Nuskha

Inspiration On 30 September 2025 the WHO identified a cluster of child fatalities in India. On 8 October the drug regulator confirmed diethylene glycol in three cough syrups. The public alert went out on 13 October. Two weeks passed while prescriptions were still being filled. Reporting put the toll between 14 and 24 children, all under five, in Chhindwara district, Madhya Pradesh. The information was public the whole time. Nobody holding a prescription could reach it.

What it does

Nuskha takes the composition written on a prescription — the salt, not the brand — and answers two questions from official Indian government data: what the medicine is legally allowed to cost, and whether that batch is on a regulator's failure list.

It joins four government sources that have never been joined: NPPA ceiling prices (the legally binding maximum under the Drugs and Prices Control Order), Jan Aushadhi generic prices, CDSCO NSQ batch-failure alerts (3,591 records, April 2024 – July 2026), and WHO Medical Product Alerts (15).

For atorvastatin 10mg the result is stark: a legal ceiling of ₹4.94 per tablet against a government generic at ₹0.88 per tablet — a 5.6× gap. Both figures official. Same medicine.

How we built it

A Strands Agents agent with three tools — find_alternatives, get_price, check_quality_record — over a local SQLite database built by parsing the published government documents. The agent is composition-first: a brand name cannot be resolved, because the comparison is only meaningful between identical compositions. A deterministic query layer runs the same logic with no model and no credentials, so the tool is reproducible without an AWS account.

Challenges we ran into

Two tiers of quality data had to be kept separate, because they carry different authority. NPPA quotes prices per capsule; Jan Aushadhi quotes per pack — comparing them raw produced a "floor" above the "ceiling". Fixed by normalising both to a per-unit basis and only comparing when the dosage forms match.

The harder problem was correctness under weak matching: strength matching alone still returned a combination product as "the ceiling" for a plain single-ingredient medicine, so combination products are now flagged and never used for a ratio.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The join itself. No existing tool — including NPPA's own Pharma Sahi Daam — connects the price record to the batch-failure record. For Coldrif, the cough syrup at the centre of the 2025 contamination event, Nuskha returns the regulator's batch record (SR-13, "Adulterated", October 2025) alongside the WHO international alert, as two separate tiers with two separate authorities.

Also: a fresh clone works with nothing but the standard library. The database builds on demand from the tracked JSON.

What we learned

A number without its source and authority level is not usable in a health tool. Every claim now carries both, and the levels never blend — a regulator's record is labelled a regulator's record, a WHO publication a WHO publication.

What's next for Nuskha

Resolve the price data from the issuing bodies rather than the mirrors currently used — the output says so on every answer. Extend NPPA coverage from the 206 formulations captured to the full DPCO schedule, and add dosage-form matching to the price comparison.

Built With

• ai-agents
• amazon-bedrock
• amazon-web-services
• health
• open-data
• python
• sqlite
• strands-agents