MP: Digvijay Accuses BJP of Taking Funds from Pharma Firms Making Substandard Drugs

Rabindra Nath Choudhury

Bhopal, Oct 25: Congress veteran and former chief minister Digvijay Singh on Saturday alleged that BJP has collected election donations to the tune of Rs 945 crores in the form of electoral bonds from various pharma companies. Products of 35 of them have failed to meet the quality standard set for them.

The pharma companies whose products were found to be not of standard have played the business game of ‘give political donations and sell substandard drugs’, he alleged.

Talking to reporters here, the Rajya Sabha member said that the business of selling spurious drugs has been growing in Madhya Pradesh for quite a long time.

The recent death of 26 children due to the toxic Coldrif cough syrup in Madhya Pradesh is the bright example of corruption and playing with human life, he said.

He said that the ‘killer’ cough syrup had 48.6 percent of diethylene glycol (DEG) which is much more than the permissible limit of 0.1 percent.

The cough syrup was prescribed by the private doctors for the patients and sold in the open market, he said.

‘It is unfortunate that the state health committee headed by chief minister Mohan Yadav had failed to take note of it. State health minister Rajendra Shukla is the vice-chairman of the committee”, he said.

He demanded the resignation of health minister Mr. Shukla for initially giving clean chit to the cough syrup that caused death of children in the state.

He accused the Centre of showing laxity in monitoring the pharma companies regularly to stop production of substandard drugs.

Mr. Singh said that as per the World Health Organization (WHO) estimation, the Centre loses a revenue of Rs 52,000 crore when around 20 percent of medicines turns out to be spurious or substandard.