Man held from UP over fake medicine racket busted in Nagpur district

Nagpur, Jun 30 (PTI) Police from Maharashtra’s Nagpur district have arrested a man from Uttar Pradesh in connection with a fake medicine racket busted in March 2023, an official said on Sunday.

    A team from Kalmeshwar police station in Nagpur district recently took Raman Vijayakumar Taneja into custody from UP’s Saharanpur, he said.
    In March 2023, the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had picked samples of ‘ciprofloxacin’ tablets from a state-run healthcare facility in Kalmeshwar tehsil, about 40 km from Nagpur, and sent them to a government lab in Mumbai for testing
    The test report, which came in December 2023, showed that the tablets had no medicinal value as they had no trace of ciprofloxacin, which is prescribed to treat a number of bacterial infections, police had said.
    Since the tablets had been supplied through the Nagpur-based Indira Gandhi Government Medical College and Hospital, FDA officials early this year raided the hospital store and seized 21,600 tablets of the same brand.
    Police said the tablet strips showed that they were manufactured by a Gujarat-based company, which didn't even exist.
    Police had initially booked three persons – prime accused and Thane resident Vijay Shailendra Choudhary, Hemant Dhondiba Mule from Latur and Mihir Trivedi, a resident of Bhiwandi.
    During the investigation, Taneja’s name cropped up, the official said, adding that Choudhary was also arrested recently.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)