The Bombay High Court on Wednesday quashed the two orders passed by the Maharashtra Food & Drugs Administration which had restrained Johnson & Johnson from manufacturing and selling baby powder as it did not meet the “standard quality”.
The division bench of Justices Patel and SG Dige termed the Maharashtra government order “stringent, unreasonable and unfair”. The bench has now permitted the company to manufacture, sell and distribute the product.
The order has been passed after the company filed a petition challenging the orders passed by the state government in September which first cancelled the manufacturing licence of Johnson’s baby powder for its Mulund plant in Mumbai and then ordered it to stop the manufacturing and sale of the baby powder.
In September, Maharashtra FDA had cancelled the product manufacturing licence of Johnson’s baby powder manufactured at the Mulund factory.
The FDA had drawn samples of the baby powder at Pune and Nashik for quality check and the samples were declared not of standard quality, Maharashtra FDA had said in a statement. The sample did not comply with the specification for skin powder for infants in the test pH, it had said.
The administration had then issued a show-cause notice to the firm. It had also issued instructions to recall the stock of the said product from the market.
But Johnson & Johnson challenged the orders in the court for sending the samples to Central Drugs Laboratory, Kolkata, which also confirmed the report and findings of FDA Maharashtra. Following this, the company filed a petition with the Bombay HC challenging the orders.
According to media reports, J&J had said last year it would discontinue the baby powder globally in 2023 and had already discontinued the product two years ago in the US because of the alleged presence of a carcinogenic substance and several lawsuits against it.