Barcode deadline for drug exporters extended

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The Government has extended the deadline for mandatory barcoding of pharma products meant for overseas markets till July 2012. This would provide relief to drug exporters, enabling the industry to meet increasingly stringent requirements in pharmaceutical production. Earlier this year, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) had said that from July 1, 2011, medicines exported from India would be required to have barcodes. A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data on the product it is attached to and facilitates its tracing and tracking.

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