Is Telma 40 banned in India?

Telma 40 is the plain 40 mg telmisartan tablet, the starting point of most Telma prescriptions. It is not banned. Telmisartan is on the National List of Essential Medicines and has never been the subject of a Section 26A notification.

The brand appears in CDSCO alerts as a counterfeit target. The alert for March 2025, reported by Business Standard on 18 April 2025, flagged a spurious Telma 40 batch collected in West Bengal along with 131 other drugs that failed quality tests; Glenmark stated that it had not manufactured the batch. The alert for December 2025, published on 21 January 2026, declared seven samples spurious, and a Telma 40 batch was among them together with three Telma-AM batches. Separately, generic telmisartan 40 mg tablets from other manufacturers appeared as not of standard quality in the December 2025 and June 2026 alerts; those are different products from different makers, and the finding applies to the batch named.

The distinction matters. "Not of standard quality" means a genuine product failed a test; "spurious" means the sample was not what its label claimed, in this case a fake carrying Glenmark's name. The Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance has argued that publishing spurious findings under the brand name unfairly damages the company, and Glenmark's denials are consistent with that.

For patients: keep taking telmisartan on your doctor's advice, buy with a bill from a licensed pharmacy, and check the batch on the strip against the alerts.