Water woes

With reference to the article ‘Credit to water savers’ (August 31), water is becoming a precious commodity. The demands both for drinking water and irrigation surges every year. A few coastal States such as Tamil Nadu have aggressively gone for desalinating sea water into potable water despite its huge investment.

While a few States have taken rain water harvesting to recharge groundwater, yet, it lacks the required momentum.

While recycling of used water, desalination would help us to meet drinking water needs, experts must devise suitable mechanisms to arrest the surface runoff water and send it back to the ground.

The government machinery needs to give utmost priority in deepening and regular maintenance of water bodies and creation of new lakes in the catchment areas.

RV Baskaran

Chennai

Generic issues

Active Pharma Ingredients (API) is the corner stone to drug production. Most firms find it economical to outsource API. Poor quality APIs can result in illnesses and even fatalities.

Nations’ regulatory bodies do have stringent regulations to ensure the quality of the highest standards. India, along with China, dominates the market when it comes to API manufacturing, but then do we have the depth and spread of oversight on quality checks on our own APIs?

That apart, different brands or manufacturers have their own methods and benchmarks that can affect the potency of their medicines even when they are producing the same drug. And the huge spread of small generic drug manufactures only adds to the challenge. The sheen on our envious pharma capabilities will dim if we do not establish a far wider base for quality audits.

R Narayanan

Navi Mumbai

The article, ‘Indian Generic: Grappling with quality issues’ (August 31) presents the ground reality on generic medicines. The problem with Indian pharmaceuticals is that there is no monitoring and controlling system worth its name.

Every unit of medicine comes to market under self certification. The country doesn’t have enough labs to test every batch of around a lakh of formulations.

If government is serious in providing medicine at affordable cost it should fix prices of branded medicines at affordable level or get generic medicines produced exclusively by PSUs.

AG Rajmohan

Anantapur

Govt compulsions

This refers to the recent cut of ₹200 per LPG cylinder announced by the government. It is unfortunate that political parties view all such decisions from the narrow prism of “politics”.

Sometimes economic compulsions force governments to resort to certain measures as in the instant case cutting the price of gas cylinder. Retail inflation has surged beyond 7 per cent mark due to a sharp 11.5 per cent hike in food inflation. RBI rate hikes can impact growth.

To ensure that growth is not affected, supply side issues need to be addressed. Hiking export duty on various rice items is one of the measures resorted to by the government earlier. The LPG price cut is will address issues of “cost push” inflation. These are part of fiscal policy measures. The decision’s timing may seem like political opportunism. But government inaction on rising inflation too would have invited criticism.

Srinivasan Velamur

Chennai

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