Seizure points to frailties in India's anti-fake meds system

A recent seizure of falsified medicines in India has drawn attention to the limitations of its QR code-based anti-counterfeiting programme.

An enforcement operation carried out at the request of a multinational pharmaceutical company – directed at a wholesaler in Amta, Howrah district in the Indian state of West Bengal – seized medicines worth around $20,000 that included blood pressure drug telmisartan and diabetes treatment metformin.

Officers involved in the operation suggested that around $115,000 in medicines were suspected of already being distributed, according to a Times of India report, which suggests that the QR code designed to verify that medicines are genuine and not counterfeit had also been copied.

"We are most worried about the way in which the QR Code on the back of the medicine strip was copied," Prithwi Bose, general secretary of the Bengal Chemist and Druggists Association, told the newspaper, noting that the code was introduced in 2023 as a way to protect nearly 300 domestically distributed medicines.

According to Dr Avi Chaudhuri, a global expert on anti-counterfeiting who raised concerns about the technology underpinning India's system in an article series published in SecuringIndustry.com, the QR coding strategy to protect Indian consumers was deeply flawed from the outset in terms of both design and deployment.

"These codes can be easily replicated and placed on fake drug packages, making them indistinguishable from a genuine product," he told us.

"Despite warnings, it is a travesty that this programme was widely embraced by various stakeholders who did not understand (or did not care) how easy it would be to defeat it. The sad reality is that the very programme that was meant to protect Indian consumers has now become a vehicle to cause them harm."