📰 $20-bn potential in renewable sector: PM
Modi invites investors and businesses to join India’s ‘unparalleled’ journey
•India’s renewable energy deployment plans for the coming decade are likely to generate business opportunities worth $20 billion a year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday.
•Inviting global investors to join what he termed India’s unparalleled journey towards expanding power generation capacity so that each citizen got access to electricity, he said the country’s renewable energy capacity was now the fourth largest in the world.
Surging capacity
•“In the last six years, we increased our installed renewable energy capacity by two- and-a-half times… it is growing at the fastest speed among all major countries. Even when it was not affordable, we invested in renewable energy [and] now our investment and scale is bringing costs down,” Mr. Modi said at the inaugural session of the Global Renewable Energy Investment Meeting and Expo.
•“We are showing to the world that sound environmental policies can also be sound economics,” he said, urging global investors to consider tapping the recently approved production-linked incentive scheme for manufacturing high-efficiency solar power modules in the country.
•“There are huge renewable energy deployment plans for the next decade. These are likely to generate business prospects of the order of around 20 billion dollars per year. I invite investors, developers and businesses to join India’s renewable energy journey,” he concluded.
Intelligence agencies bust international drug network
•It was a week-long operation of Indian Coast Guard vessels at sea with aerial support and the backing of Central intelligence agencies that led to the zeroing-in on a Sri Lankan mechanised boat transporting a huge consignment of heroin off the coast of Thoothukudi on Tuesday night.
•The well-coordinated operation involving defence, intelligence and other drug-law enforcement agencies was launched on November 17 on the basis of a specific input that Pakistan-based smugglers would be transferring a huge consignment of drugs at sea on to a Sri Lankan boat. The security agencies were already working on information that a group of international drug peddlers were operating along the Pakistan-Sri Lankan water route transporting drugs to many countries, police sources said.
•After seven days of surveillance at sea, Coast Guard personnel on board five vessels and two aircraft narrowed down on the suspicious Sri Lankan boat “Shenaya Duwa” located south of the Thoothukudi coast and 20 nautical miles off Kanniyakumari. Armed guards searched the boat and found the drugs concealed in an “unapproachable” location. The crew of six Sri Lankan nationals was in possession of 99 packets of heroin, 20 boxes of synthetic drugs, five pistols and a satellite phone set, the sources said.
•Preliminary investigation revealed that the 100 kg heroin and other contraband substances were transferred from a Pakistani dhow from Karachi in the high seas. The drugs were meant to be sent to western countries and Australia, investigators said.
•The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) which took over investigation of the drug seizure case would look into the possibility of terrorist organisations being involved in the smuggling of drugs since the suspects were in possession of sophisticated weapons.
•NCB South Zonal Director A. Bruno said the heroin appeared to be of fine quality and such drugs were usually sourced from Afghanistan. Central agencies were working on tracking the international drug network for quite some time and launched the operation after receiving actionable inputs.
•The six Sri Lankan nationals were brought to Madurai for interrogation on Thursday. The smugglers said they were heading to a location near Australia and claimed to have sourced the narcotics from an agent based in Karachi on November 16, an investigator told The Hindu .
📰 Navy’s Information Management and Analysis Centre to become national maritime domain awareness centre
‘Today we are well-equipped to ensure that a dastardly act like 26/11 doesn’t occur again’, says an official
•The Navy’s Information Management and Analysis Centre (IMAC), the nodal agency for maritime data fusion set up after the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, will soon become a National Maritime Domain Awareness (NDMA) centre, with all stakeholders having their presence there, two defence officials said on Thursday.
•“Today we are well-equipped to ensure that a dastardly act like 26/11 doesn’t occur again. The IMAC will soon transform into a national NDMA centre, wherein it will be a multi-agency centre,” one of them said.
•Approved by the Defence Acquisition Council in 2012, the IMAC became operational in 2014 at a cost of ₹450 crore and is located in Gurugram. It is the nodal centre of the National Command Control Communication and Intelligence System (NC3I), which was established to link the operational Centres and lower echelons of the Navy and the Coast Guard spread across the country’s coastline, including the island territories. The IMAC tracks vessels on the high seas and gets data from the coastal radars, white shipping agreements, Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) transponders fitted on merchant ships, air and traffic management system and global shipping databases.
•After the 26/11 terror attack, all fishing vessels more than 20m long were mandated to have AIS transponders installed, while efforts were on to have such system on under 20m fishing vessels as well. At any point of time there are around 11,000-12,000 vessels present in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) as of now, which shows the magnitude of the challenge in tracking vessels.
Maritime traffic transparency
•As part of improving transparency on maritime traffic on the high seas, the Navy had been authorised to conclude white shipping agreements with 36 countries and three multilateral constructs. So far they have been concluded with 22 countries and one multilateral construct, of which 17 and the one multilateral agreement had been operationalised, another official said.
•Under Phase-I, 46 coastal radar stations were set up. Phase-II of the coastal radar chain network, under which 38 static radar stations and four mobile radar stations were being set up by the Coast Guard and they were in advanced stage of completion, the official stated.
•In 2018, the Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean region (IFC-IOR) was set up within the premises of the IMAC to coordinate with regional countries on maritime country and act as a regional repository of maritime data. It presently has linkages with 21 partner countries and 22 multi-national agencies across the globe.
📰 Storm warnings: On weather forecast
Governments can handle cyclones better by investing in town planning and infrastructure
•Cyclone Nivar raised fears of another epic disaster for millions of coastal residents in the south, but its passage overland near Puducherry early on November 26 was less destructive than anticipated. The reported loss of at least three lives is a relatively low toll for such a large-scale weather system, although property and agriculture have suffered considerable damage from the fierce winds and massive volume of rain it dumped in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Citizens and the government were fearful of a deluge that could be a repeat of the 2015 flood — which killed a few hundred people — and they overcame COVID-19 fatigue to prepare for the worst. There was also a welcome emphasis on periodic alerts and warnings. The IMD has been getting better at forecasting slow-moving, linear tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, and multiple satellites now provide cyclone data. The deployment of over two dozen NDRF teams and disaster management equipment along the coast reassured civic agencies. Not everyone escaped Nivar with a minor penalty, however, and for suburban Chennai, the peak one-day rainfall of 31 cm in Tambaram wrought destruction mirroring what happened five years ago; smaller inland towns have also suffered inundation and severe losses. The aftermath now presents an opportunity to make a full assessment not just for distribution of relief but also to understand the impacts of extreme monsoon weather.
•The Tamil Nadu government has shown alacrity in handling the acute challenge of a severe weather event, which has occurred in the run-up to the Assembly election due early next year. Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami made field visits, and in parallel, the DMK, as the lead Opposition, mounted its own relief operations. What must worry the two major parties is that periodic papering of the cracks does not offer a sustainable solution to Chennai’s evident civic decay. There is extensive documentation on the loss of its floodplains, lakes and peri-urban wetlands to encroachment, a key factor that is exacerbating monsoon flooding. This land grab is made possible by the benign indulgence of successive governments. What is more, governments have not shown the rigour to collect and publish data on annual flooding patterns, and measure the peak flows in the neglected rivers and canals to plan remedies. Appalling indifference to land use norms has spawned an amorphous housing sector characterised by inflated, speculative prices but no foundation of civic infrastructure. To keep Tamil Nadu competitive, governments and local bodies should hardwire urban planning and invest heavily for a future of frequent disruptive weather.
📰 Policing faith: On ‘love jihad’ laws
Anti-conversion laws that bar intermarriages will lead to the path of social regression
•The proposed Uttar Pradesh ordinance seeking to prohibit “unlawful” religious conversions represents a regressive march towards unacceptable medievalism and a reprehensible zeal to police the private lives and beliefs of citizens. Cleared for promulgation by the Governor, it does not use the Islamophobic term that votaries of Hindutva have been bandying about to denote certain inter-faith marriages, but it is clearly targeted at the idea. It eschews the phrase “freedom of religion” that several other anti-conversion laws in other States have employed to title their laws. However, apparently inspired by similar legislation in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, it has sought to include “alluring into marriage” as an additional ground for declaring an instance of religious conversion as illegal, apart from the use of “force, coercion, undue influence and deceit”. The U.P. proposal envisages prison terms, from one to five years in general, three to five years for conversions involving women and SC/ST members, and adds a possible three to 10-year jail term for “mass conversion”. There is also a prior declaration provision on an intended conversion. These suggestions were contained in a report of the Uttar Pradesh State Law Commission submitted last year. While the panel had suggested that conversion solely for marriage should be declared null and void, the State’s note on the ordinance says it provides for invalidation of marriages solemnised solely for conversion.
•While upholding the validity of the Freedom of Religion Acts of Madhya Pradesh and Odisha, in Stanislaus (1977), the Supreme Court had held that the “right to propagate” a religion did not include the “right to convert”. However, those early laws did not bar conversions by marriage. The Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and the proposed U.P. law would be vulnerable on that score. After the Court’s “right to privacy” judgment, and the Shafin Jahan-Hadiya case (2018), it would be no more constitutional to use “marriage” as a ground for prohibiting conversion, as it involves the rights of privacy, choice and marital freedom. Further, all such previous laws were seen as “public order” legislation — the claim is that “forced” or “fraudulent” conversions lead to disturbance of order. An inter-faith marriage, by itself, is unlikely to be seen by the courts as an event impinging on public order. Therefore, making marriage simpliciter a ground for rendering conversion illegal may not survive judicial scrutiny. Probably to avoid this lacuna, the U.P. ordinance uses the term “allurement by marriage”, but its potential for misuse is the same. Further, the provision on mandatory prior declaration of an intent to convert is similar to the one struck down by the Himachal Pradesh High Court in 2012 as violating the right to keep one’s faith a secret. It is disconcerting that several States are keen to join this bandwagon against inter-marriages despite its potential for deepening social discord and communal divides.
📰 A clear reading of the Ayurveda surgery move
India needs its Ayurveda graduates, including surgeons, to improve the common man’s access to decent health care
•In 2014, while speaking at the inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, Prime Minister Narendra Modi extolled the virtues of India’s medical heritage. “How else would Shiva have grafted an elephant head on Ganesha after having beheaded the boy,” he asked to thunderous applause from an audience of senior doctors and very important persons. Shiva as a surgeon is of course mythology. But we know about Sushruta and his surgical dexterity at a time when the world had not yet woken up to the art and the science of surgery. There are detailed descriptions in the Sushruta Samhita, the ancient Sanskrit text on medicine and surgery, of procedures such as rhinoplasty where the nose is reconstructed with tissue from the cheek. It was thousands of years later that modern plastic surgeons described this procedure.
Response to notification
•Last week, on November 20, a Gazette of India notification by the Central Council of Indian Medicine — a statutory body under the Indian Medicine Central Council Act, and “which regulates the Indian Medical systems of Ayurveda, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa and Unani Medicine” — identifying surgical procedures that can be performed by post-graduate Ayurvedic doctors in Shalya (surgery) has stirred up a hornet’s nest.
•Many of the reactions are on predictable lines. The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has written a curious self-flagellating letter to the Prime Minister. Allopathic surgeon colleagues are outraged. Social media and WhatsApp groups are abuzz with alarmist responses. Some have portrayed doomsday scenarios, ‘where our children will be operated’ by half-baked ‘Ayurvedic doctors’ in the future.
After 1947, what the state did
•What is the overexcitement about? It is useful to go back a bit into history to understand the imbroglio better. After Independence, the Indian state was faced with the difficult task of accommodating both the ascendant modern medicine brought in by the British and India’s traditional systems of medicine, notably Ayurveda. There were two options. One was to take the best from all systems and integrate them into one cohesive science. This was possible but not easy as the systems have certain incompatible differences of approach.
•Faced with this vexing question, the state attempted everything. It patronised and encouraged formal medical education in modern medicine as well as in other traditional systems. For a brief period there actually existed ‘integrated’ courses, wherein both Ayurveda and Modern medicine were taught to students. But these withered away partly due to opposition from purists in Ayurveda who were outraged by the ‘dilution’ of their science.
•Thus, the degree in Ayurvedic medicine became largely an Ayurveda course. However, it was necessary out of a practical career compulsion to teach the basics of modern medicine to these graduates. They had to survive in the medical market, which by that time was the dominant form of health care in India. Most Ayurvedic graduates entered general practice. More importantly, several of them went on to work in rural and under-served areas. Some set up nursing homes. In rural Maharashtra, several nursing homes were run by integrated graduates. In Chiplun in the Konkan, for instance, the only nursing homes offering emergency obstetric and surgical services were run by non-allopathic graduates. In health care, availability is often more important than quality, specialisation and such extravagant ideas.
Handling an identity crisis
•As modern medicine made rapid strides, Ayurvedic graduates experienced an identity crisis. Many of them had joined the course not for the love of Ayurveda but to get a degree with the honorific ‘Dr.’ which gave them upward mobility, social status and even value in the marriage market. They could not but practise allopathy which most of them do. And became an important cog in the modern medicine machine. Thus, they became resident doctors, intensive care duty doctors and operation theatre assistant surgeons. They picked up skills, were diligent and unlike their counterparts in MBBS, were not constantly distracted by thoughts of post graduation and entrance exams.
•In an instance from a hospital, the Ayurvedic surgical assistant employed there closes the abdomen better than new trainees. In Mumbai, there is an instance of a homoeopathic graduate manning and training others on the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, a complex heart lung machine in the largest unit used for critically-ill COVID-19 patients. In Maharashtra, the ‘108’ emergency response ambulance service is manned by non-MBBS doctors. During COVID-19, a large number of the quarantine centres were manned by these doctors. Incidentally, they work for less pay which allows hospitals to control costs and even make profits. All this is not a rationalisation but an explanation which we ought to know.
•Now to the idea of Ayurvedic surgeons. In an effort to develop postgraduate programmes, Ayurveda medical colleges developed one in “Shalya’ or “surgery”. This is awkward as unlike the vast pharmacopeia, there is really nothing called Ayurvedic surgery. A procedure called ‘Kshar Sutra’ used for anal fistula was described in Ayurveda texts and has been incorporated in modern medicine. In fact the Indian Council of Medical Research conducted a trial on this many years ago. To my knowledge, “Kshar Sutra” is the only substantive contribution.
•Most Ayurvedic medical colleges run hospitals. In some areas, theirs is the only viable and equipped hospital. I am aware, for example, of the phenomenal work done by a surgeon in an Ayurvedic hospital in South Konkan who served the community for many years and at very low cost. Even today, even when there are several MS qualified surgeons, there is hardly a patient in this area who agrees for surgery unless they have his opinion. The Mumbai Municipal Corporation has appointed Ayurvedic surgeons to many of their hospitals, but I have not seen them perform any surgery.
Procedures and complexities
•The controversial notification, issued on November 20 — called the Indian Medicine Central Council (Post Graduate Ayurveda Education) Amendment Regulations, 2020 — by the Central Council of Indian Medicine authorises an MS (Ayurved) Shalya Tantra, or General Surgery postgraduate degree holder on completion of his course to perform 58 surgical procedures. Some of the procedures in the list are rather complicated. For example, I would not even trust a modern surgical postgraduate to perform a removal of the gallbladder called cholecystectomy independently unless they have assisted or been taken through at least 100 odd procedures. For Ayurvedic surgeons to do it is an obvious overkill. It has been listed as “PittashmariNirharan-chhedan” in the notification.
A silver lining
•But there are ways to look at the move beyond just outrage and alarmist social media tropes. Ayurveda graduates including surgeons are a large workforce in search of an identity. India needs them. If they are creatively and properly trained, they can play important roles in our health-care system. In fact as we have seen in certain situations, they already do. On site or ambulance care of trauma victims is in a shambles in India. It is effectively delivered by trained paramedics in many countries. Given the right training, pay and identity, Ayurvedic surgeons can be trained to strengthen this service and save hundreds of lives.
•AYUSH, or Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, is a priority area for the present government. The revival of Indian medicine fits well into a certain narrative. Be that as it may, the IMA in its opposition to such moves needs to be precise and constructive. Currently, its response is like faux chest thumping of a guild of insecure professionals. A former office-bearer of the IMA has been active on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic invoking Rahu Ketu in the war against the novel coronavirus. If the IMA is defending science, it needs to publicly oppose such opportunism also. Pseudoscience is not a preserve of Indian medicine.
•If the noise is a turf war between an overambitious Ayurveda establishment on the one hand and modern medicine with a siege mentality on the other, it is a superfluous distraction which will hopefully die down. But if it is a pointer to an urgently needed and serious discussion about utilising India’s large workforce of non-MBBS doctors to improve access to decent health care for our ordinary citizens, then it is well worth our time.
📰 Rein in the vaccine nationalism, the profiteering
The WTO has a role in getting pharma firms and countries to treat vaccines and life-saving medicines as a public good
•It is illegal to hoard, for black marketing, essential goods in drought-affected areas. Overcharging of commodities and services during any natural disaster is always a scandal. It is a crime against humanity to make a profit during any human tragedy. On the contrary, there is (and should be) empathy and concern about human suffering. Such solidarity is a recognition of the need to: prevent further damage and destruction, rescue and evacuate affected people to safer zones, and salvage belongings and meet their minimal survival needs. For this nobody is charged. Instead, it is considered as relief work which comes out profusely as charity; a humane gesture.
Business out of suffering
•The COVID-19 pandemic is also a human tragedy and needs global solidarity. It is definitely not a time to be doing business and making a fast buck. Making enormous profit out of a human tragedy is shameful. Unfortunately, such a sense of shame is missing in the international trade market. When economies crumbled in many countries, e-commerce and gadget-based gaming business boomed. And in the novel coronavirus pandemic, there are numerous examples of companies having made enormous profits in the supply of personal protective equipment and kits and ventilators.
•In a liberalised economy, there is a shocking silence in the global market trying to do business out of human suffering. Business lies in selling technologies around COVID-19, the diagnostics, drugs and vaccine candidates. This is where organisations of the United Nations and global networks for people should come together in one voice. The World Health Assembly, in May 2020, in cognisance of the obstacles to equitable access to COVID-19 technologies such as vaccines, diagnostics, medicines, PPE kits and machines, set up mechanisms to counter it. When the entire global population, estimated to be nearly eight billion people, is in need of a vaccine (still being tested and yet to be approved) then production at full capacity and supply to every country will take time.
Mechanisms that can help
•We cannot allow the rich and the strong to grab everything first. The advance purchase agreements that some countries have negotiated with pharmaceutical companies exemplify such adverse trends. Such vaccine nationalism undermines equitable access to vaccines. There has to be prioritisation for high-risk groups in all countries, especially in the least developed, low- and middle-income nations. That framework has to be accepted by the global community without dispute. In this, the COVAX partnership is a mechanism for ensuring that.
•GAVI, or the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative, was in existence during the pre-COVID-19 period to ensure the pooled procurement and equitable supply of life-saving vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. It has been roped in for the COVID-19 vaccine too.
•Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization Director General, on June 13, exhorted member countries to treat COVID-19 technologies as a “public good”. Obviously it fell on deaf ears as far as pharmaceutical companies were concerned. WHO’s idea of a “voluntary pool to collect patent rights, regulatory test data, and other information that could be shared for developing COVID-19 therapies, vaccines, and diagnostics” was met with criticism. The CEO of Pfizer even qualified this as, “... I think it’s nonsense, and… it’s also dangerous.”
Governments have a part
•A public good is a common property of the nation and such goods are not excludable or there should not be any rivalries in dealing with it. If it is a public good, governments must step in to regulate its development, innovation, manufacture, sale, and supply ultimately to the public. If there is public financing for technology development, there is no scope for grant of patent protection. A public good cannot be submitted to the vagaries of market fluctuations of pricing dependent on demand-supply dynamics. Governments should be the custodian of public goods.
•If such an idealistic outcome does not materialise based on basic human rights for availability of accessible and affordable health care, then some regulation mandated by the UN General Assembly must be thought of.
•The World Trade Organisation (WTO) had raised concern over public health with regard to the non-availability of patented drugs in sufficient quantity, and at affordable prices. Through the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the Doha Ministerial Conference declaration 2001, the WTO made provisions for compulsory licensing. This is a provision where the government intervenes when patent clauses regarding availability, reasonable pricing, local production and technology transfer are not met by the patent holder. Compulsory licensing is an “involuntary contract” issued by the national government between a “willing buyer” or local manufacturer and an “unwilling seller” or patent holder foreign company. Thailand and Brazil have done this. India utilised this provision for the first time on March 9, 2012 to grant licence to Natco Pharma Hyderabad against the will of patent owner Bayer, Germany, to manufacture Sorafenib tosylate, a life-saving anti-cancer drug for kidney and liver tumours, with 97% cost reduction. It is sold by Bayer under the brand name, Nexavar. This is an extreme step available with India if rich countries go for advance purchase and hoarding of a COVID-19 vaccine produced in India by multinational pharma companies and deny India’s supply needs.
•COVID-19 vaccine candidates are still in Phase 3 trials; regulatory approval and patent are still awaited. So, failure to comply with patent regulations as a reason for the issue of compulsory licence cannot be applied. Coercion to issue “voluntary licensing” to subsidiary companies in many developing countries such as India, Egypt, Thailand and Brazil by the patent holder is another option.
A chance to act
•Seizing the opportunity of the WTO itself mapping out key trade issues arising out of COVID-19 vaccine and fostering dialogue, India and South Africa jointly sent out a communication, on October 2, 2020 to the IPR Council of the WTO for a waiver of the protection of copyright, design, trademarks and patent on COVID-19 related technologies including vaccines. It is claimed that India’s submission has the support of 43 members of the African group and 36 members of Least Developed countries group apart from South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation countries, Indonesia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. If this is decided favourably as a special case considering the unprecedented impact of the pandemic, it will set a precedent. A UN organisation such as the WTO can wield influence on member-nations to forgo trade profits for a humanitarian cause. Global campaigns through the media and civil society organisations can garner enough momentum to exert pressure on TRIPS. This is a pragmatic step for the time being. But having nothing less than vaccines and life-saving medicines being treated as a public good must definitely be the long-term goal.
