Ahmedabad : H.G. Koshia, Chairman of the Task Force for Tracking and Tracing of Spurious Medicines (TF-TTSM), said in an interview to the Economic Times that one option before the group was to recommend that drug manufacturing companies install an SMS activated system by which a customer could verify the source and the manufacturer of a medicine strip. Each medicine strip would need to have a unique number and the customer, by means of SMS messaging, could have that number cross checked with the drug manufacturer’s customer care department. It would be mandatory for the drug manufacturer to have the software to process such SMS messages. Apart from an SMS activated authentication mechanism, the task force is to consider Unique ID and bar coding as means of checking the menace of spurious drugs, Mr. Koshia also said. KS Chhabra, honorary secretary, Indian Drug Manufacturers' Association (IDMA), Gujarat state board, was appreciative of the government’s initiative, but noted that while the big companies had the resources to adapt, those in the small and medium segment may not be able to do so immediately.

Source : Economic Times