Every September 25th, pharmacy colleges and associations across India light up with posters, cake-cutting ceremonies, and tributes calling pharmacists the “unsung heroes of healthcare.” By evening, the hashtags fade, and the profession returns to exactly where it was the day before – undervalued, underpaid, and structurally sidelined. This is not a rejection of celebration.

Pharmacists who kept supply chains running through the pandemic deserve acknowledgment. But a nation cannot applaud a profession for one day and ignore its systemic collapse for the remaining 364. A real shama lochana – self-examination – is overdue. India produces nearly 1.2 lakh pharmacy graduates every year. Yet ask any hospital administrator how many work as genuine clinical pharmacists – reviewing prescriptions, catching drug interactions, counselling patients – and the honest answer, outside a handful of corporate hospitals, is almost none. The Pharmacy Practice Regulations of 2015 mandated a registered pharmacist’s presence and clinical role in every hospital pharmacy.

A decade later, most “pharmacies” remain billing counters, where medicines are handed over with no counselling and no clinical oversight. A professional trained for years in pharmacology is reduced to a shopkeeper – while countries moving toward PharmD-led practice treat pharmacists as the last safety check before a drug reaches a patient. In India’s neighbourhood medical stores, the picture worsens. Pharmacy council audits have repeatedly found that many outlets operate without a pharmacist physically present, running instead on a registered........

© The Statesman