Where the atmanirbharta in spine?
Truth be told, I didn't expect CSIR chief Shekhar Mande could be so disingenuous. "India didn't have to depend on western countries," he says. What is this abject refusal to thank other countries for help – and preferring instead to take their help and rewriting the past to pretend we didn't need any?
Of all those who received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in India, 88% received Covishield, which was first conceived by scientists in the UK and licensed by a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company to an Indian manufacturer. Even Covaxin, which accounts for the remaining 12% (screw Sputnik V), draws on technologies perfected by scientists in the US, among other places, against the SARS and MERS viruses. And while India's drug controller approved a glut of drugs to treat severe COVID-19, the rights to the most popular among them and which also demonstrated some efficacy in any well-designed trials and observational studies – remdesivir – belong to a Californian pharmaceutical company.
Some of the special containers and chemical reagents required to conduct RT-PCR tests are mostly imported. Indian industry adapted in a relatively short span of time to boost local production of masks, PPE kits and syringes, but there's a lot that it depended on the west for and for which the west depended on India.
In The Statesman article, ICMR chief Balram Bhargava also says, "The experience of developing Covaxin has instilled self-confidence in us that India is now much more than the pharmacy of the world. It is also a vaccine superpower." Kind sir, India is no longer the 'pharmacy of the world'. And we'd have to be a shitty kind of "vaccine superpower", whatever that means, to a) run low on vaccines and syringes and completely fail to see that coming, b) celebrate 100-crore preordained inoculations, c) go so gung-ho with COVID-19 that we fail to deliver doses of a DTP vaccine to 3 million children in a year (the world's highest) and d) preferentially award vaccine-making contracts to private companies.
Of course, BB has been a foregone conclusion for a while. But that Mande can thump his chest like this… Are we to believe, then, that the rumours about why the Manipal Centre for Virus Research was shut, just as the pandemic was beginning, are true? That it was poised to undermine, with its foreign funds, foreign collaborations and foreign-trained scientists, the 'Make in India' narrative that the government as much as the government-funded scientific enterprise is wedded to.
Perhaps the most regrettable thing about Mande's comment is that – if the head of India's largest government-funded scientific research establishment is prepared to lie in public, and to himself, that Indian researchers, manufacturers, traders, healthcare workers and patients didn't want for anything that wasn't already available in the country in early 2020, he is also prepared to believe there aren't any problems that need to be fixed or resolved today either. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I don't have my hopes up. Whatever we're atma-nirbhar with today, it isn't spine among government scientists, it seems.
