was insulted by the notion that people would be considered innocent because it was culturally okay with them to give bribes,” Nelson recalled.