But Ranbaxy Laboratories' state-of-the-art plant in the Himalayan foothills - where it is ready to supply 20 million generic anti-anthrax antibiotics a month for the US market - offers none of those grim scenes.

The pristine plant belonging to India's top-selling drugmaker - a five-hour drive along a twisting road from the capital of New Delhi - could as well be in the middle of Iowa farm country in the United States. Ranbaxy sprang into the headlines after it offered to supply 20 million generic tablets of Cipro - the preferred anthrax drug treatment - to the United States as panic mounted about the possibility of a broad bioterrorist attack on the country.

But here it is bucolic. The air is crystal clean. Lush, green fields stretch as far as the eye can see.

The 160 technicians put in eight-hour shifts and the employees - from the plant director down - eat hearty, nourishing meals from the same, heavily subsidized menu.

Plant director Ramesh Parekh said Ranbaxy was known as a "good paymaster" in the area.

If it gets the green light, the plant near the Sikh shrine of Paonta Sahib on the banks of the Yamuna River, would be at the centre of the firm's US-bound production, Parekh said.

Right now, the lone company allowed to sell Cipro in the United States is German drug company Bayer AG, whose patent on the medication expires in December 2003.

Canada, gripped by scares over anthrax despite no cases so far, has already ordered generic anti-anthrax pills from privately held Apotex Inc and the United States is talking to Bayer about relaxing its patent.

The anthrax scare has opened up a new potential revenue stream for Indian generic drug companies, which this year emerged as a provider of inexpensive AIDS drugs for Africa.

Indian law allows patents only on processes by which drugs are made rather than the drug itself. As a result, Indian companies can produce drugs which are under patent in the West as long as they make them differently from the original.

Ranbaxy made the proposal to supply generic Cipro after it got a call from New York Senator Charles Schumer - who has been pushing Washington to build up emergency medical stocks - asking whether it could provide the drug at short notice.

Another Indian drugmaker, Cipla, has also offered to sell the generic drug to the United States to combat the disease which has killed at least one man in the United Sates and panicked millions worldwide.

However, Ranbaxy is well positioned to sell to the United States ciprofloxacin, as generic Cipro is known. Its twice-a-day pill already has US Food and Drug Administration approval for sale once Bayer's patent expires.

"To produce 20 million ciprofloxacin pills would be around a 20-day job for a machine working about eight hours a day," said Parekh, a 26-year Ranbaxy veteran. He said the company at the moment makes about eight million ciprofloxacin pills a month.

"If a tragedy happens, we can definitely respond," Parekh said. "We're prepared to go on a war-footing."

In fact, just one of the plant's three shiny, tablet-compression machines can spit out around one million pills in an eight-hour shift.

"Our facilities are world-class," said Parekh, as white-coated technicians monitored the computer-aided equipment.

Conditions on the factory floor are spotless. No one can enter without wearing a cap, white gown, mask, gloves and disposable slippers.

Bayer, seeking to deflect calls for the sale of knockoffs of its drug, has promised to more than triple production to meet the dosage requirements of 1.7 million people. US officials, though, want to set aside enough medicine to treat 12 million.

Ranbaxy has not said at what price it would sell the tablets in the United States but promised it would be "attractive."

A two-month course of Cipro in the United States - the amount of time needed to treat someone testing positive to anthrax exposure - costs about US$600. In India it sells for the equivalent of just US$20 - a thirtieth of the US price.

"Much will depend on the scale of the fright in the United States and to what extent it plans to stock Cipro for its citizens," C. Srihari, analyst at Khandwala Securities, said.

Agencies via Xinhua