Eight years after receiving funds from the Centre, the state’s first drug laboratory, equipped with the state-of-the-art testing facilities, became functional at Baddi on Wednesday.
The functioning of the lab will give a boost to high-quality drug manufacturing as the drug inspectors will now be able to step up the sampling of drugs. Earlier, such samples were sent to labs in Chandigarh, making the task time-consuming.
Its work has been outsourced to Panchkula-based ITC Labs, who will be paid Rs 6 crore annually by the state government to operate this lab. It has deputed 30-40 technicians and 10 administrative officials while the state government has provided two government analysts to oversee its functioning.
The Rs 32 crore lab will cater to 650-odd industrial units. Earlier, only limited drug testing was undertaken in the absence of a lab. With 15 sophisticated HPCL machines and other paraphernalia, the preliminary testing was undertaken on 70 drug samples on Wednesday.
State Drugs Controller Manish Kapoor, while confirming the news, said, “The drug inspectors have been directed to step up drug sampling for regular testing, which will also help maintain a check on the drug quality. The lab has a capacity to test 8,000-10,000 drug samples annually.”
Despite housing Asia’s biggest pharmaceutical hub in the Baddi-Barotiwala-Nalagarh (BBN) industrial belt, the state lacked a fully equipped drug-testing laboratory till now.
The need to set up such a lab assumes significance as the drug samples from the state’s drug firms repeatedly fail quality parameters.
“With the Central Drug Standard Control Organisation imposing stringent conditions such as bio-equivalence and stability data for every product, the absence of such a lab forced the industry to outsource such tests to private labs. The creation of a stability chamber and related facilities is a costly affair for small manufacturers,” said a pharmaceutical manufacturer, who welcomed the setting up of the lab.
The Union Government had provided Rs 30 crore to the state Health Department in 2017 to set up this lab under the 12th Five-Year Plan. Remaining funds were pooled by the state government as part of its share.
A building was purchased from the HP Housing and Urban Development Authority for this lab in 2017, but the setting up of the lab was hanging fire for nearly eight years. Public-sector enterprise HCL had set up the lab.
Though the lab was inaugurated in April last year, it could not be made functional as the state had to seek permission from the Centre to run this lab as it lacked the requisite mandate to operate such a lab