The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Checking paid news
Centre should help root out the menace

The Centre’s plan to refer the Press Council of India’s report on paid news to a Group of Ministers (GoM) for further scrutiny and action is well intended and needs to be pursued to its logical conclusion. As paid news has become a big threat to free and fair elections, whatever measures the Centre intends to take to root out the problem need to be endorsed by all stakeholders. In its report, the PCI has suggested an amendment to the Representation of the People Act to make paid news a punishable electoral malpractice. It also sought more teeth to help adjudicate complaints of paid news at its level. The Centre should accept both recommendations and evolve a consensus among all political parties for necessary statutory enactment. However, the menace is so serious that the matter does not rest with the PCI alone. All stakeholders, including the Election Commission, should check it.

Significantly, the Election Commission has taken serious note of the menace, particularly in the context of the Bihar elections due to be held from October 21. It convened an all-party meeting on October 4 and set up an expenditure monitoring division to look into paid news and the role of money power during elections. Income Tax officials will conduct field-level investigations to monitor expenses of candidates and political parties in Bihar. The commission has decided to include the cost of “news” in the candidates’ expenditure if it is seen as paid news, particularly if they exceed the ceiling on expenditure by resorting to paid news instead of issuing advertisements. Earlier, the monitoring team comprising observers in each district used to keep a tab only on advertisements in newspapers and television channels, including cable TV and radio, but a new column has been added to provide details and cost of paid news.

The Election Commission’s experiment in Bihar will be keenly watched because based on its success, the commission intends to enforce these measures in the forthcoming elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry. The commission has been trying to curb the misuse of money power in Bihar but enforcing the new mechanism in its true spirit and plugging all leakage points would be the real test. Surely, in this challenging task, all the political parties, candidates and the media — print and electronic — should extend their whole-hearted cooperation to the authorities concerned.

Missing daughters
Nanhi Chhan can change mindsets

President Pratibha Patil hit the nail on the head recently when she called female foetcide Punjab’s shame. No doubt, female foetuses are being aborted without compunction and compassion throughout the length and breadth of the country and the nation has much to be ashamed of when it comes to treating its daughters. Punjab, however, has more reason to hang its head in shame. Out of five lakh daughters that go missing in India one lakh are deemed to be from Punjab alone. In fact, along with the neighbouring state of Haryana it has the dubious distinction of one of the worst sex ratios in the country. Thus, the President’s concern over the skewed sex ratio in Punjab and appeal to protect the girl child cannot be taken lightly.

Time and again the need to save the girl child has been reiterated in Punjab. Efforts have been made at both individual and government levels. The government has launched several “save the girl child” campaigns. Besides these, offering many positive incentives like cash and benefits, its public health helpline, primarily started to check female foeticide, have been welcome efforts. Then there is the PNDT law that bans sex determination tests. Still the son-crazed couples find ways to beat the law and, as the findings have repeatedly revealed, the abominable practice is rampant.

In a nation where tomes have been written on women’s empowerment and host of laws have been passed to grant her equality, the ground reality is dismal. What to talk of granting the girl child an equal status, in 21st century India she is even being denied the right to birth. Indeed, initiatives like Nanhi Chhan that underline the important link between the environment and the girl child can help dent centuries old prejudices that value sons and regard daughters as a burden. It is good that Nanhi Chhan is spreading its wings to other parts of the country. Only a broad-based movement involving people from all sections of society can help check gender imbalance that poses a grave threat to the social fabric of the country in general and Punjab in particular.

Thought for the Day

If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now. — Woodrow Wilson

ARTICLE

Waiting for President Obama
The big picture is being ignored
by P. R. Chari

The chatterati in New Delhi’s seminar circuit, more accurately the flitterati — they are constantly flitting from one seminar to another — a.k.a. strategic elite, is highly excited due to President Barack Obama’s impending visit to India in early November. Advance teams have visited New Delhi and Washington to work out an agenda and assess the ground situation. And the think-tank community in both capitals is conferencing away to discover the areas of convergence and divergence that would emerge in this meeting.

So, what could be the agenda for the dialogue? Predictions are getting confused with wish lists and speculations on what Washington and New Delhi want to “get” from each other. There are insidious proposals that India should “extract” concessions from the United States, presently weakened by its intractable economic and unemployment crisis. Like, for instance, urging Obama to modify his policy to discourage Indian software engineers from being hired to reserve these jobs for Americans. Or, by demanding discontinuation of military and economic aid to Pakistan, considering its appalling proliferation record, proven links to the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Al-Qaeda, and alacrity in promoting cross-border terrorism affecting India and Afghanistan.

India is unlikely, however, to gain much satisfaction on these issues. Obama has his own political compulsions — high unemployment in the United States and the need to keep the land route through Pakistan open for gaining ingress into Afghanistan. What is not being appreciated in New Delhi is India’s glaring vulnerabilities; a Prime Minister who presides over but cannot inspire his government, and a Central government that seems to have lost its sense of direction. The Commonwealth Games have revealed India’s inadequacies. Therefore, any belief that India can command the agenda is truly naïve.

This logic has not prevented the articulation of demands that India should make on President Obama. They include hardy perennials like US support for India securing a permanent seat in the UN Security Council; gaining access to high technology, especially in the sensitive defence, nuclear and space areas; de-listing the major Indian institutions presently included in the American “entities list”; recognition of India’s strategic interests in Afghanistan; restraining Pakistan from using cross-border terrorism as a foreign policy instrument; lowering tariff barriers for Indian textiles and so on. Naturally, there is realisation in New Delhi that the United States would also have its set of demands.

These would include settling contracts in favour of US firms like General Electric and Westinghouse for supplying atomic reactors to operationalise the Indo-US nuclear deal. The provisions for damages if accidents occur and long-term culpability of suppliers under the recently enacted Civil Liability Act have caused great dismay in the United States. It believes that India is reneging on its pledge to settle at least two contracts for the supply of nuclear reactors from American firms despite the US having worked strenuously to get the nuclear deal through the US Congress, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Therefore, this issue could gain salience during the Obama visit.

The same could be said of the MMRCA [Medium-Range Multirole Combat Aircraft] deal for the sale of some 126 aircraft where the United States is looking for action.

Both the nuclear and aircraft contracts are very important to revive the concerned ailing industries in the United States. There are many other questions of interest to the US like India’s cozying up to Myanmar’s military rulers despite their abysmal human rights record and ambivalence towards Iran irrespecitve of its fundamentalist regime being the fountainhead of Shia terrorism in the Middle-East for over three decades. There is also the question of having greater understanding of Obama’s compulsions in the Af-Pak region where he is single-mindedly focused on extricating the United States from the Afghanistan quagmire.

These demand and hope lists can be expanded. But what is being ignored is the big picture. How do India and the United States view each other? Stated differently, what is the content in their much-vaunted “strategic partnership”? Several issues arise. How do the two countries perceive the “rise” of China? Since this “rise” is peaceful, why are countries in the East and Southeast Asian regions apprehensive? Why does India’s steady emergence not threaten its neighbours in South Asia? How can the rise of China and the emergence of India be accommodated in the evolving global scenario? How can India and the United States promote world order interests like democracy, federalism, religious pluralism and so on to construct a more peaceful international regime? How can they optimise their major strength, which lies in innovation and the exploration of new ideas?

Exploring big picture ideas rather than pettifogging on what either country can “get” from each other during the Obama visit would be a more profitable approach to adopt.

MIDDLE

Simplicity
by Harish Dhillon

For centuries, poets have sung the praises of the simplicity of the lives of people living in the countryside. Most famous is of course, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard.”

There are dissenters, most notably, Thomas Hardy in his iconic novel, “Far from The Madding Crowd.” Having lived in the countryside for the major part of my life I tend to subscribe to Gray’s perception.

I live now permanently in the countryside and during my evening walk I stop at a small convenience shop on the way. It is a pleasure not only to sit and talk to the owner, but also look at all the people, coming and going. One of his regular customers is a little boy of 12. He comes frequently and buys either one or two packets of noodles.

Intrigued by this, I asked Dev Dutt, whether he came every day. Dev Dutt replied that he comes every Saturday. If he and his younger brother have been good during the week and paid proper attention to their studies, their parents give them a treat of a packet of noodles. I wonder how many children in my last school would consider a packet of noodles sufficient incentive to be good and to study.

Close to the shop is a little stall where a middleaged widow makes tea. It is not particularly good tea but I always buy a cup. I would give her a five rupee note and walk away. At the end of five days, she handed me back two five rupee notes. I looked at her in surprise : “The tea is only three rupees and since I don’t have change, I waited for five days to be able to return your balance.”

But, of course, I experienced the height of this simplicity many, many years ago. I had taken a working holiday in Narkanda and, one afternoon, decided to walk up to the Hato temple. It was a steep, narrow track and by the time I reached the top, not only was I exhausted, but also a little frightened because of the gathering darkness.

I needn’t have been, because Jia Lal, the caretaker, took care of me. He gave me a cup of tea and then insisted that I should not attempt the return journey alone and in the dark.

He settled me in his hut and picking up his torch said he would be back in a short while. Because I was tired, I dozed off. He returned and held out, with great pride, a tiny tube of toothpaste and a tooth brush; “I know that people from the city do not clean their teeth with ‘datun’ so I went down to Narkanda to get you this.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if he had taken me with him, I would have neither been alone nor walking in the dark.

OPED SCIENCE

INDIAN SCIENCE IS divorced from people
Our problems require application of both science and technology. But our scientists are busy solving problems of the developed world. How long shall we allow science to be dogged by mediocrity?
B.G. Sidharth

Shortly after India's independence our population was just around 400 million and the water table twice what it is today. Sixty years down the line, from the fresh water point of view, we are in a precarious position indeed. India has faced and is facing other problems as well.

Indian scientific research does not count for much in the world

In the early sixties the country was facing an acute food shortage. We had to be rescued by the US PL 480 plan. Power, Employment, Health including Environmental Pollution and so on have also been chronic problems.

The food crisis of the sixties was solved by the Green Revolution, but it is threatening to come back again, given the fact that the population has more than doubled from that time. The point is that these mega problems that a country with our mega population faces can only be solved with suitable application of science and technology. This requires an innovative community of scientists and engineers.

Unfortunately while the number of scientists and engineers in the country has grown by leaps and bounds, the quality of science has actually plunged. There have hardly been any breakthroughs in the account books of Indian science and technology. Can we blame this on inadequate funding ? The answer in my opinion is, No. We can certainly have more funding, but this too would only go to further increase the mediocrity of Indian science.

If Nobel prizes are an index of scientific excellence of a country, then India has drawn a total blank-the last science laureate from the country, working in the country was Sir C.V. Raman and in British India. He worked with no funding and against all odds. Or, we could have a more modest index of scientific progress: Breakthroughs in science and technology. Even here we have drawn a blank.

Let us take finally an even more modest index, what in the scientific world is referred to as the citation index, which measures the impact of the scientific work. Here Indian science has actually gone down hill over the past few decades.

The problem is that the university system, which is the feeder of the country's laboratories and higher institutes of research, has all but collapsed. Almost all the ills of the country could be traced to politicians and bureaucrats but the steep decline

of Indian science and technology has been the handiwork of the Indian scientific community itself.

To analyse a little further, after independence the best talent in the country took to degrees and courses which ensured jobs, like Civil Engineering, Medicine and Law. Hardly any bright people took to scientific or technological research, or even research in medicine and life sciences.

This brain drain into what may loosely be called the industry, left the academia getting more and more depleted. Few worthy young men took to teaching or research, as these were meagrely paid jobs if at all jobs were available. This resulted in two very negative consequences. The first was that the quality of teaching in higher education plunged, leaving students groping on their own. The second was that what is sometimes called the Peter principle startedoperating. That is, mediocrity bred mediocrity and repelled quality or excellence. True there are exceptions, as always, but these do not prove the rule.

No doubt the Government was pouring funds into science and technology, but in a clueless manner. C.V. Raman derisively called this the Nehru Bhatnagar Effect. Dr. S.S. Bhatnagar, the eminent and well intentioned scientist, would approach Nehru for funds and the even more well intentioned Nehru would practically give him blank cheques. Much of this money went into building impressive brick and mortar institutions, rather than concentrating on ways and means to develop suitable human resources of excellence.

It is said that years ago Mrs. Indira Gandhi asked the eminent Indian American scientist, Dr. C.K.N. Patel, the then Executive Director of AT&T Bell Laboratories, what could be done to improve the Indian scientific research institutions. His reply silenced her into silent inaction. He suggested that all the research laboratories in India should be closed down and reopened six months later with a new set of scientists with a new agenda. That has been a major criticism of Indian science-it has not been people or society oriented in trying to tackle the fundamental problems of the country. V.S. Naipaul lamented that Indian scientists were working on problems that would get them a nod from Western institutions, rather than looking at the country or be on their own.

Some years ago Nobel Laureate Prof. Roald Hoffmann had this to say while delivering the B.M. Birla Memorial Lecture: "If I were to meet your Prime Minister, I would tell him, ask your researcher to concentrate on problems like Malaria. Let them join hands with their counterparts in a country like Columbia to solve this common problem". He went on to lament that a Malaria vaccine could be found in the US in practically no time but they would not do it for the wrong reasons. Malaria is a poor man's disease and there is no money in it.

The question is, after all this investment in science over the decades, are there any positives? Well, we might boast of the second largest scientific community in the world, which, however mediocre, can nevertheless provide support services for a vast country like India. This includes engineers for maintaining technical equipment like power plant or roads or bridges or dams, or doctors for health care, even in remote areas. Our scientists may not be able to come out with new inventions or medicines or cures, but they are capable of using existing technologies for maintenance of humans and equipment and keep afloat software outsourcing jobs. That is something positive, because many developing countries lack even that.

There is another positive too. The lack lustre and dreadful system of higher education and research in the country has driven some bright people to the developed world to pursue higher studies and research. Over the years, India has managed by default to build a bank of scientific and technical talent abroad. We could today rope them in but that is not easy. What these very bright scientists need is not so much money, but a proper environment.

Nobel Laureate Prof. Norman Ramsey once told me that rather than material incentive, it is peer pressure that drives excellence in research. Such an environment unfortunately has been destroyed by the mediocrities of our science. In other words we need to call back the brightest scientists and engineers and give them a free hand without any interference whatsoever from the Indian system. Then results will start tumbling out slowly. The question is, can we do it?

(The writer is Director, B.M. Birla Science Centre, Hyderabad)

Superbugs are hardly unusual
Dr. Rakesh K Khazanchi

A routine article in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal about the spread of a superbug, resistant to all antibiotics and which is claimed to have originated from India, has set the alarm bells ringing amongst the public in general and medical fraternity in particular. The reason for this is the conclusion drawn in the article which says that travel to India and Pakistan is hazardous particularly for those travelling for medical treatment. There are two aspects of this controversy that need to be addressed- one the scientific validity of the paper and second the advisory issued in relation to medical tourism.

The crux of this paper is drug resistance in bacteria which have the potential to cause serious infection in human beings and one must understand how this happens. Whenever bacteria are exposed to an antibiotic, they develop ways and means to survive its onslaught by genetic mutation. This ability to survive antibiotics is carried down future bacterial generations. Exposure to multiple antibiotics leads to multidrug resistance and emergence of the so called 'superbug'.

The Lancet paper is a report on emergence of multidrug resistant bacteria which are resistant to Carbapenem group of antibiotics (a high end antibiotic) in addition to other antibiotics, making it particularly dangerous. There are many ways by which bacteria can acquire Carbapenem resistance. One of these is by acquiring a gene labelled by the authors as blaNDM1 (ß lactamase, New Delhi Metallo-1) by a group of bacteria called Enterobacter. These resistant bacteria were studied from two hospitals in Chennai and Haryana and amongst those referred to UK's national reference laboratory.

In Chennai, only 4% of the bacterial group under study were found to have Carbapenem resistance. Of these about 1/3rd were found to have resistance due to blaNDM1. The study is silent about the cause of resistance in the rest two third. Of the 47 Carbapenem resistant isolates from Haryana, 26 were due to blaNDM1 and again nothing is mentioned about the cause in the rest 21 isolates. Similarly, the UK part of study concentrates on Carbapenem resistant isolates due to blaNDM1 (32 isolates) but is silent about Carbapenem resistance due to other reasons and their origin (41 isolates).

The paper further states that there was no significant strain relatedness between UK isolates and Indian isolates implying that they may be entirely different. This finding is of significance and contradictory to their subsequent claim that these bacteria originated in India.

Scientifically there are no drawbacks in this report which deals with prevalence of Carbapenem resistant bacteria (Entrobacters) due to blaNDM1 gene. The presence of Carbapenem resistant bacteria in India as well UK cannot be disputed. There are multidrug resistant bugs all over the globe e.g. Penicillin resistant Pneumococci, Vancomycin resistant Enterococci, Methicillin resistant Staph Aureus. Transfer of drug resistance is a natural phenomenon which occurs consistently in the most promiscuous microbiological world. We may keep developing newer and more powerful antibiotics and the bacteria will always find a way around it and develop resistance.

What is disturbing is that the authors seem to have completely ignored the information on Carbapenem resistant bacteria due to causes other than blaNDM1 in spite of their own finding that the resistant strains found in the UK may have been entirely different from those found in India. They have gone on to use this as an argument against medical tourism to India, particularly for cosmetic surgery. Only one of the patients tested positive for this bacteria had undergone cosmetic surgery (either in India or Pakistan) and about one third of patients who tested positive had no history of travel to these countries. Therefore their argument about a superbug from India is a biased conclusion highlighted solely to target the booming medical tourism to India. Of late many patients from developed countries are travelling to India for treatment because we now have world class facilities and expertise and are capable of competing with the best in the world.

Most of the medical tourism in India is to hospitals which have accreditation by reputed international bodies such as NABH and JCI. These hospitals have strict and up-to-date infection control policies along with monitoring of hospital acquired infections. Patients undergoing treatment at these hospitals do not have the risk of exposure to the so called superbugs any more than in any hospital in the developed world.

All said and done, one cannot ignore that a continuous battle has to be fought against microbes. Uncontrolled use of antimicrobials should be checked as this is one of the causes of development of drug resistance. This is the message this paper ought to have given rather than an unwarranted and biased advisory against medical tourism to India.

( The writer is Director, Plastic, Aesthetic and Reconstructive Surgery, Medanta, Gurgaon )