Hunting down the counterfeit menace: A novel app to identify spurious goods

The counterfeit menace is all-pervasive in India, with the market for spurious goods of all kinds worth an estimated Rs 1 trillion. But it is the pharmaceutical industry where its impact can be truly catastrophic. According to a World Health Organisation report, over 10 per cent of medicines sold in low- and middle-income countries, including India, are substandard or spurious. Since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been numerous reports of fake sanitizers, handrubs and N95 masks being confiscated from different parts of the country. 

And, as Amit Rangnekar, chairman of the pricing committee of the Indian Drug