THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 16 APRIL
Kulbhushan Jadhav Indian ‘agent’ in Pakistan
•Commander Kulbhushan Jadhav, now condemned to death by a Pakistani military court martial, had an uneventful childhood, as a police officer’s son growing up in the N.M. Joshi Marg police colony in Mumbai. He was more inclined towards sports than studies, say his friends, and eventually got into the National Defence Academy at Khadakwasla in Pune, and became a naval officer. Those who have known him from his Navy days say there wasn’t anything remarkable about him.
What is he accused of?
•The ordinariness of Jadhav’s life ended in March last year when the Pakistan authorities arrested him, on charges of being an Indian spy carrying out terrorist attacks in Balochistan, targeting Pakistan-China interests. Jadhav burst onto the national and international limelight a few weeks later, when Pakistan announced the arrest of an alleged Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) spy in the restive Balochistan province, at a press conference in Islamabad.
•Officials released a spliced and edited CD in which Jadhav is seen “confessing” to having been a spy for more than a decade. “I commenced intelligence operation in 2003 and established a small business in Chabahar in Iran as I was able to achieve undetected existence and visits to Karachi in 2003 and 2004,” he says in the video.
•Jadhav said he was recruited by RAW in 2013 and he had since been directing various activities in Balochistan and Karachi at the behest of the Indian intelligence agency, with a view to engaging Baloch separatists to target infrastructure work on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. “These activities have been of criminal nature, leading to killing of or maiming of Pakistani citizens,” he said.
How was he captured?
•According to the Pakistani CD, Jadhav said he was trying to cross over into Pakistan from the Saravan border in Iran on March 3, 2016, when he was captured by Pakistani authorities. The Pakistani Army claims he used an Indian passport under an assumed name, Hussein Mubarak Patel, which stated that he belonged to Sangli.
What is India’s reaction?
•While the Indian authorities accepted that Jadhav was a former Navy officer, the government has denied allegations that he is a spy. Jadhav, who retired from the Navy in 2001, established a small business in the Chabahar Free Trade Zone in Iran, where he reportedly operated a mechanised dhow named Kaminda , and the government believes he was kidnapped in Iran and brought forcibly into Pakistan to try and implicate India with allegations of espionage and terrorism.
•It is particularly significant that Jadhav’s arrest was announced even as Pakistani investigating officials were being shown evidence of the attack on the Pathankot airbase in India.
How will it affect ties?
•This is the latest flashpoint in the long and embittered saga of India-Pakistan ties. On April 10, the Pakistan Army announced that a Field General Court Martial had sentenced Jadhav to death, after three-and-a-half months of trial.
•The sentence was confirmed by Army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa. Many in Pakistan were taken by surprise, and according to a widely believed theory, the intelligence agencies in Pakistan wanted to pre-empt the announcement by Indian agencies of the capture of a high-level ISI spy last seen in Lumbini, Nepal, earlier this month.
What next for Jadhav?
•The government says it won’t spare any effort to secure the life of Jadhav, who is innocent, but admits that it has no knowledge of where he is being held, nor has it received any information from Iran on how he may have been spirited there.
•On Friday, India again sought consular access to Jadhav in Pakistan, which has rejected 13 earlier requests. India has also rejected Pakistan’s demand that it accept Jadhav was a spy and cooperate in the investigation in return for consular access to him, and has warned that Pakistan’s refusal to accord access is in contravention of international law. “Under these circumstances, we have no choice but to regard the sentence, if carried out, as an act of pre-meditated murder,” External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj warned in Parliament.
The lowdown on the Goods and Services Tax
•It’s the new system proposed to be rolled out from July 1 this year for taxing all goods and services that you consume. The Goods and Services Tax or GST will replace the myriad local, State-level and Central taxes that are built into the price you pay for products, and the service tax as well as cesses that are dovetailed to your outgoes when you dine at a restaurant or pay your mobile phone bills. India may be a $2-trillion-plus economy with a large, booming domestic market, but is a nightmare for compliant businesses, thanks to multiple Central and State-level indirect taxes, such as sales tax, excise duty, Central value-added tax (VAT) and State VAT. The alphabet soup of taxes, differing regulations across 29 States, and difficulties in inter-State trade which often involve hours of highway snarls at border checkpoints to collect octroi and check documents, are a recipe for inefficiency and a proven incentive for tax evasion by sticking to the informal sector. As a single tax that would replace all such duties and cesses, the GST will make India a unified market with a common tax structure, instead of 29 fractured markets. One last thing worth noting: petroleum products and alcohol are being kept out of the GST net for now.
•Nine years after the Indian economy was opened up in 1991, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government first floated the idea of a simple, transparent and efficient GST regime to substitute the multiple Central and State taxes and cesses. But, like several critical (and often inevitable) reforms in India, the GST took a tortuously long route to reach the cusp of reality — a route marred by resistance, flip-flops and political expediency. April 1, 2010 was the first official target date for kicking off the GST announced by the then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram in the Union Budget for 2006-07. That date was pushed back by a year and later abandoned as certain Opposition-ruled States, including Gujarat, stymied the tax reform. However, when Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014, the GST got a fresh lease of life and constitutional amendments necessary to implement it were cleared by the Lok Sabha within Mr. Modi’s first seven months in office. The Rajya Sabha’s approval for these changes, however, could only be clinched last August. Since then, a co-operative governance body called the GST Council, with representatives from the States and the Centre, has thrashed out the nitty-gritty of the new regime, including five rate slabs (zero, 5%, 12%, 18% and 28%) and an additional cess on top of the highest GST rate on sin goods, such as luxury cars and tobacco.
•Unlike income tax, which just a small segment of India’s mammoth 1.3 billion-plus population end up paying, virtually everyone, including the poorest of the poor, pay indirect taxes on products and services, be it a shampoo sachet or a mobile phone recharge.
•Besides improving tax compliance from traders, the GST regime is expected to boost economic growth by a percentage point or two, despite the risk of an initial blip, the government and industry bodies reckon. Investors, often put off by India’s complex taxation structure, should find it easier and more attractive to do business in the country and create an important by-product for India’s fast-growing, young workforce — jobs.
•With President Pranab Mukherjee signing off this week on four enabling GST laws cleared by Parliament, the legislative action will shift to the Assemblies to pass the State GST laws. Over the next month, officials hope to complete another cumbersome task — fitting the different GST rates onto thousands of products and services. Congress leader Veerappa Moily summed up the essence of this challenge eloquently — “Is Kitkat a chocolate or a biscuit? Is coconut oil considered hair oil or cooking oil?” We will know soon as the GST Council will take up these minutiae at its next meeting in Srinagar in the third week of May. That will leave industry with little over a month to prepare for the transition by tweaking pricing, accounting and supply chain management strategies in the middle of a financial year. Look out for a pre-GST spurt in sales as savvy consumers will try to stock up on goods that may attract a higher tax after July 1.
UN to cut food aid for Nigeria crisis as funding falls short
Funds crunch: UN may cut food aid to Nigeria
•Food aid will be cut for more than a million hungry Nigerians affected by Boko Haram’s insurgency if promised funding from the international community does not arrive, according to a UN official. Peter Lundberg, the deputy U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Nigeria, suggested this in an article in French daily Le Monde .
The heart of the matter
The absence of robust organ transplant programmes across States and prohibitive costs are affecting heart transplantsin India. There is an acute demand-supply gap
•Thirty-seven-year-old Abhishek Dalvi could not walk ten steps within his house without getting breathless. Even talking for a minute at length would exhaust this digital marketing professional whose heart’s function had dropped drastically, leaving him only with one option for survival — a heart transplant.
•Mr. Dalvi’s long-drawn battle finally met with success in December 2015 when he was transplanted with the heart of a 45-year-old man in Chennai’s Fortis Malar Hospital. “I have never felt so much better. It is as good as having your own heart, but in a healthy condition,” says the resident of Panvel, Mumbai’s satellite town. His ailment was first diagnosed in 2009 when the heart’s function dropped to merely 25%.
•Since then Mr. Dalvi remained in and out of hospital and on medication till the doctors finally told him that a transplant was his only hope. Four months after signing up on the waiting list, there was still no sign of a donor. Mr. Dalvi had to be admitted in Fortis Hospital, Mumbai after the heart’s pumping rate dropped drastically to 20%. To up his chances of getting the organ, his family shifted him to Chennai hoping that the well-developed organ transplant programme in Tamil Nadu will help him. Fortunately, Mr. Dalvi got a heart within two weeks at the Fortis Malar Hospital, that recently performed its 150th heart transplant, the highest in one centre so far in India. But is that a good enough number?
Demand-supply mismatch
•“In India, we carry out 200-odd heart transplants in a year. But the need is of more than 4,000. That is the kind of huge supply gap which exists currently,” says Dr. Suresh Rao, cardiac anesthesiologist and critical care specialist at Fortis Malar. He says that there are only a handful of centres in India that offer heart transplants. Besides Fortis in Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai, there are other hospitals in Chennai such as Apollo, Global, Frontier Lifeline, Sri Ramachandra Medical Centre, AIIMS in Delhi and Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai that add to the heart transplant kitty. Dr. Rao says that if each State boasts of a robust heart transplant programme, patients like Mr. Dalvi would not have to travel so far. Given that even the U.S., which carries out 4,000 heart transplants annually, still falls short of organs, one can imagine the enormous gap in India.
•“There is a vast sociocultural difference between India and the United States. Here, we need much more awareness because people still believe that if a heart is taken out of a body, he or she won’t attain moksh ,” says Dr. Z. Hamdulay, cardiac surgeon at the Global Hospitals in Mumbai that has recently acquired heart transplant licence and has three patients on the waiting list.
Cost and commitment
•The cost factor is also a huge problem. A heart transplant costs anywhere between Rs. 20 lakh to Rs. 25 lakh. There are lifelong post-surgery expenses of immunosuppressants and hospitalisation for regular check-ups and in case the patient develops infections. Life post-transplant is not a cakewalk either. “We have to guard ourselves from infections as we are more prone to them. And then there has to be a lifetime commitment to have the immunosuppressants on time,” says 50-year-old Chennai resident P.S. Ranganathan, who was transplanted with a 26- year-old man’s heart in March 2016. Mr. Ranganathan pops as many as 17 pills in a day. The expenses of his monthly medication go up to as much as Rs. 20,000. “But before the heart transplant, he used to slouch like a 90-year-old. Now, he works with all the energy one can imagine,” says his wife Nithya. “He has got a new life.”
The roots of Indian racism
Politicians who are unwilling to concede that Indians can be racist usually also refuse to accept that there is caste prejudice in India
•There are Indian politicians who believe that there is no racism in India. Nothing that happens — most recently, the attacks on Nigerian students in what is basically a suburb of Delhi — can convince them otherwise. Of course, many of us who have African, black British, or African-American friends and acquaintances cannot understand this blindness on the part of such politicians.
•Speaking personally, I know that I absolutely dread it when my black European friends or acquaintances announce that they plan to travel in India, particularly north and central India. I cringe at the thought of the experiences they might return with and what impression of my country, which also has so many things and people to admire, will remain with them. Because I know from having travelled with black Europeans and spoken to Africans in India, and from overhearing some of my fellow Indians, that we Indians can have more prejudices about Africans than most white Europeans today.
•But there is another group of friends and acquaintances from Europe whose excursions to India, particularly north and central India, I dread almost as much. These are white, especially light-haired or blonde, women. Once again, I have travelled with them in India, and have experienced how some Indians behave and what they say (snide or public comments), which luckily my female companions, not knowing Hindi, stayed blissfully ignorant of.
Remnants of the past
•Some of this has to do with colonial discourses which have seeped into India: for instance, the 19th century racist European association of Africa with cannibalism. After all, the mobs that attacked Nigerian students in Noida recently were ‘convinced’ that the Africans had ‘cannibalised’ an Indian student, who reportedly died of drug overdose.
•Similarly, the groping and verbal sexism that many blonde women tourists encounter is partly the result of bad Hollywood films and similar trash, through which ordinary urban Indians encounter the ‘West’. Knowing porn and not Plato, triteness and not Twain, their reactions to Western women are essentially sexist and racist. This is exacerbated by the tendency in many conservative circles, so surprising given our proclaimed spirituality, to consider the material covering a woman’s body to be an indication of her soul and morality!
•However, it does not do to put all the blame on our colonial inheritance or its neocolonial cultural ramifications. The main reason why such prejudices predominate in Indian caste circles has to do with internal reasons. As a nation, we are yet to face up to the racism and sexism that runs through many caste narratives. Before the British brought us stories of ‘African’ cannibalism, we had our own stories of cannibalism — associated, from classical texts down to some current Chitra comics, with dark-skinned, non-‘Aryan’-looking creatures. Similarly, the way we have often treated aboriginal women in India — partly because their dress codes and social mores differ from mainstream Hindustani (Hindu, as well as Muslim) ones — is simply shocking.
•With some lower middle and middle castes riding the government’s ‘backward castes’ bandwagon for economic and other reasons, we tend to forget that the worst of internal prejudice in India has been traditionally aimed at ‘dark’ Dalits and dark-skinned aborigines (‘tribals’, not as much at castes like the largely ‘fair-skinned’ Yadavs or Ansaris). This has not changed substantially even today.
Different shades of racism
•However, racism, unlike what some politicians believe, is not always a matter of colour; it is any kind of discrimination based on the false association of superficial physical differences — skin colour, shape of lips, hair, etc — with moral and intellectual qualities. However, it is also true that skin colour became its dominant index from the 18th century onwards, mostly because many Europeans wished to ‘justify’ the brutal enslavement of Africans.
•Despite this link between skin colour and racism, one can argue that other kinds of racism have also existed. A major Irish novelist recently referred to the Irish as “the niggers of Britain”. What he meant was that in the 17th century, tens of thousands of Irish prisoners were sold to English settlers in the new world as slaves. As late as the early 20th century, with skin colour taking over, some English scholars were arguing that the Irish were related to “negroes” and not to the English — despite both the English and the Irish seeming indubitably ‘white’ to us.
•There is an argument that the English worked out their initial theories of racism on the Irish before, in tandem with other Europeans, applying them on dark-skinned people, like many Africans. If so, one can argue that we Indians have worked out — and continue to work out — our racism and racism-tinged sexism on our aborigines and Dalits. It is not surprising that politicians who are unwilling to concede that Indians can be racist usually also refuse to accept that there is caste prejudice in India.
We first need a uniform criminal code
Recent incidents indicate that the rule of law has collapsed in India. We need to desperately restore it
•Four recent incidents highlight a major crisis in Indian society. First, the stunning defiance of a parliamentarian soon after thrashing an airline employee. Second, the hounding of young men and women by ‘anti-Romeo police squads’. Third, the merciless killing of Pehlu Khan, by an unruly mob. And finally, the brutal assault on a Nigerian student by a murderous crowd.
•To be sure, such incidents have happened before but they have now come together in such quick succession that one wonders if we are witnessing an attack on the entire legal system. This is not just random lawlessness or occasional appropriation of law in one’s own hands but signals a breakdown of the rule of law.
•What is this rule of law? To begin with, the mere existence of laws is not the rule of law. A society governed by laws enacted arbitrarily, merely on the caprice of a single individual or group, changing frequently on the whim of political authority, is not based on the rule of law. A key feature of the rule of law then is that it excludes arbitrariness in the exercise of power. For example, a policeman must not question or detain me without identifying who he is or specifying the grounds for suspicion. If he fails to do so, I should resist him as I would any ordinary person who grabs me unlawfully. The so-called anti-Romeo police squads have frequently acted in clear violation of the rule of law when arbitrarily questioning ordinary citizens. The rule of law implies that the police, the most visible agents of state, are not above the law.
Equality before the law
•Nor indeed are legislators or government executives! It is this legitimate expectation that our criminal law is the same for everyone, for state officials and citizens alike, that was belied in the capitulation of the government before the Shiv Sena MP. The rule of law exists only if the law applies equally to all. Politicians and ministers must follow the same law, along with all other citizens. Nor can there be one law for one group and a different one for others. If heavy penalties are imposed on ‘lower castes’ for the same crime over which the upper castes get off lightly or, as in some countries, the evidence of two or more women is required where the evidence of one man is deemed sufficient, then a fundamental egalitarian principle — the equal worth of all individuals — is violated. Nothing can be more repulsive for followers of the rule of law; legal discrimination based on attributes such as racial, religious or linguistic identity is simply unacceptable. People cannot get away with murder because they belong to a majority religion, or are linguistically dominant, or worse, still have a certain racial profile. The crowd that assaulted Nigerians must be dealt with exemplarily. Likewise, the killers of Pehlu Khan. It was bad enough that cow vigilantes killed an innocent man, but if they are treated lightly because of their tacit claim that, as cow protectors, they act in Hindu interests, and therefore must be treated differently, then this marks the collapse of the rule of law.
Rights and the rule of law
•It can hardly be overemphasised that a breakdown of the rule of law affects everyone. Today, a Muslim dairy farmer is targeted; tomorrow, it can be Hindu peasants or pastoralists who routinely transport cows and other animals from one place to another. Angry crowds or ill-motivated killers often fail to distinguish persons of one religion from another, as we gathered painfully from the ghastly murder of Sikhs mistaken in America for Muslims.
•More importantly, in our country, a rule of law that meets formal criteria of non-arbitrariness and impartiality is not enough. Lots of carefully designed laws that apply equally to all permit the state to invade our privacy, or society to discriminate against women, but can be constitutionally challenged because substantive justice is part of the meaning of the rule of law. In India, as Justices Bhagwati and Chandrachud, among others, have pointed out, the rule of law means the rule of a rights-sensitive constitutional law. Laws must respect the rights of individuals and groups both against each other and against the state. This has the further implication that both individuals and groups can make demands on the courts to enforce their rights. It follows that a judiciary indifferent to the violation of rights by vigilante groups or government is failing the Constitution and the rule of law.
•We desperately need to restore the rule of law. And while a common and just civil code would be a nice achievement indeed, can the Indian state please implement a common criminal code first!
Centre to promote use of technical textiles
Minister talks to agriculture, health Ministries
•Technical textiles or functional textiles, considered a sunrise sector in the country, is all set for demand taking off for products such as geo and agro textiles.
•“Technical textiles is a thrust area for the Government because of the value addition involved,” said Textile Commissioner Kavita Gupta. “It can be used in infastructure projects, including ports, roads, and railways, and in sectors such as agriculture. We want to promote use of textile products that will improve productivity, health standards, and infrastructure,” she said.
•Geo textiles, for example, are permeable fabrics that are used in association with soil and which have the ability to separate and filter, while agro-textiles are used in shading and in weed and insect control.
•In a bid to increase use of technical textiles in Government projects, she said, “We are trying to promote interface with other ministries. The Textiles Minister has spoken to four ministers so far and will be speaking to more.” Union Textiles Minister Smriti Zubin Irani has spoken to Agriculture, Urban Development, Health, and Surface Transport ministers and is expected to have discussions with defence, railways, and heavy industries ministers too.
•The technical textiles sector had a compounded annual growth rate of 12% for the last three years. It is expected to grow by 20 % the next five years, sources said. The schemes by the Government, better awareness, interface initiatives with other ministries are all expected to create demand.
•The aim is to create awareness, promote use of technical textile products, then ensure the usage is mandated in at least some areas. “Development and use of products have to go up. Simultaneously, standards are being created,” she said.
•Functional textiles can be woven or non-woven. Automobile, geo, medical, industrial, and agro textiles are among the range of products that are made in the country. Foreign Direct Investments are also coming in, especially for geo textiles.
TUFS support
•The Textiles Commissioner said that the number of larger industries involved in the manufacture of technical textile products is estimated to be about 2,500. Close to 1,000 of these have received Technology Upgradation Fund Scheme support.
•Industrial textiles (such as filtration fabric) and made-ups (home textiles) have taken off. “Geo (textiles used in road works) and agro textiles will [also] take off. Smart textiles (sensor embedded textiles) is another potential area,” she said.
•According to K.S. Sundararaman, vice-chairman of Indian Technical Textile Association, technical textiles is a fragmented sector with several small and medium-scale industries manufacturing specialised products. “It is difficult to give a definite number on the number of units, production, etc. But, a majority of them are in the SME sector,” he said.
•The main challenges for technical textiles in the country are awareness among consumers, need for technology and knowledge about it among entrepreneurs, the investments and time needed to be innovative and develop applications, and raw material availability.
•“China is a generation ahead in production of technical textiles. But, their costs are going up and this is an opportunity for India,” Mr. Sundararaman said.
Talwar’s talwar against leprosy, TB and cancer
Vaccination is a time tested method, but what if, as in the case of leprosy, the pathogen cannot easily be cultured in the lab?
•There are two ways for the body to tackle infectious diseases - curing and prevention. Curing involves the use of drugs and other associated treatment modes. Prevention aims at stopping the entry and action of the infecting germ. Vaccination is a time-tested method of preventing germ-borne diseases. It involves allowing the body to recognise the presence of the cells and molecules of the invader (also called pathogen) and generate counter-molecules that capture and ‘karate chop’ it into submission and removal. Indeed, this strategy is stored and maintained in our body such that when the same pathogen strikes again (say in an epidemic), our defence is ready to strike and overcome it. The body has learnt to be immune to the invader. Our immune system is quite versatile and geared to defend itself, using proteins called immunoglobulins (also called antibodies) against a large variety of pathogens.
•Vaccination involves injecting into the body a small amount of ‘sham’ (dead, i.e., usually heat-killed or highly disabled) pathogen, and allowing the body to generate the antibodies specific against the injected pathogen. This of course requires that we isolate and grow (‘culture’) the pathogen in the lab in order to inject it into the body. Happily enough, with many of the common infective diseases (e. g., measles, smallpox, polio, cholera, diarrhoea, hepatitis), this has been done, and we have successful vaccines against them. What if the disease pathogen is not easily cultured in the lab?
•One such disease, which has been with us since antiquity, is leprosy. (The Mahabharata tells us that how Pratipa’s son Devapi could not ascend the throne of Hastinapur, since he had leprosy and instead retired to the forest for penance). Fortunately, most of us humans (about 99%) are able to resist infection by the leprosy-causing germ mycobacterium leprae, or M leprae. But the rest who succumb (majority of them in Asia and Africa), are shunned by society, have deformed limbs and prone to other infections, notably tuberculosis or TB. While drugs against leprosy exist, they are expensive, need repeated doses and not 100% effective. Vaccination would be the ideal solution.
•It was this problem of generating a leprosy vaccine that Professor Gursaran Pran Talwar at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Delhi (a city 90 km southwest of Hastinapur) decided to address, way back in the early 1970s. But, the odds were very high indeed. M Leprae is not culturable; it simply does not grow in any medium. Hence to make a dead or attenuated pathogen for injection to generate antibodies was a challenge. In order to address this issue, Dr Talwar and his students combed through 16 different cultivable, atypical members of the mycobacterium family — distant relatives of M Leprae. Over the years, five of them appeared hopeful, and after almost two decades of work, one of them, termed mycobacterium w (simply called M w ) appeared to fit the bill.
Doppelganger
•Note that M w is not M leprae, but what the Germans call a Doppelganger (or a double, an imitator). It was cultivable, it induced the molecule lepromin just asM leprae does, and thus was fit to be tried as a vaccine candidate. When tried on leprosy patients in Kolkata and Delhi, Mw generated lepromin responses and was also found to be quite effective.
•Next, a detailed molecular and genetic analysis was carried out by Talwar and his students at the National Institute of Immunology (or NII, which Dr Talwar had founded, moving from AIIMS, in the early 1980s). Total characterisation of this microbe, and its genetic similarities to M leprae, and also to the TB pathogenM tuberculosis, were revealed by Syed Rahman, Seyed Hasnain and colleagues. It was further found that heat-killed M w can still boost immune responses against several pathogens. In honour of Dr. Talwar, who spearheaded the entire work, M w was renamed as mycobacterium indicus pranii, or simply as MIP. (The word indicus denotes India, while pranii comes from the middle name of Talwar and NII for the Institute).
•Encouraged by the above trials, and clearances from the Drug Controller General of India and the US Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan of Indian Council of Medical Research has announced that this vaccine will now be tried on people who are in close contact with leprosy patients in Bihar, Gujarat and Tamilnadu, and has said that MIP has the potential to bring down new cases of leprosy by 60% in three years.
•We noted above that MIP shares some of its antigenic molecules with MTb. So, why not try it out as an anti-TB agent?
Doppelganger has more up its sleeve
•They first infected one set of guineapigs with MTb and found that the animals had contacted the disease, as seen in their lungs and spleen. Next they first immunised another set of animals with MIP and then infected them with MTb.This reduced the pathology of the animals significantly. Encouraged by this, they next conducted an exploratory trial on hard-to-treat TB patients in Ahmedabad to find that those injected with MIP along with drugs had better results than control ones. There thus appear some similarities between MIPinjection and the classical BCG vaccination we all have gone through against TB.
•And most recently, Professor Dipankar Nandi of IISc Bengaluru has tried usingMIP as an anti-cancer agent, since MIP appears to stimulate cells and molecules, such as IFN-gamma and IL-12, which play crucial riles in anti-tumour immunity. Now they have tried the combination of MIP along with the anti-cancer drug cyclophosphamide as a combination therapy with promising results (Podder et al, Clinical Cancer Drugs, 2016).
•The Talwar saga bears testimony to what Louis Pasteur, a vaccine pioneer, once remarked: ‘where observation is concerned, chance favours the prepared mind’.
