Walk into any pharmacy in India, and you are likely to see a pharmacist handing over medicines with a smile, often without a prescription or any questions asked. But behind that comforting facade lies a chain of practices that don’t always inspire confidence.
In an age where you can get everything at your doorstep in 10 minutes, the stakes are higher. Quick commerce players like Zepto and Blinkit have already come under scrutiny for delivering spoiled food items. What happens when the same model is applied to prescription medicines?
The question is simple: Can you trust the medicine you're buying or the system delivering it?
If you're wondering what the problems are with pharmacies and how you can make a smart and informed choice, read this blog till the end.
Most medicines sold in India come with a label: store in a cool, dry place. But in most parts of the country, “cool” is a wishful idea. The WHO recommends storing medicines at temperatures under 30°C. Yet, during Indian summers, temperatures can hit above 40°C.
Only some retail pharmacies have air conditioning. And even rarer is the cold-chain infrastructure in warehouses. The consequence? Medicines degrade well before they reach you. Shelf life shortens. Efficacy dips. But patients rarely connect poor results to improper storage.
Even when state drug inspectors find violations during inspections, cases are often quietly dismissed through bribery.
There’s another blind spot: the source of your medicine. Pharmacies seldom buy directly from manufacturers. Instead, they rely on a fragmented web of wholesalers and distributors.
And verification? Rarely done. Retail pharmacists don’t audit their suppliers' warehouses or inspect supply chains or even check distributor licenses. Word of mouth matters more than proper records, which makes it easy for fake or low-quality drugs to slip into the system.
In India, pharmacies rarely carry out due diligence on the distributors or wholesalers from whom they procure medicines. Background and license verification are skipped, and audits of storage conditions are practically unheard of. Instead, trust is placed on relationships and word of mouth, leaving the supply chain vulnerable.
This blind trust creates an opening for counterfeit or substandard medicines to quietly enter the system. And it’s the patients who pay the price, sometimes by risking their health, sometimes by developing avoidable complications, and in the worst cases, by losing their lives.
One such tragedy unfolded in Kashmir, where nine children died after consuming a contaminated cough syrup. It wasn’t just a lapse; it was a fatal consequence of a system that doesn’t verify what it trusts.
Recent reports of Blinkit and Zepto delivering spoiled food products have raised serious concerns about the reliability of quick commerce. If these platforms struggle to maintain yyyquality for perishables, it begs the question, can they be trusted with something as sensitive as medicine? Most e-pharmacies operate out of local warehouses that are rarely temperature-controlled. In such conditions, storing and delivering medicines safely becomes questionable, especially when efficacy and safety depend heavily on maintaining strict temperature standards.
When a doctor writes a prescription, the next step for most patients is a visit to the pharmacy. There, the interaction is typically brief. The pharmacist dispenses the medicine and gives basic instructions on how many times to take it and whether to have it with food. But that’s where communication often ends. What’s missing is critical: guidance on which foods to avoid or which other medicines could interact dangerously. These oversights can lead to side effects that are entirely preventable.
Commissions fuel this entire cycle. Pharma companies often reward pharmacists for pushing specific products, similar to how doctors receive incentives to prescribe certain brands.
This creates a double-commission loop where your health decisions are optimized for someone else's incentives, not your outcomes.
This is exactly the model SayaCare is trying to challenge.
Unlike traditional or quick-commerce pharmacies, SayaCare sources medicines directly from manufacturers. Each batch is tested independently before entering its supply chain. Once cleared, the medicines are stored in temperature-controlled warehouses and delivered directly to consumers, preserving efficacy and safety.
The company promises up to 80% off retail prices, but its bigger bet is on trust. By controlling the supply chain end-to-end and removing the layers of intermediaries, SayaCare is the only online pharmacy offering something rare in Indian healthcare: transparency. I jumped on it potato
It’s not just about medicine delivery online. It’s about making sure what arrives at your doorstep actually works.
India’s medicine supply chain isn’t just leaky; it’s broken. From warehouses without temperature control to pharmacies skipping even basic verification, the system runs less on regulation and more on relationships. And in this chaos, counterfeit and degraded medicines find their way into patients’ hands far too easily.
What’s worse: no one connects poor health outcomes to poor storage or shady sourcing. The accountability gap is wide, and patients fall straight through it.
SayaCare is betting that trust can be engineered through cold chains, direct sourcing, and batch-level testing. It’s a model that flips the script: fewer middlemen, more control, and actual quality assurance.
But in a country where shortcuts are the norm and margins are king, the question is whether doing things right can scale or if it remains just a well-lit exception in an otherwise dark supply chain.