With the Indian market being flooded with fake medicine particularly in the rural areas, leading pharmaceutical companies are now making serious attempts to tie up with technology partners to enable their consumers to identify genuine products in the market.

Leading Indian drug manufacturers like Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, Lupin Ltd, Glenmark Pharmaceuti-cals Ltd, Elder Pharmaceuticals Ltd and Unichem Laboratories Ltd are investing in resources and technological interventions to check the availability of counterfeit medicine in the market.

In some cases, drug makers are spending as much as 8 to 10 percent of a medicine pack's total production cost only on solutions to protect it from duplication and counterfeiting, according to company executives.

While the global counterfeit drug market is estimated to be around 75 billion U.S. dollars, in India it is much more and is estimated to be around 20 percent of the total 65 trillion rupees pharma market (1.18 trillion U.S. dollars) or 13 trillion rupees ( 236 billion U.S. dollars).

According to industry officials and sector analysts, counterfeiting takes place mostly among the top-selling brands which include medicine for cough and cold, multi-vitamins and other acute diseases. Companies, therefore, necessarily implement such services on their best selling brands.

Shakti Chakraborty, Lupin's group president for India and Commonwealth of Independent States, said, "Quality, authentic products and services are no longer an exception, they are simply expected in today's marketplace. It is imperative that regulators and companies work together to ensure they set up systems and processes and adopt technologies that would ensure that authentic drugs reach the consumer."

The move of pharma companies has also opened up a market for various such technology service providers like PharmaSecure, Sproxil and specialised packaging companies like Bilcare. Now, consumers can simply SMS unique numeric PIN from drug packs to the service provider's number and receive a response on the authenticity. In some cases, one can also check secured codes on internet.