Pill on Jio Cinema is based on the corrupt practices of a pharma company from India. The company is called Forever Cure Pharma in the show. The show stars Pavan Malhotra as Brahma Gill, the head of the pharmaceutical company, and Ritesh Deshmukh as Dr Prakash who goes up against the corrupt and tries to take down the corrupt company along with a few whistleblowers. People who have seen the promos or the series are curious about the company shown in the web series. Let us dig in.
Forever Cure Pharma from Pill: Real Story Explored
The show is a work of fiction however Forever Cure Pharma seems inspired by the controversial Indian pharmaceutical company Ranbaxy which was involved in a similar corruption scandal to the one shown in the company. Ranbaxy was involved in malpractices such as using substandard ingredients in making medicine that would put the health of millions worldwide at risk.
Forever Cure Pharma in the show is guilty of circulating faulty medicines in markets where they could manipulate regulations. Ranbaxy was guilty of a similar crime where they falsely certified medicines for markets where regulations were not strict. The data they used for submission to authorities in these lesser markets was the data they had from medicines used in the higher-regulated markets. Ranbaxy was also guilty of mixing ingredients that failed quality tests with ingredients that passed to bring a mixture that would be good enough to get approved. According to data, ever since the year 2000 and until the scandal was unearthed in the late 2000s, 163 drugs were of substandard quality in countries like Brazil, India, and the Middle East. The scandal came to be known as the Ranbaxy Dirty Drugs Scandal.
Once the scandal came to life, there were consequences for Ranbaxy and for Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh, the owners of Ranbaxy who had sold their stake in the company in Ranbaxy to Daiichi from Japan who then filed a case against Ranbaxy for hiding important information. They had to pay a penalty of $500 Million and to finance this penalty, they had to sell their assets including a stake in the healthcare brand Fortis. Further, they had to face public humiliation for being involved in the scam.
The show is fictionalized significantly and tells the story from the point of view of Ritesh’s character. Events of the show cannot be described as a true story but the similarities between events in real life and that of the show cannot be ignored. Do you think there are similarities? Read a report by Telegraph India that described the Ranbaxy scandal in emasculate detail.