The 'Cough Syrup deaths' must scare us all in the Northeast

A superpower with killer cough syrups. Just think about that for a second. That’s India in 2025.

October is the month of celebrations. The month when the weather turns, when Durga Puja drums echo across the country, when the lights go up for Diwali, and when people start preparing for Christmas. A month of faith, of hope, of change. But what changed this October?

Twenty-one children are dead. Dead because of cough syrup.

The one thing you and I pick up casually at a pharmacy without a second thought. You take it when you have a cold, when your child can’t stop coughing, or when your throat hurts. You take it because you trust it will heal, not kill.

But in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, cough syrups sold under the brands Coldrift, Recipe Fresh TR, and Real Life were found to contain diethylene glycol, a toxic industrial chemical used in brake fluid, at levels 500 times above the permissible limit. Yes, 500 times.

What kind of country allows that? What kind of regulation looks away while poison is sold to our children as medicine?

This isn’t a mistake. This is murder by neglect.

Twenty-one children are dead, most of them from the Chhindwara and Betul districts of Madhya Pradesh. The state, of course, immediately cancelled the licence of Kataria Pharmaceuticals in Jabalpur. The company was caught storing these medicines in illegal conditions, the death syrup.

The worst part is, this isn’t new. We’ve been here before. Every year or two, a new tragedy. New names, new numbers, a different company, a different state. But the same story repeats again and again, and our children die.

There are apologies, and then, silence.

This time, even the World Health Organisation had to step in, warning the world that India, the so-called “pharmacy of the world”, is exporting poison. And yet, here we are again.

Let me tell you what scares me the most. It’s not just that cough syrup can kill. It’s that in 2025, in this new India that dreams of Mars and supercomputers, something as small as cough syrup can wipe out our children.

Why is that? Because our public health system is broken.

And that brings me to the Northeast.

Here in the Northeast, the public health system is not just broken, it’s almost non-existent.

Last year, at eastmojo.com, we made a video on this. We didn’t invent the story or twist the facts. The numbers were not from opposition parties trying to score political points. They came straight from a Government of India report.

Let’s start with Meghalaya. The state needs 112 specialist doctors in its Community Health Centres (CHCs). Guess how many it actually has? Four.

Four doctors out of 112 are required. That’s not a shortage, that’s a collapse. That’s an empty hospital pretending to function.

And this isn’t from the 1980s. This is from a government report published last year, based on data from 2021. You’d think something would have changed between 2021 and 2025, but as our reporters on the ground confirm, not much has.

So again, Meghalaya needs 112 specialist doctors. It has four.

Now, over to Assam. Out of 704 specialist posts, only 131 are filled for a state of over two crore people. That’s 573 missing doctors.

Nagaland, Arunachal, Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur — the same story. Different hills, same hopelessness.

Now tell me, how do we talk about healthcare access when we don’t even have doctors? How do we talk about development when the sick have no one to turn to?

In the Northeast, a sick person’s best friend is luck.

If you fall ill, you hope to recover before you reach the hospital. Luck plays a huge role in survival here.

Let’s look at Sikkim, my home. We’re supposed to be one of India’s most prosperous states, clean, green, and educated. But our entire healthcare system leans on one pillar, the STNM Hospital. One huge hospital, but just one.

Some will say, “But we have Manipal Hospital.” Sure. But that’s private. If STNM collapses, the whole system collapses.

The same goes for Dimapur Medical College in Nagaland, Shillong Civil Hospital, Zoram Medical College in Mizoram, Tomo Riba Institute in Arunachal, and GB Pant in Tripura. Each of these is the only major government institution in its state, each carrying an impossible burden.

People will argue, “But there are private hospitals.” Sure. But private healthcare is a luxury, not a lifeline. It exists for those who can afford it. For everyone else, there’s only prayer.

Let’s be honest, in our region, 95 per cent of people have no choice but to rely on the public health system. And that system today is on life support.

So when I say that killer cough syrup scares me, it’s not because of what happened in Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan. It’s because if it happened here, in the Northeast, we might never even find out why our children were dying. Because there are no labs to test, no doctors to diagnose, no infrastructure to investigate, and no system to scream at.

So what do we need to do? We need to attract doctors, not just tourists. We need policies that are implemented, not promises that are forgotten. We need healthcare, not hashtags.

If our governments can organise music festivals, investor summits, and tourism campaigns, not just in their states but outside as well, they can also fix our hospitals.

How many more headlines do we need before someone wakes up?

Look at these headlines — they’re real. You can check eastmojo.com:

“Boy, 9, survives lightning strike, only to die in a landslide.”

“Seven doctors for 1.17 lakh people in Mizoram.”

“Pregnant woman dies trying to reach COVID hospital 227 km away.”

These aren’t stories of bad luck. These are stories of policy failure.

The rich fly abroad for medical treatment. The middle class lines up outside AIIMS in Delhi, praying for a turn. And the poor? They sell what little they have, or die quietly in a small rural hospital with no doctor, no machine, no chance.

And yet, we call ourselves a superpower.

Tell me, what kind of superpower kills its children with medicine?

We in the Northeast know neglect better than anyone. We’ve lived through it. We’ve been called remote, exotic, and peripheral. But when a child in Chhindwara dies because of poison sold as cough syrup, that’s not distance. That’s decay. And that decay runs through the whole system.

We cannot afford silence anymore. Because next time, it could be here. It could be our children, in our towns and villages, drinking poison in the name of medicine.

And when that happens, who will we blame? The pharmacist? The company? The government?

No. We’ll have to blame ourselves for not demanding better, for not shouting loud enough, for not holding those in power accountable.

A nation that dreams of supercomputers but cannot keep its children alive, that’s not a superpower. That’s a failed promise.

The Northeast deserves better.

We deserve doctors in hospitals, not photo opportunities. We deserve medicines that heal. We deserve to live and thrive, not just survive.

And no, we don’t have to wait for the next tragedy. We don’t have to wait for the next batch of poison to reach our shelves.

We can demand accountability. We can demand help. Because we’ve already buried enough children.

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