Indian Pharma Fraud and Beyond

This now-famous book—a New York Times bestseller—has created much stir by bringing forth the story of Dinesh Thakur, an Indian born pharma researcher cum manager turned whistle-blower. Thakur had not only alerted the United States (US) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about the systematic fraud being perpetrated in drug-quality checking by Ranbaxy, a leading Indian pharmaceutical multinational company exporting generic medicines to the US market, but also pursued the matter with the FDA for more than a decade. An equally revealing account provided by the book is of the procedural delays by the US FDA bureaucracy in nailing down Ranbaxy in a legally watertight case, largely undermining the interests of the patients. However, a problematic aspect of the book is the author’s choice of framework for exploring the issues of drug-quality testing, which reflects a subtle bias against the Indian generic drug industry as such. The current review brings these aspects into discussion.

The Protagonist