From Junagadh, since 1950
Gandhi Brothers
Ayurvedic manufacturers — Junagadh, since 1950
FOUNDATION
A house at the foot of Girnar
In 1950, in a city whose Ayurvedic tradition has been carried by its vaidyas, herbalists, and trading houses for more than two thousand years, Jamnadas Gordhandas Vithalani opened a small Ayurvedic dispensing and raw-material house at the foot of Mount Girnar. He weighed out raw dravyas on brass balances, hand-selected churnas, and sourced classical preparations from across Saurashtra and Kutch. There was no signage announcing it. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew where to go.
LEGACY
The first twenty-five years
For a quarter-cenThe house's reputation was built on what it refused to keep: any dravya that didn't match in colour, scent, taste, or fracture went back where it came from.tury the work was almost entirely retail. Whole haritaki came in by the sack from Kathiawar, ashwagandha root from Mandvi, vidanga from the Western Ghats. Each lot was stored, identified, weighed, twisted into paper packets, and handed across the counter — the same trade that had been done on the same lanes for centuries.
INNOVATION
Hands before machines
By the mid-1970s a quiet problem had become impossible to ignore. Customers were buying whole herbs in good faith, then carrying them home and finding they had neither the time, the tools, nor the patience to powder them properly. A churna prepared badly at home is an Ayurvedic preparation wasted. So our grandmother took up the work herself. From 1974 to 1989, for fifteen years, she ground herbs by hand — with stone mortar and pestle, in the slow, unhurried rhythm that classical preparation actually requires. She finished what the customer had paid for, and then handed it back ready to use. This was household service work — a dispensing house's most patient hand — long before any manufacturing licence existed in the family's name.
PROGRESS
The first machine
Toward the end of the 1980s the demand had grown beyond what one person could do. The family bought its first mechanical pulverizer. The churnas her hands had been making for years — Triphala, ashwagandha, vidanga, Sitopaladi — now came off a motor instead of a stone. The preparation did not change. The throughput did. For the first time, pre-powdered churnas could be offered as a regular line, rather than a favour.
PACKAGING
A sealed pouch
A decade later came the second turning point. Around 1998–99, the family bought its first hand band sealer. Until then, churnas had gone out the way they always had — in folded paper twists, sometimes a glass jar for regular customers. The band sealer changed everything: powders could now be filled, sealed, dated, and stocked. Shelf life had a meaning. Pouches could travel further than walking distance. The dispensing house, almost without anyone announcing it, had begun to look like something more.
REGULATION
A licensed manufacturer
On 25 July 2013, brothers Kimpal and Atul Rasiklal Vithlani — inheritors of the lineage Jamnadas began — formalised what the family had been doing informally for forty years. They founded Gandhi Brothers as a registered Ayurvedic manufacturing partnership and applied for Form 25D under the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945. The licence — GA/2079 — was issued by the Food and Drugs Control Administration (FDCA), Gujarat, granting them legal authority to manufacture Ayurvedic medicines and Ayurvedic cosmetics for sale across India. Household preparation had become a documented, inspected, accountable manufacturing operation.
EXPANSION
The factory at Gomti Bhavan
The work is now done from a four-floor facility at Gomti Bhavan, Azad Chowk, Junagadh, approved by the Joint Commissioner (Ayurved), FDCA Gujarat in October 2023 under plan reference Plan/GANDHI/2023/63082/D/Ayu. The plant now carries the equipment the family did not have for the first forty years of its life — pulverizer, vibro sifter, fifty-kilogram mass mixer, thirty-kilogram fluid bed dryer, twenty-station compression machine — along with the workflows that come with them: raw-material identification, batch manufacturing records, in-process quality control, and finished-product release. The approved scope of manufacture covers Churna, Tablet, Capsule, Oil, Ghrit, and External Preparations, alongside Ayurvedic cosmetics — Hair Oil, Cream, Lotion, Shampoo, and Powder.
PRESENT
Two houses, one lineage
The two firms still work side by side. Jamnadas Gordhandas Vithalani (JGV), now a Hindu Undivided Family, continues as the family's raw-material and dispensing arm — the same trade it has done for seventy-five years. Gandhi Brothers stands as its manufacturing house. Raw materials sourced through JGV become finished Ayurvedic preparations through Gandhi Brothers, under a clear inter-entity documentation trail as required by FDCA Gujarat.
What we make
Across the catalogue, Gandhi Brothers produces fifty-eight distinct SKUs across fifty-two entries, organised in three sections: proprietary single-herb and combination preparations, classical polyherbal compounds prepared from the recognised Ayurvedic texts, and a base of single-herb churnas and capsules. Each preparation carries its own Batch Manufacturing Record, identity testing, and packaging line.
The standards we hold ourselves to
Every batch is prepared under Good Manufacturing Practice for Ayurvedic medicines (Schedule T, Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945) and recorded under Schedule TA. The manufacturing licence is now perpetual under the Drugs (4th Amendment) Rules, 2021, subject to annual self-declaration of continued GMP compliance to FDCA Gujarat. Identity, purity, finish, labelling — each step is documented and open to inspection. The discipline is the same one our grandmother kept by hand, written down now in registers and signed by the partners.
The generation that comes next
The fourth generation of the family has begun its own apprenticeship. A son of the family is currently in his second professional year of the Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS) programme at the Government Ayurved College, Vadodara, under Gujarat Ayurved University, Jamnagar. The textbooks change. The lineage does not.
From Junagadh, since 1950.
Gandhi Brothers is a partnership firm of Mr. Kimpal R. Vithlani and Mr. Atul R. Vithlani, licensed by the Food and Drugs Control Administration, Government of Gujarat (Form 25D, Licence GA/2079) to manufacture Ayurvedic medicines and Ayurvedic cosmetics.