According to an Assocham study, the lethal fake drugs market is growing at 25% annually. Lending urgency to the study is a recent research article in the Lancet journal, which says that in developing countries like India, 10-30% of medicines is feared to be counterfeit. The health ministry's estimates are more conservative: It says 5% of drugs in India are counterfeit while 0.3% are spurious. A counterfeit medicine is one that has no active ingredient or is an expired drug which has been re-labelled and sold. It's slightly different from a fake drug, which may not resemble the original in any way. Under Indian law, both counterfeit and fake drugs are described as spurious medicines. Health secretary Naresh Dayal said,