Regulating the Pharmaceutical Industry

Jug Suraiya’s blog post titled “Sick Industry” makes very interesting reading (March 25, 2016, Jug Suraiya in Juggle-Bandhi, Times of India). Visit

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/sick-industry/

What should be an indicator of a person being diabetic? Fasting sugar level? Yes, but who decides the threshold? Jug Suraiya says that “experts” redefined the threshold a couple of times during the last two decades and have caused the world to think that the number of diabetics is now more than 200% of what it was earlier.

There are lots of interesting reports about how uncontrolled commercialism can endanger public health. For, an example, visit

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/21/how-an-obscure-drugs-4000-price-increase-might-finally-spur-action-on-soaring-health-care-costs/

We need the media to be alert to all kinds of dangers. Governments can subvert institutions like Lok Ayuktas as and when they wish. Media have become our only hope for demanding high standards in public life. Society needs to worry about commercial interests and corrupt members influencing professional bodies. The “reputation” the Medical Council of India enjoys is an example of what can happen. Visit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Council_of_India

In this context I should share a joke about world of telephone companies – landline as well as mobile. What happens if the percentage of calls landing on wrong numbers increases? Profitability goes up!  

Why can’t we be more efficient?

I did a trip by car recently from Bangalore to Neyveli and Thanjavur and came back via Tiruchirappalli. In one place, Bangalore, I paid the toll electronically. Everywhere else the car had to stop and the toll had to be paid manually. I paid a total of Rs 619 at 11 places. The whole trip was about 1100 km long. This made me read up on reports of such inefficient practices elsewhere in India. This country prides itself on its software export earnings, but its own domestic economy is often a decade or more behind adopting simple technology to save its people time and money. It is a bit like the case of workers in the construction industry, who build huge multi-story apartment complexes for others. But they and their children usually live in the buildings under construction, often without drinking water, lighting and access to toilets. Sometimes their toddlers wander around such buildings, fall down and die.  

The Centre for Internet & Society has done us a service by republishing in its February 2016 Newsletter an insightful article by Shyam Ponappa in the Business Standard of Feb 3, 2016 http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/shyam-ponappa-bottled-up-national-assets-116020301314_1.html

Ponappa points out that the Indian Highways Management Company was tasked in 2012 to implement Electronic Toll Collection (ETC). He also reports that a study by IIM-C and Transport Corporation of India in 2012 reported an annual loss of Rs 87,000 Crores due to delays of the Delhi-Mumbai truck traffic. The study is reported to have indicated that the average speed of the Delhi-Mumbai truck traffic to be 21 kmph! It would be worth reading up the basis for these loss calculations; they seem to be of the order of 2% of India’s GNP in 2012!

ETC is reported to have been introduced in 2014, but the goal of having it implemented all over India remains a dream as of now. The transportation sector contributes over 5% of the GNP and the road sector handles over 60% of the freight movement (these numbers are based on relatively old information – visit http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/SOUTHASIAEXT/EXTSARREGTOPTRANSPORT/0,,contentMDK:20703625~menuPK:868822~pagePK:34004173~piPK:34003707~theSitePK:579598,00.html )

While doing research for writing this article I came across this website of ICICI Bank

http://www.icicibank.com/Personal-Banking/cards/prepaid/fastag/list-of-active-toll-plazas.page?#toptitle

It says that an electronic tag can be bought for use on the Bangalore-Chennai route at Hosur, but the publicity for this has been very poor. I have travelled on this route several times but have never seen a sign advertising this tag. I am a Bangalore customer of the ICICI bank but I have never received an email about this.

There are many other examples in the Indian economy, as readers can guess, of poor management causing huge losses. Major reforms pose their own problems, but a concerted effort to identify easily addressable problems could speed up the growth rate of the GNP by one or two percent. There was a time when productivity was given national attention, but now we hear little about productivity in general. The Niti Aayog seems to be concerned with agricultural productivity, but we do not hear about attempts to improve productivity in other sectors of the economy.

Public Sector Banks – fight the disease, not merely the symptoms

A lot of noise is being made of a businessman being given questionable loans. Is this the first such case? Or is it going to be the last such one?

The basic problem is that netas can always influence public sector banks to give loans that no one else will give. That is why netas will keep these banks going, even when they are inefficient. The bank staff are not inefficient; it is the leaches that bleed off the banks that make them weak.

The solution seems to be partly in bank staff serving as whistle blowers – protecting public interest by alerting the media in early stages of scams.

It is partly in the public taking their deposits out of public sector banks. It is also in selling off shares in these banks. We need to vote the only effective way we can vote – vote with our feet!

Navagraha and the heliocentric theory

Most Hindu temples have a corner for the "vigrahas" representing nine heavenly “bodies”. Not only planets; they include Sun, Moon, Rahu and Ketu. The whole assembly is a model of the solar system as perceived by the builders of temples. The Sun is in the center, facing east. The others are facing different directions. This suggests that people who adopted this style of worship had accepted that the Sun was the central body. It also suggests that they recognized that each planet revolved around its own axis independently. Wikipedia offers an article on Navagraha Temples. 

Credit is given to Aristarchus of Samos for proposing a model of the solar system with planets going round the Sun, in the 3rd Century B. C.  The world seems to have largely ignored his model over many centuries. It was left to Nicolaus Copernicus to propose this model again in the 16^th century and trigger off a revolution in scientific thought. The invention of the telescope and its use by Galileo in the 17^th century to report the sighting of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus settled the issue and made the Heliocentricism an accepted scientific theory.

The scientific world has not accepted any argument that Hindu astronomers had adopted the Heliocentric Theory before Copernicus. Can archeologists prove scientifically that the Navagraha corners as described above were built as parts of Indian temples earlier than the 16^th century? This would have great significance and give a lot of credit to Hindu Astronomy.

Why all this fuss about Heliocentrism? It is because Heliocentrism did a lot to upset the traditional belief that religious texts were reliable sources of information about the nature of the universe. It promoted the scientific view that “sacred literature” is no substitute for scientific findings. It was a victory for believers in reason. The extraordinary precision with which heliocentric models could predict the movement of planets and the occurrence of eclipses using simple laws of motion and gravity earned a lot of respect for the scientific method.

We have to recognize that no such revolution took place in India, irrespective of the time of adoption of the heliocentric theory there.  Belief in astrology continues to have an influence over large numbers of people. Visit Prof Shivaji Sondhi’s article at https://www.princeton.edu/~sondhi/nonphysics/writings/astrology.pdf  for a discussion on the thoughts of a former education minister of India and his efforts to provide funding for university courses in astrology. Mixing dubious beliefs with ancient knowledge that stands up to scientific investigation ruins our credibility. The baby gets thrown out with the bath water! Rejecting beliefs that fail repeated attempts at verification is as important as accepting verified knowledge.

A search indicates that at least one university in India advertises degree level courses in astrology. Visit

http://sastra.edu/distanceeducation/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=100&Itemid=256  Their website says “Astrology, the study of the stars and their influence upon human life on earth, has been in vogue since Vedic times”. 

Yes, this institution is in the University Grants Commission’s list named “Total No. of Universities in the Country as on 14.12.2015” as item 549.

TRAI is against discriminatory tariffs

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has taken a stand against discriminatory pricing for Internet services. This is a step forward towards net neutrality. Visit 

http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/WhatsNew/Documents/Regulation_Data_Service.pdf

The Internet was born with much opposition from vested interests. There was a protocol war with the Internet protocols on one side and protocols favored by the telecom monopolies of the world at that time. A lot of effort was expended to try and save the monopolies from competition from new technology-oriented companies. The victory of a set of ideas promoting competition and innovation has brought rich dividends to the large global community of Internet users.

Many arguments had been used against net neutrality in India. One of them was that if you can have first and second class on trains, why can’t you have differential pricing for Internet services? Why can’t we give better services to those who pay us more? I would like to ask a question in this context: Can a taxi service tell me that they will take me free to one hotel but will charge me 50% more than usual fare to take me to other hotels? May be the first hotel is willing to pay you more; but you are a licensed service regulated in the public interest.

The existence of discrimination in one sector is no argument for introducing discrimination in other sectors. For instance, one cannot argue that even temples discriminate against women; therefore, telecom service providers should be free to charge women more for Internet services!

I have written earlier against the most severe form of discriminatory pricing that frightens away many potential users of the Internet. This is the business of charging a novice user several times the rate that is charged to those who pay a sizable monthly fee for a package. I am not talking about 50% or 100% higher cost for small users, but large multiples that are effectively punitive charges. It looks as the service providers are saying “How dare you small fry tread on the toes of mighty companies like ours and our big users?” Visit

The internet and education in the developing world - hopes and reality

In the article mentioned above, I have also discussed the foolishness of ignoring all other factors and expecting technology alone to solve major problems. For instance, 55% of the websites on the Internet show English as the language of their content. Indian Languages, including Hindi and Tamil, are among languages accounting for less than 0.1% of the websites each, but the bulk of the people in this country prefer to read information in their own languages, not in English. Newspaper statistics show this clearly. Challenges like this have to be understood and addressed if Internet usage in India is to become widespread among all sections of society. 

Maj Gen A. Balasubramanian passed away on January 20, 2016

Maj Gen Balasubramanian was a key player in the first four decades of computing in India. He had graduated from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Madras, in the fifties, and went on to serve in the Army Corps of Signals. He was one of the founders of the Computer Society of India (CSI) and had served as the first Hon. Secretary of the Society. That was during 1965-69. He then took over from Prof R Narasimhan, the founding President, with whom he had worked closely.  Brig Balasubramanian, as he was popularly known in CSI for over a decade, served as President CSI during 1969-72.  I will refer to him as Brigadier in the rest of this article; that is the way my memory works!  

The Government of India established the Department of Electronics (DOE) in June 1970 and the Electronics Commission in February 1971. Prof M. G. K. Menon served as the first Chairperson of the Electronics Commission. Brig Balasubramanian served the commission as an Officer on Special Duty at first and as a Director later on, playing very significant roles in the EC/DOE. Those were the days when all imports had to be tightly controlled due to a shortage of foreign exchange. Brigadier had the tough job of managing the pressures from a whole variety of computer users who came seeking Government approval for their imports. The Electronics Commission was active in creating R & D institutions in India in the electronics area, and in promoting Indian companies. National policy gave primacy to public sector companies, two notable ones in the computer area being the Electronics Corporation of India Ltd, and the Computer Maintenance Corporation of India Ltd. (later CMC Ltd).  Brigadier worked very closely with Dr Prem P. Gupta, the first Managing Director of the Computer Maintenance Corporation, particularly after Dr Gupta took over as Chairman of the Electronics Commission. They had also worked together a lot to build CSI.

Brigadier continued to be active in the CSI, handling among other things coordination with the International Federation for Information Processing, and encouraging a number of initiatives by the Society.

Brigadier was a warm and friendly person; I have never seen him tense, irritated or upset during all the time I have known him. He was diplomatic in dealing with user pressures that any regulatory department has to face. DOE had the hard task of having to play the regulatory as well as promotional roles. The regulatory role he played was not an easy one, as he had to implement government policy shaped by the economic and political situation of the country. Many of those who went to him asking for permission to import a computer did not get the computer they wanted; committees set up by the Dept. scrutinized the requests and often suggested a smaller or cheaper configuration. However, the Brigadier was always available to meet the applicants and treated them with courtesy. He was a good listener and was willing to understand and consider the views of the visitors. In the Computer society too, his mature and dignified style of leadership played a major role in getting people to work together.  

I guess it was his military life and his disciplined ways that gave it to him – he was always as fit as any officer on field duty, despite living in Delhi. He enjoyed and supported Carnatic Music, a passion his family shared with him. His daughter is a talented dancer.  

Computer Society of India has lost an officer and a gentleman. It is a loss to all of us, who have known and worked with him. 

Free information and knowledge from WWW for school students and others

There is a very interesting initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_for_Schools  that I read about today. The site says, “Wikipedia for Schools is a selection taken from the original English-language Wikipedia by the child sponsorship charity SOS Children. It was created as a checked and child-friendly teaching resource for use in schools in the developing world and beyond. Sources and authors can be found at www.wikipedia.org”. It offers 6,000 articles adding to 26 million words and 50,000 images. The current content is the 2013 version. I checked to see how detailed the articles are. The one on Galileo turned out to be 7200 words long.

The way the collection is organized and interlinked, it is easy to find something of interest by clicking on two relevant letters of the alphabet in the beginning of a relevant word (like Ga for Galileo). Visit http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/index/alpha.htm

The collection is online, but you can easily make it available offline. The downloaded collection can comfortably fit into a tablet, which can also run a web server. Students can use tablets, laptops, PCs or cell phones to connect to the server tablet via WiFi. The cost per student would be very small, if we assume that they have some access device like a cell phone. The schools may provide this  service at no cost. 

An audible version would be of great value to the visually impaired, and those for whom English is only a second language. Spoken content in English on topics of their choice would go a long way to make them comfortable with spoken English. I would prefer recordings made by selected volunteers to text-to-speech systems. Subtitling in languages would help specific language communities.  Software to deliver the audio output with subtitles in selected languages would surely be worth developing.  There is a great opportunity for volunteer groups in universities to do work in this area.

Audio versions, with or without sub-titling could in principle be hosted on the Internet as well.

Finally, while articles in “Wikipedia for Schools” have been selected to be suitable for use by school students, anyone can use them and benefit. I did read a couple of articles from the collection this afternoon, and am none the worse for having done that! This opens up the possibility that public libraries, big and small, can make this collection available to their readers who bring in some access device.  

Users should examine the terms on which content is downloaded, and respect in letter & spirit the values of the Wikipedia community that has created the primary asset.

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