When I assumed charge as the Director of NIPER Mohali in 2017, I made it a point to personally visit every facility on campus. I wanted to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the infrastructure I was entrusted with. One building, however, stood out—not for its promise, but for its perplexing deadweight. It was the Technology Development Centre (TDC) – Dosage Form, a gleaming but unused structure often referred to internally as TDC – Formulations.
On paper, the facility was touted as a first-of-its-kind—a pilot-scale formulation plant housed within an academic institute. According to institutional records, the TDC was a state-of-the-art Pharmaceutical Formulation Pilot Plant, supposedly built as per current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) standards for Oral Solid Dosage (OSD) manufacturing. With a built-up area of over 24,000 sq. ft and a planned 200 kg batch size capacity, it sounded like a dream project that could bridge academia and industry.
But the reality on the ground was starkly different.
Originally envisioned as a small, educational facility to familiarize pharmacy students with formulation practices, the project morphed into a sprawling industrial-scale structure. The committee overseeing its planning, headed by Prof. Saranjit Singh, made sweeping changes to the original design. The result: what was meant to cost around ₹1 crore ended up exceeding ₹5 crore—and even then, it remained incomplete and non-functional.
When I visited the building, I was baffled by its design flaws. The vertical clearance between the floor and the ceiling was inadequate for a functioning plant. The number of air conditioning units needed to stabilize temperature and humidity made operations unviable. From a regulatory, architectural, and financial standpoint, the building was a disaster. Not surprisingly, CAG audits and the Ministry raised red flags, though curiously, the core issue of faulty design was never seriously investigated.
By the time I took charge, the TDC had been lying locked for several years—a monument to bureaucratic inefficiency and wasted public money.
Despite its obvious flaws, I made efforts to make the facility useful. My strategy was simple: if we couldn’t run it as a plant, we could still repurpose it for training and skill development. I brought in a scientist with industrial experience and, in June 2018, launched the first Pharmaceutical Industrial Training programme at the TDC. We inaugurated the event with Mr. B.K. Samantray, Deputy Drugs Controller at CDSCO Baddi, as the Chief Guest. The programme made headlines and brought a glimmer of relevance to the otherwise dormant building.
My larger vision was to use this engagement to bring industry to NIPER Mohali—to showcase our instrumentation, scientific expertise, and research infrastructure. I hoped this exposure would lead to collaborative projects and consultancy work, and that NIPER could finally start earning its keep. To that end, I was even in the process of formalizing an MoU with the Indian Pharmaceutical Association (IPA). The idea was to offer hands-on training to pharmacy students across Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, and the rest of North India.
But my efforts were stonewalled.
Beyond the initial training sessions, I was systematically blocked from expanding the TDC’s scope. Every MoU I proposed was subjected to scrutiny and delays, mainly by Dr. V. M. Katoch and Mr. Rajneesh Tingal, Joint Secretary in the Department of Pharmaceuticals. No one wanted to take ownership of the design blunders. No one was held accountable for the cost overruns or the failure to deliver a functional plant.
To make matters worse, NIPER Mohali was embroiled in internal strife. While newer institutes like NIPER Hyderabad and NIPER Guwahati surged ahead with strong leadership and institutional focus, Mohali was caught in a quagmire of legal cases, director suspensions, CBI inquiries, and administrative turf wars.
The TDC, which could have been a model for academia-industry synergy, became a white elephant—a costly, dysfunctional relic of poor planning and unchecked egos.
I made a sincere attempt to breathe life into this failed structure, to extract some value from the crores of rupees already spent. But when institutional support is replaced by internal sabotage and bureaucratic apathy, even the most well-meaning efforts are doomed.
It’s time someone asked the hard questions. Why was such a flawed design approved? Who allowed the cost to balloon fivefold? Why was no action taken for years? Public money deserves better accountability. Students and industry deserve better infrastructure. And science, above all, deserves integrity, not indifference.
