New Delhi: The deaths of at least 20 children after consuming spurious cough syrup have once again exposed the extent to which India’s national drug regulator has hollowed out from within. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), charged with ensuring the safety, quality and efficacy of medicines across the country, responded to the tragedy with the familiar theatre of raids, sample seizures and licence suspensions. But parliamentary replies, budget documents and a decade-long trail of corruption analysed by this newspaper make it clear that the institution is neither equipped nor willing to do what it was created to do: prevent such incidents before they happen.

The contaminated cough syrup in the present case, Coldrif, contained diethylene glycol nearly 500 times the per

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