India: Police search drug factory linked to sterilization deaths

RAIPUR/BILASPUR: When Indian police visited Sumit and Rajesh Mahawar’s pharmaceutical plant two days ago, they say the father and son locked the doors from the inside. A few hours later, after the police left, witnesses reported smoke rising from medicines burning behind the building.
Mahawar Pharmaceuticals, run from an upscale residential street in the eastern city of Raipur, is now at the center of a probe into more than a dozen deaths in eastern India after 83 women were sterilized at a government-run family planning camp.
More possible victims arrived at hospitals from villages in Bilaspur district, about 100 km (60 miles) from Raipur, on Thursday and Friday, some clutching medicine strips from Mahawar and complaining of vomiting, dizziness and swelling, a doctor at the district’s main public hospital said.
At least one of the strips of antibiotics, seen by Reuters, was from the same batch as those handed out at the mass sterilization held on Saturday in the same district in Chhattisgarh state, one of India’s poorest.
Police say they entered the Mahawar factory on Wednesday with the help of a security guard, but at first found nothing wrong. Drug inspectors returned the next day and shut it down, but not before two men were seen lighting a pre-dawn fire out back.
A Reuters reporter found a pile of ash surrounded by spilt white powder behind a wall at the single story blue and white building. In the cinders were medicine packets, including for Mahawar Pharma’s Ciprocin 500 mg pills. The state government has now banned the sale and distribution of all medicines from Mahawar, it said on Friday. Speaking in police custody, Ramesh Mahawar, managing director of Mahawar Pharmaceuticals, told Reuters he and his son were innocent. He said the deaths and illness had only happened in Bilaspur, while his medicines have been sold elsewhere.
“The situation has been twisted in a wrong manner. We are just being harassed,” said Mahawar, who has been making drugs for 35 years and said his company had an annual turnover of around $130,000.
Nearly 28,000 tablets of Ciprocin manufactured by Mahawar were confiscated in Bilaspur on Friday, Siddhartha Pardeshi, the district’s chief administrator, told Reuters. But adding to the mystery, a preliminary post mortem report seen by Reuters for Shiv Kumari, one of the camp’s victims, said she had died of septicemia, suggesting surgical infection.