New Delhi (PTI): The National Medical Commission has not agreed to Pharmacy Council of India's proposal to allow pharmacists to write prescription, saying writing a prescription is dependent on examining patients and making a diagnosis, the government said on Friday.

Minister of State for Health Bharati Pravin Pawar said this in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha.

Pawar also said the recruitment of pharmacists in government hospitals, their salaries and the eligible qualification for becoming pharmacists in hospitals in any state is governed by the rules of the respective state.

However, she added, the Pharmacy Council of India has issued Pharmacy Practice Regulations, 2015, and amendments thereafter, as per which there is a provision for Pharm D graduates to work in the hospitals in various positions.

Besides, D Pharm and B Pharm graduates are eligible to work as community pharmacists in collaboration with physicians and other health care professionals to provide patient care, which optimizes the use of medication and promotes health, wellness and disease prevention.

Pawar said a Regional Drugs Testing Laboratory is functional in Guwahati in Assam.

The laboratory has tested 3,285 samples in 2022 as compared to 1,133 samples in 2018, she added.

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New Delhi (PTI): Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday said the Opposition is protesting for the right to vote for every Indian and demanded a "clean and pure" voter list, asserting that the issue of alleged irregularities pointed out by him will "explode" soon as it is not related to a single constituency but the whole country.

Indicating that he would not submit a signed affidavit as sought by the Election Commission, Gandhi asserted that the data analysed by the Congress to provide "proof" of "vote theft" is taken from the EC website.

"This is their data. It is not my data that I should sign. It is their data only and has been taken from their website. This is only a move to distract," he told reporters.

The Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, who participated in a protest march by the opposition on the "vote theft" issue, said the Election Commission is "silent" as the truth is before the entire nation after his charge that over one lakh votes in an assembly constituency in Karnataka were found to be fake in a research conducted by his party.

"Another thing I want to tell is that this has not just happened in Bangalore, but in different constituencies across the country, and the Election Commission knows this. The EC knows that this data will explode. What it is trying to control and hide, we will bring it out, and it will explode. The EC knows this," he told reporters.

Gandhi was briefly detained along with others as police stopped the protest march by opposition MPs from Parliament House to the EC office.

"They (EC) cannot talk as the truth is before the entire nation," the Congress leader said as he was being taken away in a bus by the police.

"This fight is not political, but for saving the Constitution," he asserted.

This fight is for 'one man, one vote' and we want a clean, pure voter list," the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha added.

He said all the MPs of the INDIA alliance were stopped and taken into custody when they were going to meet the Election Commission.

"The truth of 'vote theft' is now before the country. This fight is not political; it is a fight to protect democracy, the Constitution, and the right to ‘one person, one vote’.

"The united opposition and every voter in the country demand a clean and transparent voter list. And, we will secure this right at all costs," Gandhi claimed in a post on X later.

Gandhi had on Thursday cited data from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls to claim that over 1 lakh votes were "stolen" through five types of manipulation in Mahadevapura assembly segment in Karnataka. He alleged there were 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters or single-address voters, 4,132 voters with invalid photos and 33,692 voters misusing Form 6 of new voters.