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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores scientific efforts and regulatory solutions proposed for measuring and controlling antibiotic pollution from pharmaceutical industries located in India, speculating on what would be required to reform these industries that are so crucial for our access to antibiotics.

Paper long abstract:

Understanding the linkages between the environment, animals, and humans for the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become an important concern for scientists involved in AMR research over the last decades. One area of concern has been how wastewater from pharmaceutical manufacturing is polluting environments with effluents containing antibiotics, potentially driving the growth of AMR. Scientists have been particularly interested in investigating this in pharmaceutical production sites located in India, for instance in the city of Hyderabad, known as India’s bulk drug production capital. This paper explores scientific efforts and regulatory solutions proposed for measuring and controlling antibiotic pollution from pharmaceutical industries located in Hyderabad, India. The paper is based on preliminary thoughts from recent ethnographic fieldwork in India on antibiotics manufacturing, regulation, and export. Paying attention to the production of knowledge on antibiotics and AMR in Indian water-bodies located around pharmaceutical production sites, and the solutions proposed for controlling these toxic “hot spots” of contamination, I explore the science and regulation of effluents as a challenge encountering the very infrastructure of globalised antibiotic production – a cost-shifting system that enables the flow of cheap antibiotics from ‘The World’s Pharmacy’. By doing so, I also speculate on what would be required to reform these pharma-industrial infrastructures that are so crucial for the circulation of antibiotics globally, and on what would be needed to restore human and ecological wellness in such globally connected spaces.