A serious violation has surfaced in Nagpur's medicine market. Acting on a complaint from Maharashtra's Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Ganesh Peth police have registered a case against two brothers who run a chemist shop in the city. The two are accused of openly selling abortion pills, medicines that are supposed to be handed out only on a doctor's advice and prescription. When the drug department's team raided their shop, they found a stock of banned medicines on the premises.
What the raid found, and where the sellers slipped
The drug administration team and the police carried out this action jointly in Nagpur's medicine market. During the inspection, when officials asked for details of how these medicines were bought and sold, both sellers failed to produce any record or the necessary documents. In other words, there was no way to establish where the drugs had come from or to whom they had been sold. The rule is clear that abortion pills of this kind cannot be sold without a doctor's prescription, yet the two brothers were running their trade in open defiance of it. It was this absence of paperwork that led the department and the police to tighten the noose around them.
Agencies now tracing the full network
When the two shopkeepers could not give officials any satisfactory answers during questioning, the police registered the case. The bigger question now is where this stock of banned drugs actually came from, who it was sold to, and whether anyone besides these two brothers is involved in the entire operation. To find those answers, the police and the Food and Drug Administration are conducting a joint investigation, aiming to reach the very root of the chain.
A department in the mood for swift action
This is not a one-off move. These days, food safety and other agencies across the country have been coming down hard on those who break the rules. Not long ago, Maharashtra's Food and Drug Administration suspended the licences of five bakeries. The famous Bimbo Bristol Bakery was among them. Bristol Bakery, it may be noted, is an associate unit of Jimmy Boy, a nearly hundred-year-old Parsi restaurant in the Fort area.
A big statewide operation in July
Earlier, on 28 and 29 July, a major drive was carried out across the state. During it, the FDA raided several dairy units in Maharashtra and seized adulterated milk and other dairy products worth around Rs 2,90,668. In this action, a total of 2,862 litres of milk and 373.85 kilograms of dairy products, including paneer and kulfi, were seized from areas such as Palghar, Thane, Mumbai, Raigad, Pune and Sangli. Strict legal action is now being prepared against all of them under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006.
