The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre to furnish an expert probe committee’s report on allegations that Johnson & Johnson subsidiary DePuy had supplied faulty hip implants to hundreds of patients in India.
It also sought the government’s response to a public interest petition that accuses the Centre and Mumbai police of inaction in the matter.
A bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi asked the Centre to “inform the court whether the report of the committee headed by Dr Arun Agarwal, professor of ENT, Maulana Azad Medical College, has been submitted and if so a copy of the said report along with the recommendations/ suggestions contained therein be furnished to the court”.
“List the matter after two weeks by which time the aforesaid process be completed,” the bench, which included Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and K.M. Joseph, added.
Petitioner Arun Kumar Goenka, a Delhi-based social activist, has said through counsel Vivek Narayan Sharma that neither the health ministry nor the Mumbai police, which had registered an FIR in November 2011, has taken any civil or criminal action against the US-based company or its officials.
About 4,700 patients across India received the DePuy implants between 2005 and August 2010, the month the devices were recalled from India.
A government panel has found the company had not informed Indian regulators in 2010 about recall of the implants from Australia in December 2009. About 93,000 patients worldwide had received the recalled implants, but not all patients need revision surgery.
The company has tracked 1,080 patients in India and reimbursed the cost of revision surgery to 275 eligible patients, a Johnson & Johnson spokesperson had said last month.
Goenka has quoted reports to say the company has till date paid $4.4 billion in compensation to about 10,000 aggrieved patients in the US for defective hip implants, and that more than 1,600 similar lawsuits are still pending in US federal courts.
He alleges that thousands of Indian patients “would be unknowingly living a life in hell, if alive, or may be dead due to the negligent acts” of the company, the Centre and the Mumbai police.
He claims the Dr Arun Agarwal committee has established gross negligence by Johnson & Johnson.
Quoting the Mumbai FIR, the petition says that around 15,820 “DePuy ASR hip implants” were imported to India till 2010 but only around 1,295 devices were recalled.
It says the balance of nearly 10,000 units — after deducting the 4,700 units actually implanted — is still untraced.
According to the petition, the government had granted an import licence to Johnson & Johnson only on December 15, 2006, but the company started marketing the implants from 2005.