The Maharashtra Legislative Assembly (“Assembly”) has proposed to amend the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, in its application to the State of Maharashtra.
At present there are about 76,800 medicine selling establishments and about 440 are manufacturing medicines in the State of Maharashtra. The numbers are increasing in thousands every year. As manufacture and sale of adulterated or spurious medicines can cause magnanimous impact in the lives of people, the Assembly has felt an urgent need to empower licensing authorities to impose penalty for not conforming to any of the conditions of license.
Therefore, in its proposal, the Assembly has inserted a new section 33-1B to give power to State Government to make rules for cancellation or suspension of licenses or imposing penalty in case of contraventions of any conditions of license with respect to:
(i) Selling, stocking, exhibiting, offering for sale or distributing Drugs other than Homoeopathic Medicines;
(ii) Selling, stocking, exhibiting, offering for sale or distributing Homoeopathic Medicines;
(iii) Manufacturing for Sale or for Distributing of Drugs other than Homoeopathic Medicines;
(iv) Manufacturing for Sale or for Distributing of Homoeopathic Medicines;
(v) Manufacturing for Examination, Testing or Analyzing of any drug in small quantity;
(vi) Requirements for the Collection, Storage, Processing and Distribution of Whole Human Blood, Human Blood Components by Blood Banks, Manufacture of Blood Products and Collection, Processing, Testing, Storage, Banking and Release of Umbilical Cord Blood Stem Cells;
(vii) Manufacturing of Cosmetics for Sale or for Distribution;
(viii) Approval of Institutions for carrying out Tests on Drugs, Cosmetics and Raw Materials used in their manufacture on behalf of licensees for manufacture for sale of Drugs or Cosmetics.
Source: Maharashtra Government
