HYDERABAD: Health Minister C. Lakshma Reddy said that 545 cases booked for sale of Gutka/pan masala in violation of the prohibition orders and a total amount of Rs. 50 lakh fine had been imposed on the violators in line with the provisions under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006.
The Government had issued orders prohibiting sale of Gutka/pan masala in January and it was being implemented in cooperation with the Vigilance & Enforcement, Commercial Taxes, Police, Transport and other departments. Mr. Lakshma Reddy was replying to a query by Leader of the Opposition Mohd. Ali Shabbir who expressed concern over the availability of the products in spite of the prohibition, during the Question Hour in the Legislative Council on Wednesday.
The Minister said though these products were not liberally available in the market, sporadic incidents of people selling these products were being detected. The Government had also taken up large scale campaign against the ill-effects of consumption of tobacco products. Congress member Ponguleti Sudhakar Reddy wanted the Government to constitute a special task force to check these sales which crossed ₹100 crore in the twin cities alone.
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Sub-standard drugs
To another query on sale of duplicate and sub-standard medicines, the Minister said inspections conducted by the drug inspector had revealed that 46 samples out of the 8,293 lifted were found to be not of standard quality. Of these, 43 drugs were listed under the not of standard quality category and three under spurious category. The department had also filed criminal cases against 43 manufacturers for manufacturing the not so standard quality drugs and the cases were pending trial in the courts concerned.
Congress member M.S. Prabhakar Rao expressed concern that spurious drugs were freely available in the market as the drug control administration was conducting namesake inspections on medicine manufacturers. The Government could consider the Chennai model wherein the Government opened the outlets to sell medicine at 15 per cent lesser than the market price.
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Seats increased
In reply to a query by TRS member Paturi Sudhakar Reddy, the Minister said the Government was proposing to set up a medical college in collaboration with the Singareni Collieries Company Limited and another college at Karimnagar was also under active consideration.
In addition, a proposal for setting up a rural medical college in the vicinity of NIMS Bibinagar was also being examined. Following the increase in the number of colleges, the availability of MBBS seats had gone up by 950 and the PG seats increased by 37.