Beyond Compliance: Rethinking Drug Safety and Traceability in 2026
AltiusHub and Dr. Avi Chaudhuri explore why compliance is just the starting point for drug safety, and what it takes to truly protect patients and pharma companies in 2026.
Compliance has long been treated as the destination. In 2026, the industry is beginning to understand it is only the starting line.
Our co-founder Abiram Vijayakumar, and Dr. Avi Chaudhuri, Former Chief Scientist at Systech and Founder of The Kulinda Consortium, sat down to explore what it truly means to build drug traceability systems that protect patients and brands, not just satisfy auditors.
The result is an industry opinion paper that asks the questions most Pharma Supply Chain, IT and Packaging leaders avoid.
a. The QR Code Paradox
India’s QR coding mandate was designed to protect consumers. In practice, it created what Dr. Chaudhuri calls an “anatomy of a debacle.”
The mandate had two critical loopholes — a space loophole that allowed QR codes to be placed on secondary packaging never seen by consumers, and the absence of unit-level serial numbers that made effective authentication impossible. The outcome? Counterfeit medicines now falsely reassure consumers that they are genuine.
This is what happens when compliance becomes the finish line.
b. Authentication vs. Traceability
One of the sharpest distinctions in the paper is the difference between track and trace and drug authentication. These are not the same thing, and they cannot be solved by the same approach.
Track and trace tells you where a product has been. Authentication tells you whether the product in a consumer’s hand is genuine. Both matter. Neither is sufficient alone.
c. Consumer as the Final Line of Defense
Even the most technically sound authentication program will fail without consumer adoption. Dr. Chaudhuri’s perspective is clear: technology cannot convince a consumer to use it. That requires public awareness, simplicity, and trust earned through consistency.
d. Data Ownership, Vendor Lock-In, and Technology Choices
The paper also tackles a harder conversation: what separates technology investments in pharma that hold up over time from those that become liabilities?
The answer isn’t the feature set at the point of purchase. It’s whether the company retains control of its data and its choices. Systems built on proprietary formats, or designed to make data difficult to access, create a dependency that compounds over time. Switching becomes a business risk in itself — which is exactly how some vendors want it.
At AltiusHub, our position is straightforward. Your data belongs to you. The system should make that easy to exercise, not harder.
e. What Meaningful Progress Looks Like
Five to seven years from now, meaningful progress in drug traceability won’t be defined by new mandates or more complex programs. It will be defined by how much harder it becomes for counterfeits to enter the supply chain.
Read the Full Paper
This blog captures only a portion of the conversation. The full opinion paper goes deeper into regulatory frameworks, the role of AI, the Indian pharma landscape and what a genuinely future-ready traceability ecosystem looks like.
