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The Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC)’s recruitment drive will address manpower shortage in the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by 2026, according to an official associated with the development.
MPSC has already floated the advertisement for recruitment drive and examinations for the same are scheduled to be held in the month of March 2026.
The manpower crunch has been badly impacting the routine tasks in Maharashtra FDA like inspections and drug sampling towards quality and compliance as out of the total 200 sanctioned posts of drug inspectors (DIs), only 45 DIs are currently working with 155 posts lying vacant. Besides this, Mumbai has only 7 DIs against the requirement of 21 DIs.
Currently, only 48 assistant commissioners (ACs) are working against the requirement of 66 ACs and 2 posts of joint commissioners (JCs) are also vacant against the requirement of eight.
Based on these requirements, the MPSC has initiated recruitment process for appointing 109 new drug inspectors (DIs) in the Maharashtra FDA to boost regulatory oversight.
This will meet the state regulator’s urgent manpower requirement as Maharashtra houses 900 allopathic manufacturers, 440 ayurvedic manufacturers and 408 cosmetic manufacturers. Besides this, there are 105,000 retail and 32,000 wholesale license holders in the state.
Three months ago, Maharashtra FDA detected a significant case of spurious drugs supplied to government hospital pharmacies, raising serious concerns about public health and safety.
To address quality issues, the state drug regulator recently procured high-end testing instruments for its Mumbai and Aurangabad labs to boost drug testing capabilities.
The Maharashtra FDA has equipped its laboratory infrastructure with state-of-the-art analytical instruments including High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), Infrared (IR) Spectroscopy, Ultraviolet (UV) Spectroscopy and Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS). These high-end technologies along with upgradation in manpower are expected to significantly enhance quality and capacity of drug testing thus ensuring compliance and patient safety.
Besides this, Maharashtra FDA has inspected all public testing laboratories approved and licensed by the Maharashtra FDA. These public testing labs are equipped with highly advanced and sophisticated instruments to help those manufacturers which lack such facility to assess the drug quality effectively.
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