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Medicines to cost more J.N. Dixit NRIs must chip in |
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Tsunami: distorted priorities
Trauma of learning a language
Stokes: no longer apple of one’s eye Narasimha Rao: he was open
to ideas Delhi Durbar
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Medicines to cost more FROM January 1, 2005, India has started recognising patents on medicines. This effectively means prices of new medicines and of those made in the last 10 years or so may double, triple or even quadruple. An Ordinance on this vital subject was issued, rather quietly, by the Centre on December 26, 2004, avoiding a public/parliamentary debate. The BJP and its allies will not protest because they themselves had moved a Bill to this effect. India had actually no alternative. It is a signatory to the WTO and has to follow its rules — recognising product patents being one of them. Way back in 1970 India had scrapped patents on medicines, enabling Indian companies to copy and manufacture medicines prepared after years of research in the developed world just by adopting a different process. By selling such medicines at a fraction of the prices charged by MNCs, Indian companies not only prospered but also brought down the cost of treatment. All that will now come to an end. The government has tried to allay the fears about medicine prices shooting up. Companies seeking marketing approval for patented drugs will have to negotiate prices with the Chemical Ministry’s drug pricing arm called the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority. The criteria for price negotiation weighs in favour of MNCs. The ministry can inspect a plant and assess the cost of production before allowing a reasonable profit margin. But this will apply only to the medicines manufactured in India. Imported medicines’ prices will be dictated by MNCs. The logic behind recognising patents is: more corporate revenue would mean more money going into research, which would lead to better drugs and more effective, even cheaper cure. Patents make sense, but should be offered only on really important inventions. Currently there is a race among companies to get every minor drug patented. Experts point out that some 4,000 pharma patent applications are awaiting clearance in India, while worldwide only 250 new chemical entities have been found in the past 10 years. Western pharma MNCs are using the WTO to promote and protect their profits, disregarding human concerns for making vital, life-saving drugs available to the world’s poor at affordable prices. The high mark-ups MNCs charge on their drugs are astronomical at times, putting the developing countries at a disadvantage. The WTO may have to look into the working of the new regime which makes it difficult for people in the developing world to buy medicines. Health for all should not be only the WHO’s aim, it should also be of the
WTO. |
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J.N. Dixit IN the death of Jyotindra Nath Dixit, India has lost one of its most cerebral diplomats and national security experts. Few understood the security imperatives for the country better than this career diplomat, who bounced back to South Block as National Security Adviser after retiring as foreign secretary a decade earlier. The nation had high hopes of Dixit who knew South Asia like no one else did having served as India’s ambassador or high commissioner in most of the countries in the region. One of his last decisions was to shut down the Kalpakkam nuclear power plant in the wake of tsunami striking havoc on the Chennai coast. When most retired diplomats spend time thinking about writing their memoirs, Dixit embarked on a new career writing regular newspaper columns and authoring book after book. Dixit has many firsts to his credit. He opened India’s mission in Dhaka when India midwifed the birth of that nation in 1971. But his most memorable, some say controversial, posting was at Colombo when India got militarily involved in the Sri Lankan crisis. Whether he acted indeed as the “viceroy” in Colombo as some derisively called him, there is no doubt that the Indian intervention helped the island-nation remain in one piece. Under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, he played a major role in establishing diplomatic relations between India and Israel, which have, over the years, blossomed into one of the most enduring. However, he always remained steadfast in his belief that India should not compromise its traditional friendship with the Arabs. He joined politics as a member of the Congress party when most people thought the party had little chance of returning to power. But to the surprise of all, this incisive analyst of national and international events had the last laugh when Dr Manmohan Singh was sworn in as Prime Minister and he himself was chosen as the National Security Adviser. Of late, he had been talking to his counterpart in Islamabad to push a dialogue between India and Pakistan. He was also engaged in high-level talks with China to resolve the border dispute. As a diplomat, he always tried to take care of the national interest. Few have accomplished as much as J.N. Dixit had, and all on his own terms. |
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NRIs must chip in THERE could be no better occasion for non-resident Indians (NRIs) and people of Indian origin (PIOs) to come to the aid of the country of their origin. India, one of the countries hit hard by the tsunami tragedy, has launched relief operations on a gigantic scale. It is taking care of relief and rehabilitation requirements of not only its own affected people but also providing aid worth millions of rupees to Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, the other major victims of the tidal waves triggered by an undersea earthquake off Sumatra. India has been disinclined to accept aid from other countries, saying that it is capable of managing on its own, and the international supplies meant for it could be sent to the more deserving countries — Indonesia and Sri Lanka. This places greater responsibility on the otherwise strong shoulders of the Indian diaspora. There are reports that the NRIs in South-East Asia, particularly those in Singapore and Malaysia, approached the Indian embassies in their respective countries immediately with aid offers. But it seems their contributions are not big enough to find special mention in the newspaper columns. From among the NRIs only the contribution — Rs 1 crore — by Lord Swraj Paul of the UK-based Caparo group has been reported. There are other Indians too who have made a plenty of money. They must chip in to give a boost to the national relief effort. Helping India liberally in this hour of crisis should be on top of the agenda for the three-day Pravasi Divas celebrations to be held in Mumbai from January 7. In fact, this is no occasion to celebrate when thousands of Indians have lost their lives and lakhs have been uprooted because of the tsunami disaster. Pravasi Divas should be used to raise a substantial sum for relief. |
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There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it. — George Bernard Shaw |
Tsunami: distorted priorities IT is a telling commentary on the United States’ focus on war, rather than peace, that it should have taken President George W. Bush several days publicly to react to the tsunami tragedy that engulfed India and other countries in South and South-East Asia and several more days for his administration to revise its original paltry offer of money to a respectable level. Traditionally, Americans are a generous people, but four years of the Bush administration and the prospect of four more years of the same have distorted their priorities, if not worldview. Even more tellingly, the Bush administration made it clear that the United Nations, rather than itself, should play the lead role after efforts to form a four-nation lead group, including India, under its own auspices failed to fly. A senior UN official, indeed, had the temerity to suggest that rich countries (a rather transparent allusion to the US) were being stingy in their responses to an unprecedented tragedy even as the number of the dead was being constantly revised upward.. The American response was like a slow-moving reel reacting to a catastrophe that sections of the US media had dubbed Asia’s Nine Eleven — the 2001 terrorist attacks on American soil that had traumatised a people and was exploited by President Bush’s neoconservative advisers to launch the country into a permanent state of “war on terror”, taking in the Afghan and Iraq invasions, to begin with. To a world alienated by President Bush’s decision to take his country into a war in Iraq without specific UN authority after propounding the theory of his right to fight pre-emptive and preventive wars, here was a chance, pleaded The New York Times, to dispel the image of America the warmonger. Others grieved over the short shrift President Bush had given to the use of “soft power”, defined as the cultural and other non-military factors that serve to enhance US influence around the world. Even America’s iconic brands are assessing the cost of anti-Americanism to their products. There is enough evidence to suggest that the Bush administration is wedded to the use of military means to achieve its objectives. Only the mess created by the unhappy occupation of Iraq and the army’s overstretch have forced President Bush to rely on others to pull his chestnuts out of the fire in relation to North Korea and Iran. And President Bush’s total identification with Israel’s Ariel Sharon in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has hardly enhanced US credentials in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Belatedly, the Bush administration sought to make amends by sending Secretary of State Colin Powell and Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the President ‘s brother, on a hurricane trip of the worst affected countries. Navy transport ships and marines have also been dispatched. How much credit the US will receive for its labours is debatable. President Bush’s initial promise of pursuing a form of compassionate conservative philosophy went out of the window in the smoke and rubble of the World Trade Centre towers. Nine Eleven served two purposes. It gave President Bush’s neoconservative advisers the justification to refine their theories of missionary imperialism and the accent of the administration’s new strategic doctrine was an unabashed and proclaimed penchant for bloodying the noise of any potential aggressor so defined by Washington. Nor was the President coy in stating his administration’s objective of preventing any power or group of powers from usurping the God-given American right of military pre-eminence in the world. The American invasion of Afghanistan won widespread support because a failed state had become the cat’s paw of a terrorist organisation, Al-Qaeda. But American ambitions remained unfulfilled and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was ever so inviting a target to settle past scores and embark on a new imperialist drive to mould what was termed as the Greater Middle-East. Opposition from such European heavyweights as France and Germany was of no consequence nor was the UN Security Council’s refusal to approve an American invasion of Iraq. It was thus hardly surprising that an unprecedented total identification of America with Israel’s unjust occupation of Palestinian territories and the persecution of the inhabitants combined with waging an illegal war on Iraq took America’s image tumbling to its lowest point in memory. The irony was that, whatever President Saddam’s faults (he had many), his was a secular regime untainted by Al-Qaeda terrorism, despite American propaganda. The “war on terror” was intended to serve America’s other interests, Iraq now became the terrorists’ happy hunting ground and each action of perceived anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias was a hospitable recruiting ground for new terrorists. Given President Bush’s tardiness in getting to grips with the horrendous scale of the tsunami tragedy, his belated efforts to present the picture of a softer America seem foredoomed. The truth is that the key Bush advisers are so obsessed with achieving world hegemony through hard power that they have little time to devote to the consequences of nature’s fury taking so many lives and plunging survivors and countries in grief and the task of rebuilding shattered lives and homes. It was no surprise that the US administration thought nothing of pumping close to $ 100 million into Ukraine to back the pro-West presidential candidate while initially offering $ 25 million towards helping mitigate the ravages of a tsunami that had caused the deaths of more than 150,000 people and devastated several coastlines. India was offered the princely sum of $ 100,000. Mercifully, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declined offers of monetary help saying that India could cope with the crisis on its own. The US administration’s tone deafness to the scale of the tsunami disaster has highlighted the fact that its focus is on hard power and the pursuit of American hegemony. Understandably, the lack of attractive options in Iraq is a matter of consuming priority, but the administration’s near total immersion in enhancing power through war-making leaves little time or inclination for coping with other peoples’ struggle with Mother Nature’s ravages. For the neoconservatives, Al-Qaeda is more deadly than Nature and, additionally, the “war on terror” serves America’s other objectives. The good news is that other rich and industrialised countries have compensated America’s initial niggardliness with handsome contributions from their governments and peoples. Japan leads the roll of honour with a contribution of $ 500 million. |
Trauma of learning a language AS a rule learning a new language can be “very rewarding experience since in effect it introduces a new world to you. It can, however, be quite taxing and frustrating too especially if the language to be learnt belongs to a family of languages which is completely different from that of one’s own language. The script there looks merely like scratches of ink on paper, the sounds are exceedingly difficult to reproduce, and the words are as incomprehensible as hieroglyphs — before they were deciphered with the fortuitous help of the Roseta stone. This came home to me fully us I saw each of my British co-probationers for the ICS struggling with the Indian language of the Province (now named ‘State’) to which we had been allotted for service. It was clear that most of them would find the going very hard and would never be able to, or care to, proceed beyond the very elementary stage of their study. Apparently the era of the East India Company stalwarts who took the trouble of mastering Indian languages and unearthing the history of the country was long past. Actually in our day also there were a few ICS men who took very special interest in the local language but they were clearly the exceptions. For instance, I know of an officer of the batch one year ahead of mine who became an expert in Telugu and achieved the great distinction of compiling the first grammar of that language and also its first dictionary. (He stayed on in India on service after Independence right till his retirement some 25 years later.) My own position in regard to the new language to be studied was fortunately very different from that of the Britishers. I had been allotted to Punjab for service and as I had already studied Urdu (with minimal acquaintance with Hindi) the authorities decided that I should take up Hindi for the probationary examination. I could of course speak Hindi or Hindustani and therefore it was possible for me to get to know quite well the written language and its phonetics during the year’s study without any difficulty. In fact, the decision that I should offer Hindi for the examination brought me a most pleasant windfall. At the end of the year the Hindi examiner, a young British teacher, quizzed me at length and then appeared the surprise. He came out with what was, for me, a completely-unprecedented-and-never to-be-made-by-any-other-examiner-of-mine remark: “Mr Krishen, I think you know more Hindi than I do”. Tailpiece: The time was a couple of minutes before half past nine and the lecturer for Hindi asked a British probationer, “Please look at your watch and tell me the time”. The response was dead silence. The lecturer was surprised and repeated his question. Then the answer came, “Sir, I do not know the Hindi for 9.28 or 9.29. I am therefore waiting for the watch hand to move to 9.30 for which I do know the
word”.
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Stokes: no longer apple of one’s eye
Samuel Evans Stokes, the pioneer of scientific horticulture in Himachal, was remembered as an emancipator of the poverty-ridden hill people a century ago. Today there is none to recall the contribution of Stokes, whose efforts earned Himachal the status of being the “apple state of India”. Credited with introducing the American Delicious apples in Kotgarh in 1916, he set the pace of commercial apple cultivation which transformed the economy of the region. Today this harbinger of the apple revolution, launching an economy which earns Rs 1,500 crore as direct income annually, finds no word of honour in the state. The selfless service of this khadi-clad man, who worked to uplift the lot of the Kotgarh residents, has long been forgotten. Recently Union Tourism Minister Renuka Chowdhary announced her eagerness to celebrate a century of the apple revolution in Himachal. But the state is yet to wake up to the fact. Even the 1,300-acre Horticulture Complex of Dr Y.S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry at Nauni, which was dedicated to Satyanand Stokes on January 14, 1976, by none other than the then Chief Minister of Himachal, Dr Y.S. Parmar, has been buried in history. While the university was named after the state’s first Chief Minister, only a library remains to be dedicated to Stokes. Interestingly, no official of the university has any idea when and why the transformation took place. Born on August 16, 1822, in a suburb of Philadelphia, he undertook his maiden visit to India in 1904 to serve the leprosy afflicted. Little did he know that this trip would transform his entire life and he would make India his permanent abode. He later married an Indian girl, Ms Agnes Benjamin, and embraced Hinduism. He then came to be known as Satyanand Stokes. It was the extreme destitution of the Kotgarh people which touched his heart. Determined to find an alternative to improve their lot, he took soil samples from Kotgarh for testing to America in 1914. He selected 5-6 varieties of apple, out of 33 strains that he tested, for commercial cultivation in view of the climatic conditions. In 1918, he imported saplings from America and Britain and took the first step towards commercial cultivation of apples in Himachal. Red Delicious and its sub-varieties and the Golden Delicious, which was a Christmas present of Stokes’ mother Florence in 1921, later went on to become the most sought- after varieties owing to their superior quality and output. Apples were originally introduced by the British during the early 19th century in India. Capt R.C. Lee introduced English apples for the first time in Kulu valley in 1970. Later Mr Alexander Coutt’s, a tailor to the then Viceroy of India, brought 100 varieties of apples from the United Kingdom in 1887. Only one variety, Yellow Newton, originally planted by Mr Coutt’s, is still yielding fruits regularly. Stokes’ firm belief in the dignity of labour inspired his students at the Tara High School, Barubagh, in Thanedaar to tend to orchards in their free time. He believed that, “students will run the orchards and the orchards will run the school”. Today apples are grown in nine of the 12 districts of Himachal. Commercial production, which began with 20 boxes in 1926, rose to 4.50 lakh metric tonnes last year. As many as 1.50 lakh families are today engaged in apple cultivation. In the absence of adequate post-harvest management, 35-40 per cent of the produce is annually lost. The large-scale cultivation of table varieties like red- coloured sweet apples is seen as the main reason for the post-harvest losses, observes Dr S.P. Bhardwaj, Assistant Director of the Regional Horticulture Research Station, Mashobra. It was the vision of that American in Khadi which fetches the state today an annual income of about Rs 25,000 crore. |
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Narasimha Rao: he was open
to ideas
I
had never met Narasimha Rao before he became Prime Minister. But when I sought and got an appointment, he told me that he was going to call for me. It was the usual formal introductory meeting after which he called me again. I just recall a few of my reminiscences of my frequent meetings. When the All-Party Hurriyat Conference was formed, I suggested to him to invite it for unconditional talks. After some discussion, he agreed. The decision was announced by the Minister of State during his visit to Srinagar. It was summarily rejected by the Hurriyat. When I met Rao again, I justified the invitation as his government had not lost anything by its rejection, but gained morally. On the occasion of the siege of Charar-i-Sharif in 1995, I told him that it was not merely a place of religious worship, but represented the entirety of Kashmiri personality as it was the tomb of Sheikh-ul-Alam Shiekh Noor-ud-din Noorani, most revered personality in Kashmir. I said: “If it was destroyed by militants, they will be doomed for ever. But if the impression goes round that it was done by the Army, Indian prestige would equally suffer.” I suggested a number of ways to protect it, including a ceasefire with Kashmiri nationalists who revered the saint as against Islamic fundamentalists, including militants and a section of the separatist camp, and offer to the former “if you can save the shrine, we will not come in the way. Or allow the Army to undertake the task.”I also offered to negotiate with the Kashmiri nationalists if the government agreed with my suggestion. The shrine could not be saved. I reported to Rao that nobody in Kashmir believed that destruction of the shrine was the handiwork of militants. Everybody was blaming the Army. Why did he not heed my advice, I asked agitatedly. He disarmingly replied, “I had not known the importance of the shrine but heard about the personality of the Nund Rishi as the saint was popularly called. None of my political and administrative advisers on Kashmir had ever told me that. I was just considering your suggestions that the trouble took place.” Regarding damage control measures, I suggested that he could persuade some non-official individuals or institutions to donate money for the reconstruction of the shrine as a gesture of concern of the rest of India. Rao readily agreed with the suggestion. On the issue of autonomy for Leh that was announced after an agreement with the Ladakh Buddhists Association, I commented that when Ladakh region as a whole was demanding autonomy, the government did not concede it, why had it been done on the demand of the Buddhists of Leh? Rao insisted that it was autonomy for the whole Ladakh region that had been announced. Padamanabhia, the then Secretary for Kashmir Affairs, confirmed my interpretation of the official decision and added that the PM was under a wrong impression. Thereafter Rao said that he had heard Padamanabhia and agreed with my suggestion that autonomy to Leh and Kargil should be under the framework of a Regional Autonomous Council for Ladakh region so that it was not divided on religious lines. Necessary corrections were added to the LAHDC Act, though at that time Kargil leaders did not accept it. I need not give account of other subjects that I discussed with him to demonstrate how patient and open minded he used to be to new ideas and suggestions. |
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Paswan starts campaign WITH
Parliament out of the way, LJP leader and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan has switched to the campaign mode in his home state of Bihar where assembly elections are due in February. The verbal spat between Paswan and RJD supremo and Union Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav is bound to intensify in the days to come. Paswan wants to see the back of Laloo and the RJD in Bihar because of what he describes as its misrule for more than 15 long years. The LJP chief is talking of going it alone in Bihar as that would certainly cut into the backward votes of Laloo and company. Laloo constantly has more than one foot in his backward backyard being the proxy Chief Minister for all practical intents and purposes. Sonia takes
the lead Congress president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi has virtually taken the lead in visiting the tsunami-devastated regions of the country leaving others a poor second. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is literally following the leader though he has been keeping close tabs on the colossal relief and rehabilitation measures. Along with several other organisations, the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation has announced adopting all the orphans following the natural calamity which has left a trail of death and devastation. BJP in the
dock The BJP finds itself on the backfoot with the CBI having registered cases against Bangaru Laxman and JD (U) leader Jaya Jaitley on charges of accepting bribes. Laxman and Jaitley figure among the list of 10 accused in the first five FIRs filed by the CBI probing corruption in defence deals. The next step is interrogating those named in the FIRs. Further, the CBI has not ruled out arresting some of the dramatis persone connected with the Tehelka sting. The resurrection of the case is bound to snowball into a major political issue in the upcoming Assembly elections. A charming Governor Grapevine has it that some Governors or in this case S.M. Krishna enconsed in Raj Bhavan in Mumbai appears to have charmed the Shiv Sena. This despite the reservations expressed by the Shiv Sena-BJP combine. Even Union Minister Sharad Pawar’s NCP made no bones about its reservations of appointing Krishna as the Governor of Maharashtra. The objections were on account of the long-pending boundary dispute between Maharashtra and Karnataka. It was widely felt in the Pawar camp that sending Krishna as the constitutional head of Maharashtra would not augur well for the state as the latter would be biased in favour of Karnataka when it came to the boundary dispute. Even as the Marathas braced for uncertainty, Krishna came to Mumbai and conquered the hearts of the Shiv Sainiks by displaying statesmanlike attitude from day one. Former Lok Sabha Speaker Manohar Joshi called on Krishna and urged that as Governor he must take Maharashtra’s side on the vexed boundary issue with Karnataka. Lakshmi’s
grouse Union Minister of State for Health Panabaka Lakshmi is peeved that she never gets a line in print. Not many would be surprised about the ignorance of her role at the Centre. A Congress MP from Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, she regrets that after spending money for hosting a lunch for scribes on her beat, the papers drew a blank the next day. In the case of The Tribune, she made several promises to give an interview but always gave the slip. Nevertheless, scribes who partook the lunch hosted by Lakshmi insist she does not say anything that is newsworthy. Photojournalists complain she hardly looks into the camera. All in all, she has to learn the ropes of being in the news. Contributed by Gaurav Choudhury, S Satyanarayanan and R Suryamurthy |
Who the name of God recites, His arduous toil is over, indeed, redemption-lit his visage shines, and many others he has freed. — Guru Nanak Do not be impressed by empty numbers. A poem may have thousands lines yet mean nothing. One word of sense which makes a man reflect is better than all such poems. — The Buddha There is a great deal of truth to the idea that you will eventually become what you eat. — Mahatma Gandhi  |
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