India has seven sets of rules, no single regulator, and a 1954 law with prison attached.
There is no plain-language guide to any of this, and enforcement is split between a medical body, a consumer body, state drug controllers and the courts. Here are all seven, so you can check the number yourself.
Every one of these can reach your marketing.
Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act 1954
Section 3 bars any advertisement suggesting a drug will diagnose, cure, mitigate, treat or prevent the conditions listed in the Act’s Schedule. Section 7 sets the penalty: up to six months’ imprisonment, a fine, or both on a first conviction; up to one year on a subsequent one.
Source: Act text, Sections 3 and 7
Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations 2002
Regulation 6.1 prohibits a registered practitioner from soliciting patients directly or indirectly, and from advertising in a way that gains custom. These are the operative rules today. The National Medical Commission notified replacement regulations in August 2023 and put them in abeyance within weeks, directing practitioners back to the 2002 code.
Source: NMC places 2023 regulations in abeyance, directs practitioners to the 2002 guidelines
Consumer Protection Act 2019
Brings misleading advertisement within consumer law and gives the Central Consumer Protection Authority power to investigate and penalise. A patient who feels misled by your website has a forum that does not involve the medical council at all.
CCPA Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements 2022
Sets out what counts as bait advertising, surrogate advertising and a free claim, and imposes due-diligence duties on endorsements. This is the instrument that reaches influencer and testimonial content.
Telemedicine Practice Guidelines 2020
Issued as Appendix V to the 2002 Regulations. Governs how an online consultation may be offered and described — which makes it a marketing document as much as a clinical one, because it constrains what a consultation landing page may promise.
Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023
Consent, notice and data-principal rights for every digital personal data point you collect. An enquiry form on a clinical website collects health-adjacent personal data, which places the obligation on you rather than on your agency.
Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act 1994
Section 22 prohibits any advertisement relating to pre-natal determination of sex, in any form, by any person or facility. For a diagnostic centre this is the single most dangerous line on a website, and it is breached by implication more often than by intent.
The rule most Indian practices break without knowing it.
It is not an outrageous claim that gets a practice into difficulty. It is the ordinary sentence — “India’s most trusted cancer hospital”, “95% success rate”, “world-class outcomes” — written by a marketing team that has never read Regulation 6.1, approved by a consultant who assumed somebody had.
Under the 2002 Regulations the test is not whether the claim is true. It is whether the advertisement is calculated to gain custom. A superlative you cannot substantiate fails that test even when nobody complains.
This page is a marketing practitioner’s reading of published law, not legal advice. For an actual compliance position, instruct a lawyer. We will tell you plainly when a question is past where we can responsibly answer it.
The Supreme Court did not prosecute Patanjali under the 1954 Act.
The proceedings were contempt of court. Patanjali gave the Court an undertaking in November 2023 to stop advertising claims of the kind the Act prohibits. When such advertisements continued, the Court issued contempt notices, rejected the first apology affidavits, and ordered the company’s managing director and Baba Ramdev to appear in person.
The contempt proceedings were closed on 13 August 2024, with the Court accepting the apology and warning it would reopen them on any further violation.
We set this out carefully because it is quoted loosely across the Indian marketing industry as a prosecution under the Act, and it was not. The distinction matters: what disciplined Patanjali was a promise made to a court, not a conviction.
The Act still carries the imprisonment provision in Section 7. It simply was not the instrument used here.
- In Re: Patanjali Ayurved Limited, through its Managing Director Acharya Balkrishna, Baba Ramdev, SMC(C) No. 4 of 2024, Supreme Court of India. Contempt proceedings closed, 13 August 2024
- Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act 1954, Sections 3 and 7. Act text
Compliance and credibility are the same work, done once.
Everything these seven regimes push you away from — unsubstantiated superlatives, outcome claims, solicited testimonials — is also what a careful patient discounts and what an answer engine cannot verify. The rules are not a tax on good marketing here. They are a description of it.