Revised 16 September 2026 · v1.1.0 · what changed

Jan Aushadhi — formally the Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana (PMBJP) — sells generic versions of almost the entire National List of Essential Medicines at government-run Kendras, priced 50–80% below branded equivalents. Its current product basket, per the official PMBI Product List, runs to 2,439 items. This piece does two things with that list: shows what's actually in it, and traces what can honestly be said about where the active ingredients behind its best-known molecules come from — a question this blog has already found, in researching India's broader pharma-API dependency, does not have a single clean answer.

Union Minister Mansukh L. Mandaviya at the signing of an MoU between the National Yuva Cooperative Society and the Bureau of Pharma PSUs of India (BPPI) to set up 1,000 more Janaushadhi Kendras. Source: Press Information Bureau, Government of India, Wikimedia Commons, GODL-India.

1. What's actually in the catalogue

The 2,125 medicine-type products span roughly 60 named therapeutic groups; a handful account for most of the basket.

The remaining ~580 medicine products spread across smaller categories — ophthalmic/otic, urology, gynaecology, orthopaedics, anti-fungal, steroids & hormones, and further down, single-digit groups like anti-retroviral, anti-viral and vaccines. The other 314 products are surgical items and consumables (gloves, sutures, catheters, dressings) with no active pharmaceutical ingredient and no bearing on the sourcing question this piece is actually about.

2. The question this list alone can't answer

India's pharma-API dependency on China is well documented at the national level: this blog's earlier reporting found 43.45% of India's pharma imports by value come from China, and that China supplies 70% or more of 97 distinct active ingredients. What doesn't exist — not from BPPI, not from PMBI, not from CDSCO's WHO-GMP manufacturer registry, not from any secondary source this research could locate — is a public dataset connecting any specific Jan Aushadhi product, batch or drug code to the country its API actually came from. CDSCO's WHO-GMP database records where the formulation is made (India has 1,500+ WHO-GMP-certified facilities); it says nothing about where the powder that went into that formulation was synthesised.

So the honest version of this question isn't "which Jan Aushadhi drugs use Chinese APIs" — nobody publishes that — it's "of Jan Aushadhi's most common molecules, which are independently known to be China-API-dependent, and by roughly how much."

3. The cross-reference: 15 molecules, checked against the catalogue

Matching well-documented China-dependency figures against how many distinct Jan Aushadhi SKUs contain each molecule (by name, case-insensitive, across every formulation and combination product) gives a genuine, if partial, picture:

Four findings stand out. First, the molecule with the single largest number of Jan Aushadhi formulations — metformin, 77 SKUs once every dose strength and combination is counted — is also one where the PLI scheme claims real if partial progress, unlike paracetamol (43 SKUs, 91% dependent, not on the PLI's localised-molecule list at all). Second, Penicillin G and Rifampicin both show the same pattern, drawn from this blog's own earlier PIB Annexure analysis: both are Bulk Drugs PLI-localised molecules, and both are still near-total or flat China-dependent (95.8%, and 89.17%→89.01%) — localisation and falling dependency are not the same thing. Third, ibuprofen cuts the other way: its dependence fell sharply, 99.34% to 80.73% in a single year, with no PLI project behind that improvement at all — market forces alone moved this number more than the PLI scheme moved Penicillin G or Rifampicin. Fourth, for five of the fifteen molecules checked — cefixime, ceftriaxone, metronidazole, azithromycin and ampicillin — no independently verifiable China-dependency figure could be located at all. That is a real gap in what is publicly known, not a finding of low dependency; this piece reports it as a gap rather than guessing a number.

4. One product that quietly disappeared

An earlier, apparently older PMBJP price list this research also examined listed "Rifampicin and Isoniazide Tablets IP (450mg+300mg)," a fixed-dose anti-TB combination, drug code 379. That exact product — and anything else containing "rifampicin" or "isoniazid" by name — is absent from the current 2,439-item catalogue. Rifampicin itself remains a Bulk Drugs PLI-localised molecule, so this isn't necessarily a supply problem; it could equally be a reformulation, a rename, or simply that the older list this research consulted was already stale by the time it was found. Flagged here as an open question, not a conclusion.

5. What would actually close the gap

Nothing in this catalogue or its category structure is a mystery — PMBI publishes the product list itself in full, and it updates daily. What's missing is one layer down: BPPI does not require or publish API country-of-origin disclosure from the manufacturers whose formulations it lists, the way, for instance, US FDA drug listings increasingly require facility-level API sourcing data. Without that, a reader can know that Jan Aushadhi's paracetamol is one of 43 SKUs pulling from a China-91%-dependent molecule, but not whether the specific strip in a specific Kendra's shelf traces to a domestic KSM plant or an imported one. Closing that gap is a disclosure-policy question, not a research one — and outside what this piece, or any public source available to it, can currently answer.

Sources: official PMBI Product List (pmbi.co.in/ProductList.aspx), full CSV export dated 16 September 2026, consistent in size (2,439 products) with the 2,110-medicine + 315-surgical basket the government reported as current to 31 December 2025 in a February 2026 Lok Sabha written reply (PIB annexure, static.pib.gov.in); this blog's own "India Cannot Sell ‘China-Free’ Medicine While Importing 43% of What's In It" and "India's ₹60,000 Crore API Push, Traced to Its Six Actual Schemes," whose PIB-sourced China-dependency and Bulk Drugs PLI figures are reused directly here, not re-derived; the Ciprofloxacin, Rifampicin and Ibuprofen FY23-24/FY24-25 figures corrected against and reused from this blog's own "Five Years and ₹25,000 Crore Later, China Still Supplies Three-Quarters of India's Drug-Making Ingredients," whose 90-line PIB China-import Annexure (PRID 2237414, 10 Mar 2026) is the primary source — this piece's first published version had a less precise Ciprofloxacin figure and reported Ibuprofen as unquantified, both corrected after a same-day archive cross-check; industry/trade-press commentary (of less certain primary-document backing, flagged accordingly) for the diclofenac figure. SKU-match counts were computed by case-insensitive substring search against the product list's Generic Name field and are reproducible against the source file. pmbi.co.in, janaushadhi.gov.in and the PIB annexure PDF could not be fetched directly from this session's network; the underlying product list was supplied directly by the reader.

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See also: India Cannot Sell “China-Free” Medicine While Importing 43% of What's In It · Five Years and ₹25,000 Crore Later, China Still Supplies Three-Quarters of India's Drug-Making Ingredients · India's ₹60,000 Crore API Push, Traced to Its Six Actual Schemes · Ethanol Freed Up Refinery Capacity for Petrochemicals. The Pharma Chain Hasn't Seen Much of It Yet..

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.