GS1 – friend or foe to India's medicines coding system?

Recent articles published in the Indian press have expounded a provocative idea – that the involvement of coding standards group GS1 has contributed to the failure of systems in India designed to protect the public against falsified medicines.

The claim – put forward by anti-counterfeiting expert and SecuringIndustry.com contributor Dr Avi Chaudhuri via articles in Pharmabiz (1) and Express Pharma (2) – is that GS1's focus on track-and-trace standards in guidance to the Indian government resulted in systems for protecting both exported and domestic medicines that were not fit for either purpose.

In a nutshell, Chaudhuri's contention is that the track-and-trace systems are unsuitable for developing countries because of their cost and complexity, the need for each supply chain partner to upload incoming and outgoing product shipment data, and the overall inadequacy of track-and-trace as an anti-counterfeit approach – because counterfeiters do not use the regulated supply chain.

Those factors have already led to the demise of the export market system, which was withdrawn earlier this year, while the domestic system – currently being critiqued in this SecuringIndustry.com series – is likely to fail in the near future, just 18 months after it launched, he writes.

In his analysis, Chaudhuri also takes issue with the decision by the Indian government to adopt a system advocated by an organisation that "earns substantial revenue from having the drug industry adopt its coding and traceability solutions," noting that it "has a business agenda of its own that can be in stark conflict with a nation’s objective of protecting its citizens."

SecuringIndustry.com reached out to GS1 for comment on the assertions, and received the following response from GS1 India's representative Vinay Gupta, who said the Pharmabiz article – which has now been taken down – is "based on false factual premises and totally fallacious to defame us, written with the objective to cause immense reputation harm and vested interest of the author."

He added: "QR code in general, is widely used and accepted across sectors in India for varied purposes including UPI payments, accessing websites, platforms, downloading applications and forms, adding locations etc. The usage of QR codes can also be seen adopted by various government departments. Drugs companies are free to generate and are, in fact, many of them are generating QR Codes on their own to comply with the Government mandate. QR Code is an open source technology and any person or company can generate a QR code and affix it on their products, without any involvement by GS1 in any manner to comply with regulations."

The difference of opinion has led to some toing-and-froing on social media, in which GS1 India made similar claims that the Pharmabiz article had no factual basis, leading Chaudhuri to tell us that the original version of the text (to which he provided a link here) had all key claims supported by references to published evidence.

"GS1 was not aware of the evidence supporting the various claims in my article and as a result assumed there was no factual basis, when in fact the opposite is true," said Chaudhuri.

"I hope GS1 will now focus on addressing the very real concerns I raised and the best way to do that is by way of a published scholarly rebuttal for everyone to assess."

There may be an opportunity for the points raised in the articles to be considered and contested at a GS1 India media roundtable due to be held on Monday (May 19) as a satellite event to the GS1 General Assembly 2025, which is hosted this year in Mumbai until May 23. 

Keep an eye out for the next instalment in Dr Chaudhuri's series, due on SecuringIndustry.com in the coming weeks, which will provide his take on how India can move forward with its domestic coding programme. You can follow these links to read part 1 and part 2.

Top image adapted from a graphic by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

References:

1)     GS1 has caused great harm to India's fight against counterfeit drugs – Pharmabiz May 1, 2025, pages 10-11

2)     A defining opportunity for clarity from GS1 – Express Pharma May 14, 2025