Regulating the regulators

Govt must strengthen accountability

Contamination in packaged spices, eye drops, and children’s cough syrups; misinformation in advertisements for an Ayurvedic medicine; revelations of high sugar content in baby food; and the mislabelling of sugared food products as “health drinks”. These issues that have serially hit the headlines over the past year point to the serious weaknesses in consumer-facing regulatory institutions in India. It has taken court appeals, exposes by influencers and non-government organisations, and embarrassing complaints from global regulatory bodies to highlight these weaknesses. The upshot in most cases has been to haul up the companies concerned with restrictions without raising questions of how the plethora of state and central regulators allowed the transgressions in the first place.

The recent complaints from Hong Kong and Singapore of high levels of a banned pesticide in products of two products of popular spice mixes are a case in point. It took the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India almost a month  to make some sort of response by asking states to collect different brands of spices for testing. Unasked in this imbroglio, which could seriously impact booming spice exports, is how such contaminants, which are also banned in the domestic market, escaped the attention of the food safety regulator in the first place. Last year, following reports that children in the Gambia and Uzbekistan died after taking Indian-made cough syrups and consumers in the US developed eye infections or blindness after using Indian-made eye drops, the government issued showcause notices to 70 companies and asked 18 to shut shop. Such retrospective vigilance, taken to safeguard India’s reputation as “pharmacy to the world”, leaves unanswered the question of how to enhance the efficacy of drug regulators to ensure such incidents do not occur.

There is certainly scope for a thorough reorganisation, given the regulation load imposed by the presence of over 10,000 pharma-manufacturing units in India. The urgency to do so can be seen from the frequency with which the US Food and Drug Administration highlights the failure of Indian drugs to conform to US standards, a serious problem, given that the US is the Indian pharma industry’s largest overseas market. More recently, following strongly-worded Supreme Court strictures against Patanjali’s misleading advertisements, the Uttarakhand government saw fit to suspend 14 of the company’s product licences, which begs the question of the basis on which these were given. Again, the case had its origins in a complaint by the Indian Medical Association against Patanjali’s advertisements that claimed to cure a range of illnesses better than allopathic drugs.

But where super-vigilant regulators in developed overseas markets can be relied on to spot transgressions in Indian products, the domestic consumer has little recourse to redress mechanisms in the face of regulatory failure. Consumer courts have been around since 1988. Though initially praised for their efficiency, these too have gone the way of the wider judicial system with backlogs clogging the system. Verdicts that are supposed to be delivered in three months can take up to five years, with the process of filing a case taking a fair chunk of the time. Last month, the government directed all consumer courts to start hearing cases online in an effort to streamline and fast-track procedures. Demanding greater efficiency and accountability from consumer-facing regulators should be the next step.