📰 Conservationist joins SC panel on elephant corridor case
SC committee to hear resorts and land owners of Nilgiris.
•The Supreme Court on January 27 appointed conservationist Nandita Hazarika as Member of a Technical Committee constituted by it on October 14 last year to hear complaints by land owners against the action taken by the Nilgris Collector, which included sealing of their buildings and allegations about the “arbitrary variance in acreage of the elephant corridor.”
•The order came after a Bench led by Chief Justice of India Sharad A. Bobde was informed of the death of one of the committee members, Ajay Desai, through an application filed by the Hospitality Association of Mudumalai.
•On October 14, the top court upheld the Tamil Nadu government’s authority to notify an ‘elephant corridor’ and protect the migratory path of the animals through the Nilgiri biosphere reserve. The reserve is the largest protected forest area in India, spanning across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.
•A three-judge Bench led by CJI Bobde had said it was the State’s duty to protect a “keystone species” such as elephants, immensely important to the environment.
•The corridor is situated in the ecologically fragile Sigur plateau, which connects the Western and the Eastern Ghats and sustains elephant populations and their genetic diversity. It has the Nilgiri Hills on its southwestern side and the Moyar River Valley on its north-eastern side. The elephants cross the plateau in search of food and water.
•The Supreme Court judgment was based on 32 appeals filed by resorts/private land owners, including Bollywood actor Mithun Chakraborty, against a Madras High Court decision of July 2011. The High Court had confirmed a State government order of August 2010, notifying the corridor.
•The three-member Technical Committee of the National Elephant 2 Action Plan also includes former Madras High Court judge, Justice K. Venkatraman; and Praveen Bhargava, trustee of Wildlife First.
Researchers from ICMR and Bharat Biotech post results on bioRxiv pre-print server
•Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin has been found to neutralise the U.K. variant with “similar efficiency” as the strain used for making the vaccine and hence “dispels the uncertainty of possible neutralisation escape” following vaccination, say results posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. Preprints are yet to be peer-reviewed and published in medical journals. The work was carried out by researchers from ICMR and Bharat Biotech, Hyderabad.
•The sera from people vaccinated with Covaxin were tested against the same strain used for making the vaccine, another strain found in India but different from the one used for making the vaccine, and the U.K. variant.
•The median ratio of 50% neutralisation of sera was found to be 80% for the U.K. variant and 90% for the strain circulating in India, but different from the one used for making the vaccine, Dr. Samiran Panda of ICMR and one of the authors of the preprint told The Hindu.
•The study was conducted using sera collected from 38 people who have been vaccinated with Covaxin during the Phase-2 trial. Researchers from ICMR’s Pune-based National Institute of Virology and Bharat Biotech found that the vaccine has “comparable neutralisation activity” against the U.K. variant and the strain used for making the vaccine.
•Explaining how the neutralisation studies are carried out, Dr. Panda said that the virus isolated from people is grown in the lab using cell lines (monkey kidney cell-lines in this case). When viruses successfully grow in them, the pathogenic effects of the viruses are observed in the cells. The sera taken from vaccinated people are then added to the cell line culture system, and its ability to prevent the virus from causing pathogenic effects is observed. In this case, the sera taken from vaccinated people was able to neutralise the virus and hence prevent pathogenic effects being produced in the cell lines containing the virus.
•The U.K. variant was isolated and characterised from people returning from the U.K. The variant isolated from U.K. returnees had “all signature mutations of the UK variant”, the authors say.
•Sera collected from 38 vaccine recipients during the Phase-2 trial had “equivalent neutralising antibodies” to the strain used for making the vaccine, the strain circulating in India but different from the one used for making the vaccine, and the U.K. variant.
•The indigenously developed vaccine Covaxin can be expected to work against the new U.K. variant, says Dr. Panda. The preprint says “it is unlikely that the 501Y mutation found in the UK variant would be able to dampen the potential benefits of the vaccine in concern”.
📰 Troubling trends: On widening inequality
Inequality is widening across the world, and India is no exception
•The world economy is slowly recovering from the devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but that is only partial solace. The recovery is uneven among countries, and within countries, but the emerging universal truth is that economic inequality is rising sharply in all countries. A new report by Oxfam has revealed that the 1,000 richest people worldwide recovered their losses from the pandemic within nine months as opposed to the world’s poorest who might take a decade to limp back to their pre-pandemic standing. Inequality was alarmingly high and destabilising social and political order in much of the world even before the pandemic struck. It is set to further aggravate, fear 295 economists from 79 countries, commissioned by Oxfam. Inequality in India has risen to levels last seen when it was colonised. The additional wealth acquired by India’s 100 billionaires since March when the lockdown was imposed is enough to give every one of the 138 million poorest ₹94,045, according to the report. An unskilled worker in India would take three years to earn what the country’s richest person earned in one second last year, the report calculates. The worsening inequality in income and opportunities impacts some sections disproportionately due to discrimination based on gender, caste and other factors. The poorer people were worst affected by the disease itself.
•The focus on growth had led politicians and policy makers to accept rising inequality as inevitable for decades. Inequality came to be seen as a benign outcome of economic growth that led to reduction of absolute poverty. Concerns about inequality could also be easily dismissed as being informed by socialism. Any criticism of capitalism was viewed with scepticism in the mainstream of development debates, until the crisis of capitalism could no longer be ignored. The literature on capitalism and its linkage with democracy is now growing fast. There is now universal agreement among economists that the distribution of new wealth between capital and labour has become so one-sided that workers are constantly being pushed to penury while the rich are getting richer. This has social and political consequences as upheavals in democratic societies around the world show. The environmental costs of a development model that hinges on higher and higher growth are also obvious. On the one hand, there is an acknowledgment of the crisis among capitalist moghuls. The theme of the World Economic Forum at Davos this week is ‘the Great Reset’ which it says is a “commitment to jointly and urgently build the foundations of our economic and social system for a more fair, sustainable and resilient future”. On the other, measures that favour capital at the cost of labour continue; for instance, changes in labour laws in several States during the pandemic. Lip service is not enough to tackle inequality.
📰 Emphasising self-reliance in science
The draft science policy is a rambling document, but it contains nuggets of scientific vision and information
•On March 4, 1958, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, for the first time in the history of independent India, Parliament passed a resolution on science policy. The resolution stated: “Science... has provided new tools of thought and has extended man’s mental horizon. It has thus influenced even the basic values of life, and given to civilization a new vitality and a new dynamism.” The resolution said the aim of the scientific policy was, among other things, to “encourage individual initiative for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, and for the discovery of new knowledge, in an atmosphere of academic freedom.” In effect, this resolution proved to be a springboard for the development of the country’s scientific infrastructure. Since that resolution, successive governments issued policy statements with varying emphasis on chosen objectives and goals, often echoing the existing national and global imperatives and the ruling dispensation’s ideology.
The 2020 draft policy
•India’s Department of Science and Technology recently released a draft of the fifth Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. This 62-page-long document presents the objectives and goals of our new science policy. The public is expected to provide feedback on this document before it gets finalised. But the problem with the document is that it is rambling and full of jargon and clichés, making the task of separating the grain from the chaff a major exercise in itself.
•The new policy envisages technological self-reliance and aims to position India among the top three scientific superpowers. Though the names of the other two nations are not mentioned, it must be understood that they are the U.S. and China. For that to happen, the draft policy says, we need to attract our best minds to remain in India by developing a “people-centric” science, technology, and innovation “ecosystem”. It states that the private sector’s contribution to the Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and Development should be doubled every five years. The 2013 policy had similar aims. The 2020 draft policy fails to discuss what we have achieved on these fronts since then.
•Why does our R&D investment in science continue to hover between 0.5% and 0.6% of the GDP? Raising it to 2% of the GDP has been a national goal for a while. Despite strong recommendations in the past by several scientific bodies and leading scientists and policymakers, we are still well short of that goal. The 2020 draft policy blames this on “inadequate private sector investment” and adds that “a robust cohesive financial landscape remains at the core of creating an STI-driven Atmanirbhar Bharat.” It looks as if the government is trying to shift the responsibility of financing R&D to different agencies such as the States, private enterprises, and foreign multinational companies. But it is doubtful if the various funding models that are presented are workable or practical, especially during a pandemic.
•The policymakers who drafted this report should have gone back to the self-financing revenue model proposed in the Dehradun Declaration for the CSIR labs back in 2015 and critically evaluated its success rate. Common sense informs us that the private sector cannot be expected to pay for basic research. This is because the return on investment in basic research takes too long from a private sector perspective. Only the government can have long-term interest to support such research. Participation of the private sector in basic science has not happened even in the U.S. The fact is that basic science research in India is suffering from the lack of adequate funding despite grand proclamations. Even elite institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology are finding it difficult to run their laboratories on a day-to-day basis because of paucity of funds.
•The draft policy visualises “a decentralized institutional mechanism balancing top-down and bottom-up approaches, focusing on administrative and financial management, research governance, data and regulatory frameworks and system interconnectedness, for a robust STI Governance”. This is easier said than done. This intention is in fact defeated in the document itself, where several new authorities, observatories and centres have been proposed, which may end up feeding up the already fattened bureaucracy in science administration. Decentralisation of administrative architecture is essential, but we need to explore the practical option of providing more autonomy to research and academic centres for financial management.
•Some points are welcome. These include the fact that policymakers are considering alternative mechanisms of governance of the financial landscape; that they realise the administrative burdens of researchers and the problem of journal paywalls; and promise to explore international best practices of grant management.
•It was reported in 2019 that more than 2,400 students dropped out from the 23 IITs in just two years, with over half of them belonging to the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Classes. The number of suicides of students is also on the increase in the IITs. Caste discrimination could be one of the reasons for these tendencies. As a part of inculcating an inclusive culture in academia, the document promises to tackle discriminations “based on gender, caste, religion, geography, language, disability and other exclusions and inequalities”. It mentions more representation of women and the LGBTQ community, but is silent on how we are to achieve their proportionate representation.
Science and society
•In the chapter ‘Science Communication and Public Enagagement’, concerns on the disconnect between science and society are valid. But the fact is that hyper-nationalism is not conducive to the propagation of evidence-based science and a rational outlook. It is also heartening to see that the document harks back to our constitutional obligation to “develop a scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.” But it is silent on how this can be achieved when pseudoscience is deliberately propagated in the name of traditional science with the help of some arms of the government. A recent instance is the proposal by the Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog to conduct a national examination under the garb of ‘cow science’.
•The document does not mention how to stem the rot within, although it speaks extensively about science communication and scientific temperament. Our belief systems, values, and attitudes have an impact on the quality of research. That partly explains why Indians who have chosen to work in labs abroad are able to make path-breaking discoveries. The ruling dispensation has a moral obligation to facilitate an environment that encourages a mindset that constantly challenges conventional wisdom as well as open-minded inquiry among the students. Only a dissenting mind can think out of the box.
•The document contains nuggets of modern scientific vision and information. But its digressive style impacts the reader’s attention. The document should prioritise important issues and amplify first the problems which have cultural and administrative dimensions. With the advent of new disruptive technologies, global competitiveness will be increasingly determined by the quality of science and technology, which in turn will depend on raising the standard of Indian research/education centres and on the volume of R&D spending. India has no time to waste.
📰 The best shot against COVID-19
Our choice of vaccine has to be dependent on whether the data have been gathered with scientific rigour
•This is slated to be the year of minimising the impact of COVID-19. While mutants of the virus pose a new threat, the only viable strategy to curb COVID-19 has been to develop vaccines. The fast-paced scientific work done to develop the vaccines is unparalleled. Within a year of COVID-19 being identified, several vaccines have become available. What do we know about these vaccines?
Types of vaccines
•The result of the trial of Pfizer and BioNTech’s mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine was submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December 2020. It showed 95% efficacy in adults ages over 65. However, the infrastructure for the delivery and storage of the vaccine under fastidious requirements of -70°C is not easy to achieve. Equally, this vaccine has come under a cloud, with 29 deaths of elderly people with pre-existing illnesses reported in Norway following administration of 42,000 doses. Moderna using mRNA-based vaccines and Johnson & Johnson using DNA-based vaccines are also being developed in the U.S. These vaccines are unlikely to come soon to India because of cost and storage requirements.
•The first heterologous COVID-19 vaccine consisting of two components has been used in Russia with good initial reports. However, this adenovirus-based vector vaccine, Sputnik V, was released after Phase 2 studies in a very small number of volunteers and the protocols were not published. Other countries to get a nod for its use are Serbia, Argentina, Bolivia, Algeria, and Palestine. It has reportedly been administered in more than a million people in several countries without safety concerns. In India, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories is using Sputnik vaccine in a placebo-controlled Phase 3 trial with 1,500 volunteers. The results are expected by mid-2021.
•The chimpanzee adenoviral vector vaccine by Oxford University-AstraZeneca is the only vaccine in India which has completed Phase 3 trial. The large placebo-controlled trial of 23,848 volunteers in the U.K. and Brazil has shown an acceptable safety profile along with increased antibody response by homologous boosting. The Drugs Controller General of India gave approval for its use in India on January 2 and it is being rolled out under the name Covishield. The Serum Institute of India in collaboration with AstraZeneca has produced a stockpile of 50 million Covishield vaccines which has been sent to all the States. This vaccine can be stored and transported easily.
•Then we have the adenovirus vector-based Covaxin by Bharat Biotech, which is in Phase 3 trial with a goal of 26,000 volunteers. The results are expected only after three months or so. Yet this vaccine has been rolled out in India for restricted use in clinical trial mode which lacks clarity.
•The States and priority group beneficiaries don’t have the option to choose whether they receive Covaxin or Covishield. Consequently, uptake amongst health professionals has significantly reduced. As per established protocols and ethical norms, the immunogenicity and safety data from Phase 1 and 2 trials are not enough for approving the clinical use of a vaccine. Without Phase 3 trial data, confidence in the safety and effectiveness of Covaxin will remain questionable. It is noteworthy that due to inadequate immune response of two vaccines using inactivated virus, Merck & Co in the U.S. abandoned its trials.
•Zydus Cadila is developing two COVID-19 vaccines. The company’s novel DNA-based vaccine will complete Phase 3 studies by mid-March before applying for approval. It is appropriate for the company to wait until Phase 3 results are available.
•In addition to these, there are at least two more vaccines in various stages of development in India. Biological E is working on a protein-based vaccine in collaboration with the Baylor College of Medicine, U.S. The company is conducting Phase 1 trial. Phase 2 trial may begin in March. Gennova’s vaccine is India’s first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine that can be stored at 2°C-8°C. Phase 2 trial of this vaccine is likely in March. Outside of India, there are about 60 other vaccines undergoing clinical trials globally.
How do we choose a vaccine?
•Our choice of the vaccine has to be dependent on whether the data have been gathered with scientific rigour. Each trial should involve an adequate number of volunteers; studies need to have a control or placebo arm; protocols of the studies should be in the public domain and in peer-reviewed scientific journals; and Phase 3 trials should be completed with an adequate number of volunteers and observation periods of adequate length with the results reviewed by experts. Trial outcomes need to be scientifically validated and should not be influenced by political pressure and deadlines. The aim must be to effectively and safely protect the population and make COVID-19 innocuous.
📰 Keep the wheels of economic recovery turning
The fiscal stimulus needs to continue in FY 2021-22 to speed up India’s economic healing
•The forthcoming Economic Survey will tell us about the state of the economy based on available empirical evidence. The first advance estimates of national income published on January 7 project a contraction of 7.7% for real GDP. The Q2 GDP estimates published by the National Statistical Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) on November 27 had suggested an economic recovery in India. An improvement in the rate of contraction from 23.9% in Q1 to 7.5% in Q2 was seen as the beginning of a sustained recovery. The Ministry of Finance, in its Monthly Economic Review highlighted it as signifying a ‘V’ shaped recovery and as a reflection of the resilience and robustness of the Indian economy. The Monetary Policy Statement of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released on December 4, 2020 also projects positive growth in the remaining quarters of the financial year. A low fatality rate and rolling out of the vaccination programme have added to the optimism.
•Growth rate of the economy had collapsed from 8.2% in Q4 of 2017-18 to a mere 3.1% in Q4 of 2019-20, sliding continuously for eight quarters. The policy stance adopted by the Union government against this backdrop was premised on the hope that private corporate investment will pick up momentum sooner than later, putting the economy back in the trajectory traced in the first decade of the new millennium. The RBI did the heavy lifting through five consecutive lowering of repo rate, adding to a total of 135 basis points from February to October 2019 along with liquidity infusion programmes. However, monetary-fiscal linkages are crucial to catalyse the demand.
Revise monetary framework
•While being cautious of inflation, the RBI has decided to continue the accommodative stance in its latest monetary policy to support growth. It has retained status quo in the policy rate of repo at 4%. The CPI inflation after crossing 7% has cooled off to 4.6% in December. Still, the real interest rates remain very low. The RBI expects inflation to ease to the specified band. The efficacy of the new monetary framework (NMF) — the agreement between the RBI and Government of India in February 2016 to adopt inflation targeting in India — will be reviewed in March 2021, and we flag the need for revising the framework.
•The RBI is continuing its liquidity infusion programmes including the on-tap Targeted Long Term Repo Operations (TLTRO). This programme announced on October 9, 2020 for five stressed sectors has been extended to 26 stressed sectors notified under the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS 2.0). The RBI is also continuing its ‘operation twist’ — the elongation of debt maturity structure through simultaneous buying of long-term bonds and selling of short-term bonds — with Open Market Operations (OMO) of ₹10,000 crore scheduled for December 17, 2020.
•Nevertheless, the RBI Governor has rightly pointed out that the signs of recovery are far from being broad-based and are dependent on sustained policy support. He has also pointed out that it is a no-brainer that Union Budget 2021-22 will be pro-growth.
Stimulus by the state’s moves
•The economies which rebounded fast, post the global financial crisis, were the ones which resorted to significant fiscal stimulus. We argue for fiscal stimulus not based on “business cycle” arguments to trigger animal spirits, but from the perspective of much needed targeted state interventions in public health, education, agriculture and physical infrastructure, and to redress widening inequalities in the time of the novel coronavirus pandemic. In a context where private final consumption expenditure is sluggish, contracting 26.7% and 11% in Q1 and Q2, respectively, a “fiscal dominance” is expected in India for sustained economic recovery. However, India cannot afford fiscal stimulus at the rates of advanced economies, due to a lack of fiscal space. The pandemic has hit many crucial sectors and has left millions jobless. It is in this context that the Finance Minister has promised a “never before like budget” on February 1, 2021.
•The Biden Plan of $1.9 trillion will make the pandemic response of the United States a massive $5.2 trillion one. Compare this with the $800 billion worth U.S. fiscal response to the global financial crisis. According to the International Monetary Fund’s Fiscal Monitor Database of Country Fiscal Measures, the fiscal stimulus for India is 1.8% of GDP. The corresponding figures are: for Brazil 8.3%, Russia 2.4%, China 4.6%, and South Africa 5.3%. The IMF, in its Fiscal Monitor, highlights the need to scale up public investment to ensure successful reopening, boost growth and prepare economies for the future. Subdued interest rates make this case even stronger.
•Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her interview on December 8, 2020 to Bloomberg TV, indicated that the “fiscal deficit fears will not derail government spending”. This announcement is welcome, given the much needed fiscal package for enhancing the public health infrastructure and the COVID-19 vaccine roll out, to address the falling effective enrolment rates due to the digital divide, the employment and livelihood crises and the need for strengthening social and physical infrastructure spending.
•Plummeting private corporate investment in India is a matter of concern. A co-authored paper by Hrishikesh Vinod, Honey Karun and Lekha Chakraborty in The Handbook of Statistics titled Financial, macro and micro econometrics using R using maximum entropy ensembles time series methodology showed that public infrastructure investment is the prime determinant of private corporate investment in India. The fear of financial crowding out emanating from high fiscal deficit is misplaced in the context of India.
Flexible fiscal rules
•The path of economic recovery will be determined by the degree of containment of the pandemic and the sustained macroeconomic policies. Any abrupt withdrawal of ongoing economic policy support, both by the monetary and fiscal authorities, will be detrimental to growth in times of the pandemic. The fiscal rules at the national and subnational government levels need to be made flexible to enhance the fiscal space to deal with the extraordinary situation. The public debt deficit dynamics in India, therefore, needs a careful calibration in the forthcoming Budget 2021-22.
