Six months after the first child died in Parasia, Chhindwara — six months after a routine prescription for a cough and cold became a death sentence for 26 children under the age of four — the SIT investigating India's most devastating drug poisoning scandal of 2025 has made two more arrests.
On Saturday March 7, 2026, the Special Investigation Team detained two more paediatricians from Parasia: Dr. Aman Siddiqui and Dr. S.S. Thakur. Both are accused of prescribing the banned and contaminated Coldrif cough syrup to children for commission from the manufacturer. With these two arrests, the total number of accused in custody in the Coldrif case stands at 13 — a number that includes the owner of Sresan Pharmaceuticals, multiple doctors, medical store operators, a medical representative, and their family members.
The families of the 26 dead children — who have waited six months for accountability — said the new arrests brought them some relief. They want one thing: that the guilty face the full force of the law, so that no child in India dies this way again.
What Happened: The Coldrif Tragedy, Reconstructed
The deaths in Chhindwara's Parasia subdivision unfolded in a pattern so medically predictable, and so entirely preventable, that each step of the tragedy compounds the outrage.
In early September 2025, children across Parasia began presenting at clinics with routine seasonal ailments — mild fever, cough, runny nose. The kind of symptoms that bring children to paediatricians every monsoon season across India. Doctors at multiple private clinics in the area prescribed what appeared to be a standard cough syrup: Coldrif, manufactured by Sresan Pharmaceuticals of Kancheepuram, Tamil Nadu.
The children initially seemed to recover. Symptoms subsided. Parents took their children home.
Then, days later, something went wrong. The children stopped urinating. They began vomiting persistently. They became swollen. Blood tests showed dangerously elevated creatinine and urea levels — the classic markers of acute kidney failure. Kidney biopsies confirmed the cause: diethylene glycol (DEG) poisoning.
The children — most of them between one and four years old — were rushed first to Chhindwara District Hospital. As their conditions worsened, several were transferred to Nagpur, Maharashtra's largest referral hospital. Three died in Nagpur. Six died in Chhindwara over the following days. Then more. By the time the death toll stabilised, 26 children had lost their lives.
The common thread: every one of them had been given Coldrif cough syrup.
The Chemical That Killed Them: DEG at 48.6%
Diethylene glycol is an industrial solvent. It is used in antifreeze, brake fluid, and industrial lubricants. Its presence in pharmaceutical formulations is tightly regulated globally because it is highly toxic to human kidneys — particularly in children. The permissible limit for DEG as an impurity in medicines, under Indian pharmaceutical standards, is 0.1% (w/v).
When samples of Coldrif were tested at the Government Drug Testing Laboratory in Chennai, the result was staggering: 48.6% diethylene glycol — nearly 486 times the permissible limit.
The MP government lab's own testing confirmed contamination levels of over 46%. Two independent laboratories, in two different states, found the same result within a narrow range of each other. There was no ambiguity. Coldrif was not accidentally contaminated. At 48.6% DEG, the contamination was so extreme that it points to a fundamental, systemic failure in the manufacturing process — or deliberate adulteration.
The Tamil Nadu Directorate of Drug Control declared the Coldrif sample (Batch No. SR-13; manufactured May 2025; expiry April 2027) as "Not of Standard Quality" — the regulatory euphemism for a product so contaminated it should never have reached a shelf, let alone a child's stomach.
The Arrest Timeline: From Dr. Soni to Dr. Siddiqui
The first arrest in the case was made on October 5, 2025 — Dr. Praveen Soni, a paediatrician in Parasia who worked simultaneously as a government doctor and ran his own private clinic. Most of the 26 dead children had been treated at his clinic.
Dr. Soni's arrest sparked immediate controversy in the medical community. Doctors across India protested, calling his arrest "scapegoating." Their argument: a doctor who prescribes a drug that is legally available in the market, approved and distributed by a government-licensed company, cannot be expected to independently test every medicine for DEG. His job is to diagnose and prescribe; the job of ensuring drug safety belongs to the Drug Controller.
This argument has a genuine point. But it has a significant counter-point: police informed the court that Dr. Soni was allegedly receiving a 10% commission from Sresan Pharmaceuticals on every Coldrif prescription. If true, this transforms the case from negligence into a calculated financial arrangement — one in which the doctor's incentive was to prescribe Coldrif regardless of its safety profile, and the company's incentive was to maximise prescriptions regardless of its product's quality.
The MP High Court, during a January 17, 2026 hearing, rejected bail petitions filed by Dr. Praveen Soni, his wife Jyoti Soni (proprietor of the medical store adjacent to his clinic, which sold the syrup), Rajesh Soni, and Saurabh Jain. The court called the case "extremely serious," noting that the accused's role was prima facie grave and that granting bail would send the wrong signal to society. The court also referred to the Union Government's 2023 Fixed Dose Combination (FDC) guidelines, which clearly prohibit certain drug combinations for children under four years — guidelines that were apparently not followed in the prescriptions linked to these deaths.
By the time of the two new arrests on March 7, eleven accused had already been in jail for approximately six months — including Sresan Pharmaceuticals owner G. Ranganathan and medical representative Satish Verma (arrested from Chhindwara). Three drug inspectors had been suspended for negligence and lapses in quality control.
The March 7 arrests of Dr. Aman Siddiqui and Dr. S.S. Thakur — both paediatricians at Parasia — follow the same alleged pattern: prescribing Coldrif for commission, to children too young and too vulnerable to survive the consequences of what was being put into their small bodies.
Total arrests: 13.
The Regulatory Collapse: How Coldrif Reached a Shelf
Every child who died from Coldrif represents not just a manufacturing failure but a regulatory one. The question of how a cough syrup with 48.6% DEG was manufactured, batch-certified, licensed, distributed across multiple states, and prescribed to children for months before anyone noticed — is the question that India's drug regulatory system has not yet fully answered.
Step 1 — Manufacturing: Sresan Pharmaceuticals of Kancheepuram held a manufacturing licence from the Tamil Nadu Drug Control Authority. The licence permitted production of cough syrups. Quality control processes at the facility clearly failed to detect — or chose to ignore — the catastrophic DEG contamination in Batch SR-13. The Tamil Nadu government subsequently revoked Sresan's manufacturing licence and shut down the company.
Step 2 — Batch certification: Before any pharmaceutical batch is released for sale, it must undergo quality testing by the manufacturer's in-house quality control department, with batch certificates confirming compliance with pharmacopeial standards. Batch SR-13 passed this process. Either the QC testing was fraudulent, incompetent, or both.
Step 3 — Drug inspector oversight: State drug inspectors are responsible for conducting periodic inspections of manufacturing facilities and randomly testing market samples. Three MP drug inspectors were suspended for their role in the Coldrif case — an admission that oversight failed at the state level. How the syrup circulated for months without triggering a market alert is a question that the SIT's investigation must still fully answer.
Step 4 — Commission-driven prescriptions: If the commission allegation against multiple doctors is substantiated, it reveals a corrupted doctor-pharma relationship in which a company with a substandard product uses financial incentives to ensure prescription volume, bypassing the normal market mechanism that should punish unsafe drugs through reputational failure.
Each of these four steps represents a point at which this tragedy could have been stopped. None of them worked.
The WHO Alert: India Is Not Alone in This Failure
The Coldrif case is part of a pattern that the World Health Organisation has been tracking with alarm for several years. Between 2020 and 2025, multiple incidents of DEG contamination in cough syrups and medicines manufactured in India, Indonesia, and other countries caused mass child deaths across the Gambia, Indonesia, Cameroon, and Senegal — deaths that led to the WHO issuing global medical product safety alerts.
In India's own recent history, the Marion Biotech case (2022–23) involved DEG-contaminated cough syrup linked to 66 deaths in Uzbekistan, manufactured in Uttar Pradesh. The Maiden Pharmaceuticals case involved cough syrups linked to 70 deaths in the Gambia. In both cases, Indian manufacturing facilities produced drugs with toxic contamination that passed domestic regulatory checkpoints.
The Chhindwara case is different from those in one crucial respect: the children who died were in India, on Indian soil, treated by Indian doctors, dispensed by Indian medical stores. This was not an export failure. It was a domestic regulatory collapse — one that should have been prevented at every point in the supply chain.
The FDC Violation: A Law That Was Ignored
One of the most significant revelations from the High Court hearing came in its reference to the Union Government's 2023 guidelines on Fixed Dose Combination (FDC) drugs. These guidelines explicitly restrict the use of certain drug combinations in children under four years of age — including specific combinations found in cough syrups.
The court found that these guidelines appear to have been violated in the prescriptions linked to the Chhindwara deaths. Children under four were prescribed a formulation that current national guidelines suggest should not be given to children in that age group.
This dimension of the case — the violation of FDC guidelines — is separate from the DEG contamination but equally important. It suggests that even if Coldrif had been manufactured without DEG contamination, prescribing it to very young children in the manner documented in this case may have been clinically inappropriate.
The Families: Six Months of Grief and Waiting
Behind every arrest, every court hearing, every regulatory finding, are 26 families in Chhindwara who have spent six months asking a question that no official has yet answered to their satisfaction: how did this happen?
These are families who brought their children to trusted doctors with ordinary childhood illnesses. Families who watched their children recover, then crash, then die — in hospitals that diagnosed the right condition (kidney failure from DEG) but could not undo the poisoning that had already destroyed the organs. Families who watched the government ban Coldrif, arrest doctors, suspend drug inspectors, and form an SIT — while their children were buried.
The two arrests on March 7, 2026 brought them "some relief," as TV9 reported — in the cautious, exhausted language of people who have stopped expecting dramatic justice and have learned to value incremental accountability.
They want more arrests. They want convictions. They want sentences proportionate to 26 children's lives. And they want one thing above all: that no family in India should have to ask, six months after a tragedy, why a medicine that killed their child was on a shelf in a licensed pharmacy on the day they walked in.
Key Takeaways
- On March 7, 2026, the SIT arrested two more Parasia paediatricians — Dr. Aman Siddiqui and Dr. S.S. Thakur — in the Chhindwara Coldrif case; total arrests now stand at 13.
- 26 children, most under four years old, died from acute kidney failure caused by Coldrif cough syrup contaminated with 48.6% diethylene glycol — 486 times the permissible limit.
- First arrest was made October 5, 2025: Dr. Praveen Soni, alleged to have prescribed Coldrif in exchange for a 10% commission from Sresan Pharmaceuticals.
- Sresan Pharmaceuticals, Kancheepuram (Tamil Nadu), has had its licence revoked; owner G. Ranganathan is in jail.
- Three drug inspectors were suspended for negligence and quality control failures.
- MP High Court on January 17, 2026 rejected bail for Dr. Praveen Soni and three co-accused, calling the case "extremely serious" and citing violations of FDC guidelines for under-four-year-olds.
- Coldrif was banned across MP, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, UP, Delhi, West Bengal and Puducherry.
- The case reflects a systemic pattern: India has had multiple DEG-contamination scandals — Marion Biotech, Maiden Pharmaceuticals — with inadequate regulatory reform between incidents.
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