Not even one per cent of the accused have been arrested in cases of spurious medicine trafficking in 20011-12 in the country which lacks authentic data on the extent of the problem, CBI Director Ranjit Sinha said today.
Expressing concern over poor detection of spurious drug network in the country, Sinha said, "According to the statistics of the year 2011-12 (upto March 2012) of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, out of 48,082 drugs tested across the country, 133 turned out to be fake, which translates to roughly 0.27 per cent."
He said prosecution was launched only in 0.43 per cent of these 133 cases and only 0.23 per cent of accused who were found involved in the manufacture of these fake drugs were arrested.
Speaking at the three-day training on 'Investigation of Trafficking of Spurious Medical Products' in collaboration with Interpol, Sinha said failure to prosecute an accused could be due to several factors including lack of expertise on the part the investigating officers to gather evidence to implicate the accused.
"...Counterfeiting cases that are detected and investigated are not prosecuted, perhaps due to certain weaknesses in investigation. Needless to say that the investigating capability of officers is required to be beefed up," Sinha said.
The CBI Chief said low detection rate could be due to lack of an efficient intelligence collection apparatus or awareness among the stake holders.
"It has been difficult to assess the extent of the problem of counterfeit medicines in many settings because of the lack of resources or skills to detect counterfeit medicines, the absence or weak medicines regulatory systems, the different definitions of counterfeit medicines in different countries worldwide, as well as the variations in the distribution systems," he said.
