More than 1,000 small scale pharmaceutical units employing around a lakh of people have shut down their operations in the last one year as they could not cope with regulatory changes and the current financial crisis, says an industry body. That is at least three units a day on an average.

An equal number of companies have also shifted to states that provide tax exemptions, often retrenching people in old locations. The remaining 2,000-2,500 units are facing imminent closure.

This will result in another 500,000-600,000 technical and non-technical people unemployed in the near future, said T S Jaishankar, chairman of Confederation of Indian Pharmaceutical Industries, the umbrella organisation of various state level pharmaceutical associations. But, he said, the exact statistics were not available.