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By:

Anil D. Salve

21 March 2026 at 8:11:09 pm

A Drought of Wisdom in an Ocean of Information

We live in an age where information is everywhere. With a single click, we can access news from across the world, thousands of opinions, countless videos and endless claims. Knowledge has never been so accessible. Yet, in this overwhelming flow of information, something increasingly scarce is discernment-the ability to distinguish what deserves our belief from what deserves our doubt. Information and knowledge are not the same. Reading, watching or hearing something does not automatically...

A Drought of Wisdom in an Ocean of Information

We live in an age where information is everywhere. With a single click, we can access news from across the world, thousands of opinions, countless videos and endless claims. Knowledge has never been so accessible. Yet, in this overwhelming flow of information, something increasingly scarce is discernment-the ability to distinguish what deserves our belief from what deserves our doubt. Information and knowledge are not the same. Reading, watching or hearing something does not automatically make it true. We need the ability to verify information, understand its context, recognise its purpose and only then form an opinion. In the digital age, this ability has become one of the most important forms of wisdom. Social media has transformed the way information travels. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and other platforms have made communication faster, wider and more accessible. But the same speed that connects society can also overwhelm it. Information often reaches us before facts do. A headline is read before the full story. A short video is watched without knowing what happened before or after it. A photograph is circulated without its original context. A message arrives with the familiar words, “Forwarded as received,” and within minutes it may reach thousands of people. By the time the truth catches up, the rumour may already have done its work. The problem becomes even more serious when misinformation is deliberately created and circulated. Rumours may be planted not merely to mislead individuals but to divert public attention from an important issue, create suspicion, damage someone's reputation or push society towards a particular narrative. A distraction does not always need to be completely false. Sometimes a small piece of truth is mixed with exaggeration, selective facts or emotional language. The result can be more powerful than an outright lie because it appears believable. This is how narratives are manufactured. Social media platforms can become powerful tools in this process. A repeated claim begins to look familiar, and familiarity is often mistaken for truth. A provocative post attracts attention. Thousands of reactions create the impression that “everyone” believes it. One emotional video triggers another, comments intensify the mood, and before facts have an opportunity to speak, public sentiment may have already shifted. This is where mob psychology enters the picture. A society can move from calm to anger, suspicion to trust, or optimism to fear with surprising speed. People who would ordinarily think carefully may react differently when they see thousands of others expressing outrage, fear or hostility. The individual begins to follow the crowd, and the crowd begins to reinforce the individual. The danger is not limited to negative emotions. The same mechanism can also be used positively-to mobilise people for social causes, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, public awareness and community action. Technology itself is neither wise nor foolish. Its impact depends on how information is created, amplified and consumed. The greatest danger, therefore, is not that we have too much information. It is that we may lose the habit of thinking while consuming it. We are increasingly becoming consumers of information rather than creators of thought. Everyone has access to information today, but access does not necessarily mean understanding. The boundaries between a rumour and a report, an opinion and a fact, popularity and truth are becoming increasingly blurred. A post does not become true because thousands of people have liked it. A video does not become evidence merely because it has gone viral. An opinion does not become a fact because it is expressed confidently. An idea does not become correct simply because it confirms what we already believe. This last point deserves particular attention. We often accept information not because it is accurate, but because it is comfortable. We are naturally attracted to information that confirms our existing beliefs and suspicious of information that challenges them. In the digital world, this tendency can be amplified by algorithms that repeatedly expose us to content similar to what we have already watched, liked or shared. Gradually, we may find ourselves living inside an information bubble where we hear many voices-but mostly voices that agree with us. That is not diversity of information. It is an illusion of certainty. Discernment does not mean doubting everything. It means thinking before believing. It means asking simple but powerful questions: Who is saying this? What is the evidence? What is the context? What may be missing? Who benefits if I believe it? And have I heard the other side? These questions may take only a few seconds, but they can prevent hours, days or even years of misunderstanding. This responsibility is particularly important for the younger generation. Children today are growing up in an environment of unprecedented information exposure. They can encounter more information in a few hours than earlier generations might have encountered in weeks. Therefore, education cannot merely teach students how to collect, remember and reproduce information. It must teach them how to question, verify, analyse and interpret it. A student who can write the correct answer in an examination may be academically successful. But a student who knows how to ask the right question is better prepared for life. The classroom of the future must therefore produce not merely informed students, but thinking citizens. They must learn that forwarding a message is also a form of responsibility. Sharing a post is not an innocent act when it can affect someone's reputation, create public fear or influence social behaviour. The challenge becomes even greater in the age of Artificial Intelligence. AI can generate information, images, audio and video with extraordinary speed and sophistication. The distinction between what is real and what merely appears real may become increasingly difficult. In such a world, human judgment becomes more valuable, not less. Technology can produce an answer in seconds. It cannot automatically tell us whether that answer deserves our trust. Some answers require experience. Some require context. Many require the ability to think independently. We have more information, more technology and more connectivity than any previous generation. Yet our real challenge is to preserve something technology cannot manufacture for us: the capacity to think for ourselves. The ocean of information will only become larger. The question will no longer be, “How much information do we have?” The more important questions will be: What should we accept? What should we question? What should we verify? And what should we reject? No technology can completely answer these questions for us. No number of likes can substitute for evidence. No viral trend can replace judgment. No majority can turn misinformation into truth. That responsibility belongs to human beings. Information can tell us what happened. Discernment helps us understand what it means, why it happened, what may be missing from the story and how we should respond. Perhaps, therefore, the greatest educational challenge of our time is not to teach people how to find more information. They already know how to do that. The greater challenge is to teach them how to pause-to pause before believing, to pause before reacting, to pause before forwarding and to pause before joining the crowd. Because sometimes the most intelligent response to information is not an immediate reaction, but a moment of reflection. The ocean is already around us. It is growing deeper every day. What we need now is not more information to swim through it-but the wisdom to know which direction to take. (The writer is the Principal of Podar International School, Ausa, Latur. Views personal.)

The Coldrif Tragedy: When Systems Fail Our Children

Writer: C.S. Krishnamurthy
C.S. Krishnamurthy
Oct 26, 2025
5 min read

Pharmaceutical negligence and a hollowed-out regulatory state have made tragedy routine in India.

Earlier this month, India confronted a familiar nightmare. Children in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh, began falling ill after taking a simple cough syrup. Before toxic batches were identified, at least 20 young lives were lost. They were victims not of disease, but of a pharmaceutical industry unchecked by conscience and a regulatory system weakened by neglect.


Tests revealed the culprit to be diethylene glycol (DEG), an industrial solvent present in Coldrif syrup manufactured by Sresan Pharma at 480 times the permissible limit. This was no accident, but a calculated betrayal where profit overrode safety, and which was enabled by a system that allowed it to happen.


The irony is unbearable. Eighty-eight years earlier, in 1937, the United States faced an identical disaster when the S.E. Massengill Company sold Elixir Sulfanilamide laced with DEG. At least 105 people, mostly children, died. The outrage led to the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, forcing companies to prove drug safety before sale and transforming the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into a true public health guardian. India, by contrast, seems doomed to repeat history rather than learn from it.


Systemic failures

The Coldrif case exposes a web of systemic failures. A syrup containing 48 percent DEG could not result from a labelling slip. Someone knew. Someone mixed industrial solvent into medicine meant for children, gambling that supervision was too weak to catch them.


Yet, accountability has been selective. A local doctor was arrested for prescribing the syrup to children under five, while the manufacturer, the real culprit, initially walked free. The Indian Medical Association rightly called this scapegoating. Under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act (1940) and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (2023), producing adulterated drugs carries penalties up to life imprisonment. But laws on paper mean little when they gather dust while children die.


Just this month, the World Health Organization told India that “much remains to be done” to halt the sale of toxic cough syrups after at least 24 children died. Investigations at Sresan Pharma’s Tamil Nadu plant revealed more than 350 critical quality-control violations — rusted equipment, untested excipients, and untrained staff. India’s drug regulator, belatedly tightening the rules, has now made DEG and ethylene glycol testing mandatory for both finished syrups and raw materials.


The deeper problem lies in India’s fractured regulatory architecture. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), under the Health Ministry, lacks autonomy and enforcement power. State drug regulators function unevenly, with overlapping authority and varying competence. A system designed in 1940 for a smaller industry now struggles to monitor a pharmaceutical behemoth.


The scale of neglect is staggering. Approximately 3,500 inspectors are reportedly responsible for nearly 10,500 drug manufacturers — barely one inspection per facility every few years. Many units haven’t upgraded to revised Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) despite repeated extensions.


Such episodes are no longer local misfortunes but international reputational hazards. When Indian-made medicines kill children abroad, the spill-over is moral, commercial and diplomatic. Regulators who claim that the tainted batches were not exported may find this comforting, but the very existence of informal export channels means the risk is latent and transnational. In a globalised pharmaceuticals market, supply-chain negligence in Nagpur or Kancheepuram can turn into a crisis in Yaoundé or Bangkok with almost no detection in between.


Broader pattern

India’s tragedy mirrors a broader pattern of pharmaceutical lapses thriving in weak regulatory environments. In Panama (2006–2007), DEG-contaminated cough syrup killed at least 78 people according to official counts, though some estimates suggest over 100 deaths. In 2019–2020, similar contamination killed children in Jammu. Since 2022, Indian-made syrups have caused child deaths in The Gambia, Uzbekistan, and Cameroon, prompting WHO alerts. In every case, industrial solvents replaced pharmaceutical-grade glycerin because DEG is cheaper.


The Panama case showed how negligence spans continents. Chinese suppliers mislabelled chemicals, Spanish traders rebranded them and officials failed to verify imports.


Earlier this month, the WHO issued yet another global alert over three Indian-manufactured syrups deemed “toxic to children,” warning that illicit exports cannot be ruled out. The repetition is chilling. Each new scandal underscores that the problem is not an aberration but a recurring structural malaise.


Here lies the cruel contradiction. India is hailed as the ‘pharmacy of the world,’ supplying affordable medicines and vaccines to 150 countries. Yet Indian-made drugs have often caused preventable deaths both at home and abroad.


Even when penalties reach millions of dollars globally, large companies treat them as a cost of doing business. Smaller manufacturers thrive under weak oversight, viewing compliance as optional. Far more than damaging commerce, each contaminated export erodes trust. When Indian syrups kill children overseas, it tarnishes not just the brand, but the nation’s moral standing.


The post-1938 American blueprint, where safety became a pre-condition for sale rather than a punitive afterthought, remains precisely what India has yet to internalise. The European Medicines Agency and Japan’s PMDA offer models of regulatory independence and transparency that New Delhi’s fragmented system sorely lacks.


Demanding accountability

True justice in the Coldrif case demands three layers of accountability:

First, criminal liability must be enforced. Executives at Sresan Pharma should face prosecution for negligence causing death, not merely regulatory violations. Suspension of licenses is cosmetic; imprisonment is deterrent.


Second, civil and financial penalties must sting. Compensation should be swift and substantial, not buried in litigation. The Panama case led to a compensation fund — modest but meaningful. India must follow suit.


Third, regulatory accountability is essential. Inspectors and officials who failed to detect the contamination must face inquiry. Were inspections skipped, or palms greased? Without systemic accountability, history will replay.


Systemic reform

Punishment alone won’t suffice; reform must follow. India needs a unified yet decentralised regulatory system where the CDSCO operates as an independent, statutory apex body coordinating with empowered state arms.


Quality Management Systems (QMS), already adopted by 85 percent of pharma firms, must become legally mandatory, with surprise audits. The Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission should conduct unannounced market testing, and special fast-track courts should try pharmaceutical crimes with technical expertise and speed.


Reform must begin before tragedy strikes. India should adopt GMP as binding law, not aspiration. DEG must be classified as a restricted chemical, its usage strictly tracked. Every batch of syrup should undergo independent pre-distribution testing.


Technology can help: digital labelling can prevent misbranding; real-time alerts can flag irregular procurement patterns.


The next step must go further: establishing a national drug-safety registry linking manufacturers, suppliers, and testing labs in real time. Such a platform, modelled on the FDA’s Sentinel Initiative, could spot anomalies before they kill. India’s ambition to be the world’s medicine cabinet must rest on credibility, not cheapness.


The Health Ministry now stands at a crossroads. It can issue another inquiry and wait for outrage to fade, or it can rebuild the system from the ground up. Reform must include statutory independence for regulators, higher inspection budgets, fast prosecution of offenders, and fair victim compensation. Coordinated international monitoring must prevent tainted exports that stain India’s global credibility.


The symmetry with the 1937 incident in FDR’s America is haunting: what spurred reform in Roosevelt’s America remains an open wound in Modi’s India. Until accountability becomes instinct rather than reaction, the next tragedy is only a shipment away.


The government will have to do more, much more, than offer token condolences to the parents of Chhindwara’s victims. They deserve swift justice, sweeping reforms and an assurance that no child will die again because medicine turned into poison.


India must finally prove it has learned what the world learned nearly a century ago: that the price of safety is eternal vigilance, not recurring tragedy.


(The writer is a Bengaluru-based freelancer. Views personal.)

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