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Indian pharma races to strengthen authentication against counterfeit as threat looms large
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Nandita Vijayasimha, Bengaluru
August 12 , 2026
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Indian pharma is stepping up efforts to strengthen product authentication as counterfeit medicines continue to pose a growing threat to patient safety, brand reputation, and regulatory compliance.
Ankit Gupta, president, Authentication Solution Providers' Association (ASPA), said counterfeiting in India is no longer a peripheral nuisance, it is a structural risk to public health and to the credibility of our pharmaceutical industry.
Recent events underline why this is not an abstract statistic. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), has stepped up nationwide surveillance of semaglutide supply chains after an Interpol intelligence alert routed through the CBI flagged counterfeit batches of the GLP-1 drug in circulation, traced back to a fraudulent European source. That international law enforcement, not just domestic inspectors, felt compelled to raise the alarm on a single molecule's supply chain is a signal every stakeholder in Indian pharma should take seriously, he added.
As semaglutide patents lapse and Indian manufacturers scale up generic production for a market projected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the same demand surge that creates legitimate opportunity is exactly what counterfeiters exploit — a pattern we have already seen with PPE kits, oximeters and cough syrups during Covid-19, Gupta told Pharmabiz in an email.
ASPA's counterfeit news repository shows that media-reported counterfeiting incidents across sectors rose from 445 in 2018 to 559 in 2025, with a 3.4% average annual increase over the period. Within healthcare products alone, ASPA has recorded 521 counterfeits since 2018, spiking sharply during the pandemic from 27 cases in 2018 to 136 in 2021 before stabilising at 52 in both 2024 and 2025. That is still nearly double the 2018 baseline, and it tells us the problem has not gone away; it has simply matured, he noted.
Our latest Crisil-ASPA study, State of Counterfeiting in India 2025, is equally sobering. As many as 33% of consumers say they encountered a counterfeit healthcare product in just the last 12 months, and 80% believe counterfeiting in this category has increased. Consumers now perceive that 28% of healthcare products in the market could be fake, up from 20% in our 2022 survey. Worryingly, only 52% of consumers check for authenticity before buying medicines, the lowest compliance rate of any sector we studied, even as counterfeit healthcare products are perceived to be roughly 18% cheaper than genuine ones. Cheaper, less scrutinised, and increasingly prevalent, this is precisely the combination that puts patients at risk, he pointed out.
The response cannot rest on inspection and enforcement alone. Our data shows real gaps in the current toolkit: only 48% of consumers check for holograms and 40% for QR codes when buying healthcare products, well below the reliance placed on simple packaging appearance. Manufacturers must move faster on tamper-evident labels, holographic tagger foils, security blister packs and QR/NFC-based smart authentication that consumers and regulators can verify at the point of sale, not after harm is done, said Gupta.
We continue to advocate adoption of ISO 22383:2020 and ISO 28000 as the backbone of a serious anti-counterfeiting strategy, alongside sustained consumer education, a need 93% of respondents in our survey endorse. The semaglutide episode is a warning shot. Indian pharma has the innovation capacity to lead the world; it must now match that with authentication infrastructure that protects the patients who trust it, said Gupta.
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