Standards
Methodology
Sources
For medicines we use the CDSCO NSQ portal (monthly alerts from central and state laboratories, January 2019 onward) and its spurious-drug feed; Gazette of India notifications under Section 26A (S.O. and G.S.R. numbers) and CDSCO's consolidated banned-drugs list with its court-status footnotes; CDSCO directions to state licensing authorities; state drug controller orders; WHO Global Medical Product Alerts; and court orders as reported in the judgment or by the regulator. For food we use FSSAI orders, directions and press notes; the FoSCoS recall list; BIS public recall alerts; state food safety commissioner orders; peer-reviewed studies (with DOI); and results published by independent testers. News reports are used only to date an event, or where no official document is public, and are labelled as such.
How a record is made
- Fetch. A scheduled job pulls the CDSCO portal. PDFs are read by the parser published in our repository. Orders and studies are read by an editor.
- Clean up. Manufacturer names are stripped of prefixes and stray punctuation and matched across months. Product names are grouped by molecule and form. Failure descriptions are sorted into a fixed set of categories (assay, dissolution, sterility and so on). The name exactly as the laboratory printed it is always kept alongside.
- Verify. Every curated status is checked against the original document. Where a detail cannot be confirmed, say a notification number quoted only by a news report, or a court date reported differently in different places, the page shows an "under verification" note and the detail is flagged as unconfirmed in the public data file.
- Publish. The page states the status in the regulator's own words, links the source, and shows the date it was last checked. Changes are logged.
What each status means
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Banned | A ban under Section 26A (drugs) or an FSS order or regulation (food) is in force. |
| Restricted | Allowed with a condition: a dose limit, an age warning, a labelling rule. |
| Stayed | A court has put the order on hold. The product may be sold while the case is pending. |
| Quashed | A court struck the order down. |
| Halted | CDSCO told state authorities to stop manufacture and sale (the April 2025 list). There is no notification in the Gazette. |
| Under examination | Referred to the Drugs Technical Advisory Board (the pre-1988 combinations, 2017 to 2023). |
| NSQ | A specific batch failed a government laboratory test. |
| Spurious | A sample is suspected of not being what its label says. The matter is under investigation. The reply of the company named on the label is shown. |
| Recalled | Taken off the market, by order or voluntarily. |
| Notice | A show-cause notice, advisory or direction. Not a ban. |
| Licence suspended | A manufacturing or food business licence has been suspended or cancelled. |
| Cleared / Not banned / Withdrawn | Tests found no violation; no action exists; or the regulator withdrew its own order. |
How often we update
CDSCO releases its monthly NSQ alert about three weeks after the month ends. We rebuild the site within a day. If CDSCO revises a list, we compare the versions and log the changes on that month's page. Gazette notifications, FSSAI orders and WHO alerts are added as they come out. Every page shows the date it was last checked. That date changes only when the content does.
What "not found" means
The batch checker searches every NSQ and spurious record that CDSCO has published. A "not found" result means the batch has not been reported as failing a test. Only a small sample of the market is tested each month, so not being listed is not proof of quality.
Copyright and reuse
Government notifications are reported as facts, with credit and a link. We do not mirror the documents. Gazette notifications may be reproduced under Section 52(1)(q) of the Copyright Act. Our own compiled data is released under CC BY 4.0 from the data page. Reports from independent testers and journals are linked and summarised, not copied.