Mohammed Sajid & Tarun Kartick
Port Blair, Sep 15: The Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands is of the fastest growing UTs of India and has a lot of potential to be exploited in the field of medicine and health care. With the unavailability of specialist medical facilities every year thousands of patients from these Islands travel to other parts of the country for undergoing specialized treatment.
With the development of these Islands and improvement in the economical conditions of the residents of these Islands most of the patients nowadays are shifting to private practitioners and prefer to buy drugs from medical stores instead of obtaining it for free from the hospitals of Directorate of Health Services.
Because of this shift in the mentality of the residents, hundreds of Medical Stores have opened up in these Islands in the last five years.
Presently according to the recent statics there are almost 110 registered medical stores in these Islands. Mushrooming of medical stores is raising concern about the quality of the drugs that these stores are selling.
People always have a doubt in mind while approaching medical stores about the quality of the medicines that they are buying.
In Andaman and Nicobar Island the Directorate of Health Services is the controlling authority of drug sale but sadly the Directorate of Health Service has no full time Drug Inspector.
The directorate is operating with two Ex-Officio additionally charged pharmacists working as drug inspectors for the 110 druggist selling medicines and other related products throughout the Union Territory.
Further the drug inspector is a statutory post dealing with law, rules, regulations of Drugs and Cosmetics Acts and is notified by the Lt. Governor although the present Ex-officio in charge have necessary qualification for drug inspector but many believe that still the additional charge on the two pharmacists will not serve the purpose of effective administration of drugs in the Islands.
All the states and Union Territories in India have proper posts of Drug Inspectors and Andaman and Nicobar Islands is perhaps the only place where such a responsible post is temporarily filled by Ex-Officio In-charge.
The recruitment rules for the Drug Inspector has already been framed by the Andaman and Nicobar Administration, which has also been notified to DHS but still the DHS has not made permanent posting for the same.
The Drug Administration in these Islands is now been doubted by the residents and most of the people specially the much educated ones now avoid buying medicines from the newly opened drug sellers.
Already in recent past CBI has found distribution of sub-standard medicines in Andamans and if the DHS does not post full time Drug Inspectors the Andaman Market with soon flood with sub-standard and fake medicines.
Hope the Administration will wake up soon, before a major disaster. Hope full time, well educated and well learnt Drug Inspectors will soon be appointed by the DHS.
