O P I N I O N S

EDITORIALS

Hike in paddy MSP
Encourage alternative crops also
IT is good enough that the Centre has raised the minimum support price (MSP) of paddy by Rs 40 to make it Rs 650 a quintal, but it would have been better had it been done without protests by farmers and pressure by political parties and the media.

Avoid paranoia
Looks don’t make anyone a terrorist
In the face of extreme terrorist threat, various governments can be excused if they follow a zero-tolerance policy. But this policy should not translate into paranoid behaviour as it happened when 12 persons were taken off a Northwest Airlines flight for Mumbai at the Amsterdam airport by Dutch authorities. 

Pluto ex-communicated
Eight planets now make the company
And finally, for no fault of its own except that it was too small and had an eccentric orbit, and should never have been a planet in the first place, Pluto stands demoted. 

• Thought for the day

ARTICLE

Cola controversy
Global majors must stick to norms
by V. Krishna Ananth
Among the various symbols of the liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation, (LPG) agenda, the two cola majors — Coke and Pepsi — have been the most prominent. There are, of course, many others. The mobile phone instruments, the motorcycles, the shampoos in sachets and the internet cafes have captured the imagination of a generation.

MIDDLE

Wah, Ustad!
by Mukul Bansal
Inam, khitab bahut mile, lekin mein to jo tha vahi hoon (Awards, titles I got aplenty but I continue to remain what I was)”, said Bismillah Khan one evening at the Kamani Auditorium in New Delhi where he was performing at the “Malhar” festival.

OPED

State of hospitals-2
Flight of talent hits patient care
Syed Nooruzzaman visits Rohtak’s Pt B.D. Sharma PGIMS hospital and finds that a promised transition into a ‘centre for excellence’ is not happening
A drive down the nerve-centre of Haryana politics — Rohtak —takes one to a place where there is a mela-like rush almost every day. Anxiety is writ large on the faces of the people. There are long queues everywhere.

Stem cell research without killing embryo
by Steve Connor
Scientists from a private biotechnology company in America are claiming a breakthrough that could overcome the principal moral and ethical objections to using human embryonic stem cells for treating a range of incurable conditions, from heart disease to Parkinson’s.

From the pages of

 

REFLECTIONS

EDITORIALS

Hike in paddy MSP
Encourage alternative crops also

IT is good enough that the Centre has raised the minimum support price (MSP) of paddy by Rs 40 to make it Rs 650 a quintal, but it would have been better had it been done without protests by farmers and pressure by political parties and the media. Given the consensus on the demand for a higher MSP, the Centre was left with no other option. It is surprising how the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) recommended as low as Rs 600 as the MSP for paddy. The rise in the diesel price alone should have prompted it to suggest a higher increase in the MSP.

Since the government policy is to break the paddy-wheat cycle and encourage crop diversification, a low paddy price is supposed to force farmers to shift to other crops. It is true that returns from paddy are higher than any other kharif crop. However, farmers will not quit or cut paddy cultivation unless alternative crops become more remunerative. Pulses, oilseeds and cotton should be encouraged through better MSP than that of paddy and their marketing should be as assured as of paddy.

Punjab and Haryana have paid a very high price for paddy cultivation. The Centre has raised the paddy MSP over the years to meet its requirements for the Central pool. The CACP does not take into account factors like the deterioration in the soil quality due to excessive paddy cultivation or the depletion of underground water resources. This has forced farmers to go in for expensive submersible pumps. Last year the Punjab Government bought power worth Rs 640 crore to supply it free to paddy growers. Industrial losses caused by the diversion of power to agriculture are also not taken into account in the calculation of paddy input costs. A gradual crop diversification alone will undo the damage done by the excessive dependence on paddy.

Avoid paranoia
Looks don’t make anyone a terrorist

In the face of extreme terrorist threat, various governments can be excused if they follow a zero-tolerance policy. But this policy should not translate into paranoid behaviour as it happened when 12 persons were taken off a Northwest Airlines flight for Mumbai at the Amsterdam airport by Dutch authorities. All of them were Muslims bound for India. Nobody has cared to explain why they had to undergo this ordeal. They were not carrying any weapon; nor did they make any threat. It is just that their “behaviour” was considered “suspicious”. Now that they are being set free, it has been mentioned that they were detained for “flight disruption”, whatever that means. The fact of the matter is that air marshals assumed that their talking animatedly on cellphones and handing over phones to each other constituted a grave threat to flight safety. Perhaps this over-reaction had something to do with the fact that the number of Muslim immigrants in Holland is on the rise and there is a large section there which is dead-set against this intrusion.

This is not the only incident of its kind. Only last week, two British-Asian students from Manchester were ejected from a flight in Spain, just because their co-passengers felt they were “terrorists”. Such hyper-sensitivity could reek of racial prejudices. Just because they look like Arabs or speak a language that sounds like Arabic, or their names sound Muslim, does not make them terrorists. Even if they are Arabs and are actually speaking that language, does that mean they should be offloaded? Such racial profiling would be the most abominable violation of human rights. Ironically, this kind of discrimination would provide grist to the terrorist propaganda mill.

There is a lesson here for Indian security agencies as well. They too at times tend to be as insensitive as their western counterparts. After every nearly terrorism incident, they end up detaining a large number of persons from a community to which suspects are believed to belong. That is what provoked a recent conference of Muslim clerics in Delhi to condemn the tendency and remind the world that every Muslim is not a militant. This distinction is too obvious but is at times forgotten by the authorities who should know better. 

Pluto ex-communicated
Eight planets now make the company

And finally, for no fault of its own except that it was too small and had an eccentric orbit, and should never have been a planet in the first place, Pluto stands demoted. The decision of the International Astronomical Union was a while coming, but it was inevitable considering the increasing number of claims made for a 10th planet. After all, at just 2,300 kilometres across, the highway distance from Chandigarh to Bangalore, there was always going to be more claimants for planet status. There are several frozen masses doing the rounds in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, the eighth planet, and several scientific teams, armed with funding from organisations that included NASA, would regularly turn up a “tenth planet.”

The latest was Xena, just 50 per cent bigger than Pluto, and that set off a major debate as to what constituted a planet, resulting in the excommunication. Pluto was not without defenders. In fact, Mike Brown, an intrepid planet discoverer, has argued that since Pluto was historically and culturally considered a planet, and every young child knew which was the ninth planet, human kind should continue to regard it as one. But it was all getting a bit tiresome, and the IAU had convened a 19-member panel to resolve the issue. The choice was simple. Keep Pluto, in which case you faced the possibility of an expanding list of pseudo-planets. Or, excise Pluto. Scientifically speaking, that was the more elegant and sustainable solution.

Now we have eight “classical” planets that includes Earth, sized at 12, 756 kilometres and Jupiter, at an awe-inspiring 1,42,800 kilometres. The system is also occupied by 1.8 lakh “minor planets”. The best thing about the decision is that astronomers can now look for a genuine number nine, spanning the extent of our little Solar System. And much else besides. To tell the truth, Pluto was getting in the way — much to the discomfort of the community of astronomers, if not of the children.

Thought for the day

The people that get on in this world are the people that get up and look for the circumstances that they want; and if they can’t find them, they make them.

— George Bernard Shaw

ARTICLE

Cola controversy
Global majors must stick to norms
by V. Krishna Ananth

Among the various symbols of the liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation, (LPG) agenda, the two cola majors — Coke and Pepsi — have been the most prominent. There are, of course, many others. The mobile phone instruments, the motorcycles, the shampoos in sachets and the internet cafes have captured the imagination of a generation. There are the shopping malls in and around our metropolitan cities, the holiday resorts and the way in which the young boys and girls dress up.

We have also seen the arrival of a new brand of newspapers, pink in colour, that declare war on our own instruments of democracy, including Parliament, and try day in and day out to delegitimise the politician. They carry out this battle by presenting the politician, particularly those who still question some of the deals between our own leaders and the various multinational corporations, and even muster documentary evidence to show that many such deals are inimical to the nation’s interest, as the detractors and anti-nationals.

Such struggles as the one carried out by Medha Pathkar in the Narmada valley, by Thomas Kochery through the long coastline and the battles against the setting up of a cola plant in Gangaikondan, against the Koodankulam atomic energy plant and against the sethusamudram project are described by them as a waste of energy and against the nation’s interest.

They are indeed shaken, once again, by the bold efforts by a team of dedicated activists led by Sunita Narain. In her dogged pursuit for the truth and national interest, Narain and her associates went on to establish, once again, that the various brands of “soft’’ drinks peddled by the two cola majors contain a heavy overdose of pesticide residues. And faced with the harsh reality, the cola majors are continuing to play tricks with our own media playing ball.

Their trick is to say that the samples have been tested in a lab in London and that they conform to standards set by the European Union. And our own newspapers are carrying these advertisements, most of them spread over half a page, and earning huge revenue out of that. The point is that these bottled drinks, sold in India, contain pesticide residues that are above the standards set by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BSI) and hence it is the duty of our own state governments to ban their sale because they are inimical to the health of our citizens.

The second and most spurious argument peddled in the news section of our media is that any adverse action against the cola majors can affect the “confidence’’ of the foreign investor. It is sad that these custodians of our nation’s interest do not recall whatever happened to another such fraud on the nation a few years ago; the sage of Enron! This company was found to have been a fraud and involved in a whole lot of fraudulent deals and despite this, considered as a saviour of India when they came to set up a power plant in Maharashtra.

After destroying large tracts of our mangroves and siphoning out a lot of our own money, the company went off without generating one unit of electricity. The fact is that nothing happened to India and its economy even after this fraud left the country. Of course, precious resources were lost and no one who saw the deal through — N.K.P. Salve who as Union Minister for Power negotiated the deal — were asked to explain why they let this fraud into the country and loot its resources.

But then, the point is that even if banning the sale and manufacture of the coloured water by these two cola majors would lead to a fall in foreign investments, the nation can afford it because the health of its people is far more important than the few dollars these MNCs bring in every year. It is also a fact that these MNCs come with technology that reduces human labour substantially and hence their contribution to generating jobs in the country is insignificant.

It is also a fact that they take away large tracts of agricultural land at cheap prices (because our own political leaders facilitate that) and pose serious threats to our own food security. The fact is that when more and more agricultural land is taken over for industrial activities there is less and less of agricultural production and this in turn will make us, as a nation, vulnerable to import of foodgrains. Similarly, when the farmer is enticed with a few lakhs as compensation to his holdings, he stops engaging in productive activities and the land is let fallow. This, in the long run, will reduce the nation to abject dependence on food imports.

And while the salaried and the blue collar worker (in the factories and the BPOs set up by the MNC) can afford to buy and consume food products imported from outside the country, the poor and the poorer sections of society will be left to starve. The point is also whether everyone will reconcile himself to his fate and starve? No. A number of them will not hesitate to loot the supermarkets and turn into bandits. This is happening today in South Africa and many other parts of the world.

All these are reasons that we as a nation act firmly against Pepsi and Coke, the two symbols of the LPG era. And yes. Budhadeb Bhattacharya should be taught that it is the duty of the state government as much as the Centre to save its people. Bhattacharya was heard wondering, even after his own party’s government in Kerala banned the sale of the two colas and their other products, as to whether it was his job or that of the Centre to take such a step.

Well Mr Bhattacharya, if you have the right to negotiate and invite foreign investors, you also have the duty to tell them to behave properly. It is your duty to ensure that spurious stuff is not sold in the shops in your state.

MIDDLE

Wah, Ustad!
by Mukul Bansal

Inam, khitab bahut mile, lekin mein to jo tha vahi hoon (Awards, titles I got aplenty but I continue to remain what I was)”, said Bismillah Khan one evening at the Kamani Auditorium in New Delhi where he was performing at the “Malhar” festival.

His melodious rendition of Miyan ka Malhar on the occasion still lingers in one’s memory. Paying a tribute to his gurus, he said: “My teachers told me to imbibe whatever I could from wherever I could. This leads to excellence.”

The maestro was fond of establishing a rapport with his audience by sharing his thoughts and anecdotes at the very outset. He was also a raconteur par excellence. That day he explained to the audience that an artiste could not be at his best all the time: “Raag, rasoi, pagri jo kabhi kabhi ban jaye (Perfection in rendering a raga, preparing food or tying a turban is achieved sometimes only).” A poet, too, succeeds at a few poems only, he added.

He recalled his performance of Raag Kedara in Berlin, when the audience was moved to tears.

After an enthralling performance that evening, the Ustad explained to a group of fans that he did not perform for the public. He performed for Him alone. “I performed to my heart’s content today. Whether the audience liked it or not is their business,” he said.

Striking a note of humility, he went on to say that after all these years, he had come to understand that playing the shehnai was nothing more than knowing how to blow into it in the right manner. “Kya kahan lagana hai (How to strike the right notes).”

That day Ashwini Bhide’s performance of classical vocal had preceded Bismillah Khan’s rendition. When the young artiste sought the Ustad’s blessings, he said: “Don’t be joyous when an ignoramus praises you. And don’t be discouraged if a great artiste doesn’t laud you. The soil in which the rose grows also smells of the flower. Listen to great artistes and do riyaz.”

Talking about the future of the arts, he said: “The arts will flourish but they will be devoid of effect.” He further explained to his fans, “The knowledge of music is not gained by tradition or heredity. You’ve to practise it. It’s not bound by any religion.”

Bismillah Khan was known to regale his fans through witticisms. When Pandit Ravi Shankar was felicitated on his 70th birthday at a grand function at the Siri Fort Auditorium in New Delhi, the Ustad, while congratulating Panditji, hugged him and said: “May you live long but don’t get married any more” (Panditji had around this time married a young Sukanya).

One of the most respected classical musicians, Bismillah Khan will be remembered for his concern for the young artistes. His idea of promoting talent was that the old and the young artistes should be presented together. As always he struck the right note.

OPED

State of hospitals-2
Flight of talent hits patient care

Syed Nooruzzaman visits Rohtak’s Pt B.D. Sharma PGIMS hospital and finds that a promised transition into a ‘centre for excellence’ is not happening

Patients and visitors milling around the Accident and Emergency Services wing at the Pt B. D. Sharma Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Rohtak

A drive down the nerve-centre of Haryana politics — Rohtak —takes one to a place where there is a mela-like rush almost every day. Anxiety is writ large on the faces of the people. There are long queues everywhere.

This is the scene at the Pt B. D. Sharma Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences — PGIMS for short. Nearly 4000 patients visit the hospital’s Out-Patient Departments (OPDs) daily despite the fact that doctors have very little time to spend on a patient. “But you cannot afford to argue with your doctor”, as an old patient said.

The PGIMS is the only hospital of its kind in Haryana, but it is visited by patients from the neighbouring states too — Punjab, Rajasthan, Delhi and UP. The rush is increasing day by day. This is not entirely because of the services available here. The heavy rush is primarily owing to the cheap medical care and diagnostic facilities and the fact that the situation at the district hospitals is worse. As a result, the PGIMS functions like any other hospital though, ideally, it should have been a referral medical centre.

A senior doctor says, “The staff strength, both medical and paramedical, is too inadequate to cope with the rush of patients. There is a pathetic scene at the trauma OPDs because of the shortage of staff. A patient has to wait for nearly one and a half months for getting an MRI done. But who cares? The staff position is much below the sanctioned strength. Forget about the need for recruiting more hands; even the vacant posts are not being filled.”

In such a situation, it is surprising how over one lakh operations, major and minor, are performed at the 1446-bed hospital annually. The institute admits, on an average, 75,890 patients every year.

It is also visited, in large numbers, by a peculiar category of patients. These patients, suffering from chronic problems mostly related to their lungs, intestines and skin, have dangerously high levels of pesticides in their body. They can be described as the victims of the Green Revolution. But there is no proper facility to handle their disorders.

The PGIMS has medical, dental and nursing colleges, but the degrees are awarded by Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak. The institute is likely to be converted into a deemed university with a view to bringing it on a par with the PGI, Chandigarh, and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi.

The idea is to develop the PGIMS into a centre of excellence. But some senior faculty members, who do not want to be identified for obvious reasons, admit that this is not possible under the circumstances, particularly when the institute is under the control of the Haryana government. It must get an autonomous character to be in a position to attract the desired talent as also to provide the best medical care possible.

Recently the government announced a revision in the various allowances, including the non-practising allowance, given to the teaching faculty at the institute. It also introduced an annual learning allowance and abolished the ceiling on the basic salary of the faculty imposed to ensure that no medical teacher got a pay packet heavier than that of the Chief Secretary of Haryana.

But this will hardly serve the purpose. What about the difference between the salaries of the faculty members at the PGIMS, Rohtak, and those at the PGI, Chandigarh, or the AIIMS, New Delhi? A professor at Rohtak gets as his basic pay Rs 2000 less than his counterpart at Chandigarh and New Delhi. This difference in the basic pay in the case of others down the line can also be seen. The gap is much wider when we look at the total emoluments.

There are some serious promotion policy problems too. Why then should a medical teacher stay at Rohtak unless he has some compulsions? The institute has been suffering from the flight of talent continuously. At least, 30 faculty members left for greener pastures in the recent past.

The PGIMS Director, Prof S. S. Sangwan, has his own argument, based on old values, when it comes to money matters. In his opinion, a person who is greatly bothered about financial gains should not have been in the medical profession in the first place. What should matter to a doctor more than anything else is the professional satisfaction and the izzat that he or she gets in society. The Director has a point, but the truth is that money remains a major driving force in any profession, and the medical field is no exception.

The institute has, no doubt, impressive infrastructure. It has state-of-the- art radiographic facilities. Patients can get their X-ray reports on compact discs (CDs) and floppies. In the near future, when all the departments and wards are computerised as planned, doctors will have access to the X-rays of their patients on their computer screen itself. The institute is in the process of establishing a telemedicine facility, too.

Besides the numerous super-specialities at the PGIMS, it has been sanctioned 14 new such facilities. There is a plan for a new 200-bed trauma centre, some extra OPD blocks, a 350-bed Mother and Child Hospital, a 100-bed Mental Hospital, a Regional Institute of Ophthalmology, etc. These projects have already been sanctioned.

However, many faculty members believe that all the facilities and super-specialities cannot improve the status of the PGIMS unless it is able to attract talent from wherever possible. Advanced machines and imposing buildings can serve the intended purpose only if there are competent professionals.

There is very little research activity at the institute. The grant of the annual learning resource allowance of Rs 20,000 for the purchase of medical books, journals, etc, may be helpful but only to a limited extent in the absence of a policy to encourage the faculty to remain engaged in research. There is no policy to promote the faculty’s participation in international seminars and workshops, essential to create an environment of excellence.

Stem cell research without killing embryo
by Steve Connor

Scientists from a private biotechnology company in America are claiming a breakthrough that could overcome the principal moral and ethical objections to using human embryonic stem cells for treating a range of incurable conditions, from heart disease to Parkinson’s.

Robert Lanza, the chief scientist at Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts, said: “It is possible to generate stem cells without destroying the embryo and without destroying its potential for life.”

Normally the embryos - which consist of a microscopic ball of a few dozen cells - would be broken apart to extract the stem cells, which are capable of developing into any one of the many specialised tissues of the body.

The scientists used a special technique for extracting single cells one at a time from the embryo, leaving the rest of them undisturbed and capable of developing into a full-term baby.

Dr Lanza and his team believe that it will be possible to adapt the existing technique so that stem cells could be almost routinely extracted from human embryos without harming their future health and well-being.

“The derivation of human embryonic stem cells currently requires the destruction of ex utero [IVF] embryos,” the scientists say in their study published in the journal Nature.

“The ability to create new stem cell lines and therapies without destroying embryos would address the ethical concerns of many, and allow the generation of matched tissue for children and siblings born from transferred PGD embryos,” they say.

The scientists have already shown that stem cells can be derived from IVF mouse embryos and that these embryos can develop normally in the womb.

In the latest study, they extracted a total of 91 cells from 16 spare IVF embryos. Two developed into stem cells lines that have grown continuously in the laboratory of eight months and have shown potential for developing into specialised tissues.

“These cell lines were genetically normal and retained their potential to form all of the cells of the human body, including nerve, liver, blood, vascular and retinal cells that could potentially be used to treat a range of human diseases,” the scientists say.

Ronald Green, head of Dartmouth College Ethics Institute in Hanover, New Hampshire, said that the technique could be a way out of the moral impasse exemplified by US President Bush’s opposition to human embryonic stem cell research.

“It shows it’s possible to make any number of lines in future without harming embryos or impairing their development,” Dr Green told Nature.

However, scientists and ethicists in Britain were less convinced about whether the technique could be used practically and whether it is capable of satisfying the ethical worries about embryonic stem cells.

“The use of embryonic cells will only become non-controversial when it is accepted that the early embryo is of little or no moral significance,” said John Harris, professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester.

Professor Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, who cloned Dolly the sheep, said that the technique was not very efficient and further research is needed to make it useful.

“It would be very unfortunate if this result was used to discourage embryo donation because the authors make unjustified claims for their techniques,” Professor Wilmut said.

By arrangement with The Independent

From the pages of

March 25, 1977

Fittest choice

A Gandhian to the core and a man of high principles and incisive frankness like Sardar Patel, Mr Morarji Desai is certainly the right choice for the Prime Ministership after Mrs Gandhi. His appointment is an act of poetic justice, considering that he was the first victim of her policies in 1969. A symbol of austerity and discipline, for long years he has been an enigma to many people and was often misunderstood. But there are few who can equal his record to national service, his wide experience of administration and his personal integrity. When asked by a journalist whether he was indeed a Rightist, he replied: “Yes, I am a rightist in the sense that I do everything right.” All his actions, he asserted in his biography, were based on morality, propriety and truthfulness.

Mr Desai spent seven years in jail before Independence and about 19 months in detention during the Emergency, mostly in introspection. But never once has he climbed down on a question of principle. He has had no use whatever for manoeuvres and horse-trading to which politicians of lesser calibre often resort in order to remain in power. All these and numerous other qualities will stand him in good stead in the most responsible assignment of his career. The people would certainly wish him well.

REFLECTIONS

If we call him the father of all, then why do we not realize our brotherhood?

—The Upanishads

Let us not envy others’ knowledge but strive to learn from them.

—The Upanishads