UP seized fake medicines worth ₹5.43 crore, and the invoices were as fake as the drugs
Agra was the biggest haul at ₹3.63 crore. Four Lucknow firms were booked for forged bills.
Uttar Pradesh's Food Safety and Drug Administration spent this week raiding medical shops, warehouses and one illegal factory, and the pile it came back with is the kind of number you only get when a network has been running for a while. Fake, counterfeit and illegally traded medicines worth about ₹5.43 crore were seized across Lucknow, Agra, Varanasi and Gonda. Officials briefed the press on Wednesday.
Agra was the centre of it. Raids there turned up counterfeit medicines, fake labelling and forged billing worth ₹3.63 crore, including fake insulin labels, forged bills of ₹1.88 crore, and government-quota stock being sold off the books. Nine FIRs were registered. Two people were arrested.
In Lucknow the seizure was smaller, ₹41.58 lakh, but the paper trail was longer. Seven cases were filed against 32 people, and two accused were arrested. Investigators say a supply chain was running through Aminabad, and they have booked four firms: Health Plus, MK Pharma, Ram Pharma and Patient Care Surgical House. MK Pharma, they say, showed fake purchases of around ₹8.87 crore in 2025-26 and then deleted the old data. Manufacturers have already called Alkasol and Dexorange syrups sold by two of the firms counterfeit. About 39.20 lakh Zoryl M1 tablets have no verified source.
The Lucknow trail led a joint team of the FSDA, Ghaziabad Crime Branch and the Uttarakhand drug department to an illegal unit making counterfeit Clavactum 625 and Razo-D capsules. They took machinery, blister-packing and overprinting kit, and fake branded packaging, together worth about ₹2 crore. Varanasi added a ₹25 lakh seizure and one arrest. Gonda added medicines, injections and syrups worth ₹1.13 crore that officials say were linked to drug abuse.
I keep thinking about the insulin labels and the Zoryl tablets, because those are not lifestyle products you can shrug off. People take them because a doctor told them to, and they have no way of knowing whether the strip in their hand is real. Maybe the ₹5.43 crore is the part they caught this week. The unverified 39 lakh tablets are the part that already left the warehouse.
The FIRs are the start, not the map. Watch whether the four Lucknow firms lead to a manufacturer list that goes beyond Uttarakhand, and whether the deleted MK Pharma data can be recovered. A statewide raid that stops at seizures is a press conference. One that names the factories and the chemists who kept buying is a case.