Is Telma banned in India?

Telma is Glenmark's telmisartan, the most prescribed blood-pressure brand family in India. Telma alone, Telma-H with hydrochlorothiazide, Telma-AM with amlodipine, Telma-CT with chlorthalidone. None of it is banned. Telmisartan is an essential medicine and has never been named in a Section 26A notification.

What Telma has is a counterfeiting problem larger than any other Indian brand's. In September 2022 Himachal Pradesh drug inspectors caught a unit in Baddi manufacturing fake Telma-H under Glenmark's label. The CDSCO's monthly alerts have since flagged a spurious Telma-H batch (reported 30 March 2025), a spurious Telma 40 batch collected in West Bengal (reported 18 April 2025), Telma-AM batch 05241217A as potentially spurious (October 2025 alert) and, in the December 2025 alert published on 21 January 2026, three more Telma-AM batches and another Telma 40 batch. Each time Glenmark stated that it had not manufactured the batch. The Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance has objected to the way such findings are published under legitimate brand names, and the objection has some force: a counterfeit is not the brand owner's product.

For a patient, the risk is not that Telma has been withdrawn but that a fake strip contains no telmisartan. That argues for buying from a licensed pharmacy with a bill, keeping the strip, and checking the batch against the alerts our database tracks. It does not argue for stopping treatment; an uncontrolled blood pressure is the bigger danger.