Time to streamline anti-Naxal ops

Two Central ministries, ministry of defence (MoD) and ministry of home affairs (MHA), are engaged in a nasty war of words over an incident involving Indian Air Force personnel during an anti-Maoist operation in Chhattisgarh.

An IAF Mi-17 that was providing logistical support to the police was brought down by Naxal fire. The MHA lashed out at the “cowardice” of the IAF personnel who, reportedly chose to abandon the machine and the wounded man where the chopper landed and flee to the nearest camp. The rescue party and reinforcements reached the spot three hours later.

The IAF also came under fire because its personnel did not bother to leave behind its commandos to guard the chopper and the injured cop — leaving the machine and its load of weapons unguarded in the Naxal-infested territory for three long hours.

The Air Force, in its defence, said the blame lay on the state’s police which did not ‘sanitise’ the area near their camp.

While the blame game continues and respective departmental inquiries are on, the uncomfortable issue of (and the ambiguity regarding) the role of the armed forces in anti-Naxal operations has raised its head.

The MoD had earlier declared that its personnel (read IAF) can return fire if fired upon by the Maoists guerrillas. It has not emerged clearly why the armed helicopter, with highly trained commandos on board, could not respond to the attack and went down.

The IAF personnel, before scramming, left an LMG and a pistol with the wounded policeman — how noble!

May be, in that condition, he was supposed to do a Rambo and mow down any possible Naxal assault team.

Now, imagine a scenario if the chopper crew had decided to hold their position. No matter what their training, the sheer numerical superiority of a Naxal party would have overwhelmed them. The result would be that other IAF teams would tend to get trigger-happy, raising the possibilities of civilian casualties. In an area where human intelligence is minimal and terrain preventing easy distinguishing of Naxal patrols and foraging tribals, this would have serious consequences.

There is also the issue of setting up Army camps and training sessions in Naxal strongholds. True, a sovereign country will not be dictated by presence of guerrilla groups when it comes to training and deployment of its forces. Though there has been no untoward incident so far, there is a high probability of the Army getting dragged into the conflict.

The Naxals are no fools to attack army personnel or camps and bring on themselves the wrath of a well-trained and heavily-armed force. However, if a communication gap or a case of mistaken identity results in such an attack – and casualties – things are going to get ugly.

The Army would get involved in the direct action and soon the conflict would snowball into a full-fledged civil war. And when such a conflict takes place it always tends to take a heavy toll on lives (uniformed and civilian) and scars the region’s psyche — and that is something nobody wants.

The government agencies should shake off their lethargy and revisit standard operating procedures (SOPs) so that the forces (police and the military) are in a better position to deal with delicate situations like the one faced by the IAF personnel in Chhattisgarh.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on February 6, 2013.)

We are not a nation of human guinea pigs

In a country of 120 crore people, where lakhs are born and almost the same number die every day, life comes pretty cheap — as shown by the unabashed continual of human drug trials sans conformation to ethical norms.
The recent expose by Lancet on unethical human trials that took place in a Madhya Pradesh government hospital shows the extent to which pharma companies have been able to sabotage the very system that should ensure good practices.
For pharma companies who want to conduct human trials, India offers several advantages such as low operational costs, large number of high-end private hospitals, English-speaking doctors and technicians and most importantly — a massive supply of diverse, impoverished people who can be used as human guinea pigs.
Getting information on medical records itself is difficult and involves a maze of rules, procedures and not the least, miles of red tape.
Well… there is more bad news. Only a small segment of the human trials take place in government hospitals, the rest take place in private clinics — which are not obliged to provide any information under the Right to Information Act.
Figures provided by the Lancet speak for themselves — up from about 50 human trials cleared in 2003, there have been 1,852 projects registered with the Clinical Trial Registry India (CTRI) in mid-2011. Ironically, this registry was set up only in 2007.
An even more shocking aspect is that the Madhya Pradesh government had banned all human drug trials in the State as recently as 2010 and the ban is still in force. The aberration that has been exposed in Madhya Pradesh is just the tip of the iceberg.
Drug companies of repute, both national and international, use clinical research organisations (CROs) to do the dirty work for them. The CROs, in turn, use services of dubious characters as agents to recruit the subjects (read victims).
Informed consent, which is mandatory, remains a farce as the subjects are usually illiterate or barely-literate and cannot read the elaborate forms (usually in English) that they sign. They are also equally unaware of the nature of the drug that is going to be tested on them and the possible side effects.
And even when the side effects surface at a later point of time, these people rarely have the means to get treatment or a collective mechanism to seek compensation. The most preferred human guinea pigs are tribals, most of whom are neither organised nor literate.
“The CRO industry generated $485 million in revenue in 2010—11 and has been growing about 12 per each year. The number of CROs grew from a handful before 2005 to more than 150 today. However, there is no government registry for CROs in India,” points out another reference in the Lancet report.
The worst part about the whole human drug trial episode is that the doctors, who have sworn to protect life and uphold medical ethics, are the facilitators for these unethical practices.
It has been only been seven decades since the notorious human experiments of Nazi doctors on inmates of concentration camps. We might be a democracy, but with laxity on regulations, we swing dangerously close.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on February 8, 2012)

Whose power is it anyway?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has put an end to ambiguity over the government’s policy on how it plans to implement the controversial nuclear power projects by saying the Kudankulam plant will start operations in the next couple of months.

The four reactors, built with Russian technology, are slated to provide 4,000MW to the national power grid and cater to both the domestic and industrial consumers.

One can’t help but wonder if the newfound panacea for our power woes will go the same way as the mega dams, which Jawaharlal Nehru had touted as “temples of development”. These projects provided electricity and irrigated millions of hectares but also displaced millions of people and drowned vast stretches of pristine forests.

Till Fukushima, Japan was the poster boy for champions of “safe, fail-proof” nuclear power and the tsunami nailed all the well-crafted and well-publicised lies. It has come to a point where even breast milk in the nearby precincts have been found contaminated by radiation.

If somebody wants to establish a firecracker factory next to your house won’t you want it shifted to some uninhabited area? Won’t you be worried for the safety of your family and that of the neighbourhood even if the top rocket scientist comes and tells you about its safeguards?

In a country where operations and safety features of all nuclear facilities are ‘classified’ and details opaque due to ‘national security’ concerns, it is only natural that the threatened population is up in arms.

Visuals of tribal folk near the Jaduguda uranium mines suffering from unknown diseases, congenital defects in newborns, sterility in young adults, and lung disease in mine workers, from Anand Patwardhan’s War and Peace (the filmmaker had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get the censors’ cuts quashed) are enough to make anyone have second thoughts about ‘safe’ nuclear power production.

The prime minister’s soft voiced yet razor sharp concluding observation that Kudankulam protests were “overdone” smacks of arrogance and makes a mockery of the idea of democracy. Not surprising for a head of the government who is used to being dictated by a higher power.

When the whole world is phasing out nuclear power and replacing it with greener and sustainable technologies, it’s sad that our government is going for it — a policy with single-minded focus of burgeoning the wallets of private players at the cost of health and safety of public.