Mounjaro was brought to India eight months ago by pharma company Eli Lily.
It has become India’s highest-selling drug, even replacing the antibiotic Augmentin.
Meant to treatment of diabetes, it has significant side-effects when used for weight-loss.
A few months ago, on an episode of Kajol and Twinkle’s Two Much with Karan Johar and Jahnvi Kapoor as guests, Twinkle spoke of the travails of menopause-related weight gain and asked Johar, “Should I be injecting myself?” She was obviously referring to Ozempic, the celebrity weight-loss injection that until recently was not available in India.
Johar has been a poster child of the injection, openly endorsing it in the initial months of his transformation to a gaunt self and then going on to retract his statements with the backlash that followed.
The new celebrity around the block is Mounjaro, brought to India eight months ago by pharma company Eli Lily, nudging out Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, which just arrived in December 2025, thereby losing the first mover advantage.
Diabetologists across Indian cities are becoming some of the most sought-after doctors—not because diabetes has suddenly spiked, but because Mounjaro is now the country’s most coveted prescription. Originally positioned as a diabetes drug, it is now being aggressively sought for weight loss, metabolic “reset,” and lifestyle optimisation.
Mounjaro hit the streets faster than Ozempic in India, and its runaway popularity as a weight-loss injection reveals how quickly treatment can slide into aspiration - and how unprepared India’s healthcare system is for the shift. In the meantime, Ozempic has slashed its prices due to competition from Mounjaro and is now available at Rs 8800 for a one-month starting dose.
Such is Mounjaro’s success that in this short time frame, it has become India’s highest-selling drug, even replacing the antibiotic Augmentin, which was almost prescribed reflexively by doctors all over, to the extent that there is now a huge drug-resistance problem to lower spectrum antibiotics.
“When diabetic drugs were found to have weight loss as a side effect, doctors realised they were on to something and tested them on obese patients. It’s the genius of pharma and marketing companies to take an anti-diabetic drug and convert it into a weight-loss panacea,” says Nuzhat, an independent medical communications consultant with pharma companies.
“If diabetes was the blockbuster lifestyle disorder of the last decade, this decade it is obesity,” But Mounjaro and other such drugs are now shortcuts to “looking good,” while in reality they should only be prescribed only for extreme obesity,” she adds.
Belonging to the category of GLP-1RAs, a class of drugs that mimic a natural gut hormone (GLP-1), it works by suppressing appetite and increasing the feeling of satiety. It also reduces gastric emptying, thereby making you feel full for a long time after you have eaten. GLP-1 RAs affect the pleasure centres in the brain, reducing the release of dopamine or "feel- good" neurotransmitters. So, eating does not give you the pleasure it did....so you eat less...and you lose weight. In fact, there is ongoing research to explore the use of these drugs to treat alcohol and opioid/nicotine addictions because of the GLP-1 RAs.
Who then bears the onus of regulating its consumption and use? “Of course, the pharma companies carry a disclaimer, but it is usually in such tiny print that you will never find it, reminds Nuzhat.
"Doctors are also liable to warn the patients about the side effects. Most of the time, the patient has already made up their mind that they want the drug, and besides, the “Next to God” aura of doctors, which existed in the previous generation, is no longer the case," she adds. Besides, insulin regulation is just one aspect of diabetes and the GLP-1 RAs address just one aspect of it.
When patients walk into clinics asking for a specific drug by name, it also indicates a shift in medical authority. Speaking of the changing doctor-patient relationship and the power imbalance, Smita Das, a Pune-based diabetologist, speaks of walk-in patients who come demanding the drug, like the 22-year-old she recently met.
“The capability of people to pay for expensive medication has increased several-fold, and when they can do that, they also demand results. There are other, safer drugs which promise three to four kgs of weight loss, but patients want more and faster. And now even chemists have started selling it over the counter, and doctors are often forced to prescribe it, because of the pharma-doctor nexus," says Das.
When reminded that there are parameters to be checked and regulations to be followed, patients are dismissive and look at it as an alternative to the gym (and at 13,600 a month, it is probably cheaper than one too, and promises faster results than protein powders and other diet regimes).
“In this fast-track Blinkit and Swiggy life, it’s the younger people who resort to the easy way out, says nutritionist Mrudula Narwekar, who calls this phenomenon the other extreme of the protein powder fixation for young people who want fast results. “Diet and exercise are always better, and more sustainable, but it takes time, and young people don’t have time to wait, so they fall prey to these western fads,” she says. “It is ironic, because the West is now following what we used to do. But we are going the opposite way.”
At the end of the day, it is a drug for the elite, and the elite can afford it because they have five doctors on call, besides nutritionists and access to the best nutrients or infusions to make up for the deficit in the body.
One of the reasons such problematic drugs are flooding the market is the fast-tracking of approval that began with the COVID vaccine. A lot of parameters are compromised and let go of to bring a new drug into the market. At its claim to be able to reduce 21 to 23 per cent of body weight, Monjaro is clearly superior in performance to Ozempic (which promised 15 per cent), and the jab of choice currently, even though Ozempic is safer from a cardiovascular point of view. But the wedding season is on, there are clothes to fit into, bodies to show off, so clearly, safety is the last thing on people’s minds.
Mounjaro sits at the uneasy intersection of medicine, desire, and speed. It has exposed how quickly a therapeutic promise can slip into a cultural one, and how readily markets, doctors, and patients collude in that shift. When weight loss becomes a prescription and restraint becomes injectable, ethics can no longer be an afterthought. In the end, the legacy of Mounjaro will depend on whether we treat it as a tool within limits or as a shortcut that absolves us of asking harder questions about health, responsibility, and restraint.
