Inside the mind and heart of Venkatesh Sridhar

Venkatesh Sridhar wonders why India’s Prime Minister is lying through his teeth about the Indo-US Nuclear deal.

Venkatesh Sridhar states the facts that strongly makes him oppose the India US Nuclear Deal, as it is bad for India.

As you all know I have been spending quite some time over at Mutiny, reading a variety of blogs that are of interest to me. One such blog was titled, Open letter to Ms. Sonia Gandhi by Chacko. In the post, Chacko asks about Mrs. Sonia Gandhi’s views on the strike organized in Kerala, India by the UDF, a political alliance led by the Congress against the policies of the LDF government, an alliance of all Left parties in the state of Kerala.

It was against the price rises of rice and other basic commodities in the state of Kerala. This despite the fact that the Congress heads the Union Government in New Delhi. Now, the crux of the matter is that Chacko laments about the fact that Rahul Gandhi, who is poised to be the next Congress leader and is projected as the next generation of the Congress, does not list his email address in his Lok Sabha (the lower house of Indian Parliament) profile page. This despite, Rahul Gandhi’s interests being the Internet. Now, any 4 year old kid today knows how to use e-mail, chat and surf the net. And I am sure someone whose interest is Internet surely would have an email id. And also every leader in the Lok Sabha is allocated an email id which is yourname@sansad.nic.in (Sansad means Parliament in Hindi, NIC stands for National Informatics Center, which is responsible for all Government domain and Internet services and .in stands for the country Top Level Domain of India.), so Sonia Gandhi’s email is soniagandhi@sansad.nic.in, which is where Chacko sent his email to.

Maybe Rahul did not want to share his email id for the fear of ’spam’ from the people of India, who by the way he is supposed to represent. Maybe he should have just shared his email anyways which leader would read his own mails will be handled by some secretary any ways unless of course you are President Abdul Kalam, who as everyone knows was known to respond to his emails and who by the way has his own website where he talks about his thoughts and idea, no political agenda bullshit.

Now, I digress, why am I blogging about all this with a post title of Nehru Dynasty: Why should we not ask questions?

Venkatesh Sridhar thinks aloud whether the Communist Party of India is on the verge of extinction. Is the Left on the way to become a party of the past?

I was just browsing the Times of India website and came across this article titled ‘Would you vote for a party launched by idealistic IITians?‘

I despise the title completely. I mean, WTF, the title looks like its asking me a straight forward and simple question - Would I vote for a party launched by idealistic IITians? The straight forward, answer is HELL NO. (I will give my reasons later in the post)

This post might come as a shock to many. But, this time I am going public with my opinion on the ineffectiveness of our Indian media. I am getting frustrated with them more and more as I finished reading the story of Watergate Scandal in the book, All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. These are the two journalists of The Washington Times. The entire scandal was unraveled by them. Imagine something of this sort happening in India. Considering the current bunch of nincompoops in the media in our country, there is a real fat chance of it happening.

Protagonist and characters - Abhijit Panse is a man on a mission, the mission is to simply ban Orkut. Yes, the very same orkut that brings people together, especially friends who have not been in touch for a long time.

The Plot – There is a hate group for Bal Thackeray, the erstwhile leader of Shiv Sena and for Chatrapathi Shivaji Maharaj.

The Act – Cyber café’s rampaged across Thane and Mumbai.

The Climax – Govt. mulls over ban on Orkut.

Today, I was just browsing the Times of India website and I came across their editorial page titled “DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Bye-Bye Tata” by Sauvik Chakraverti, I was intrigued by the title and I clicked on the link to further read it and I found this article by Sauvik was about the recent land acquisition controversies in Singur. As I read on, I was shocked and appaled and I decided to let Sauvik know why, click on more to see what I wrote to him.

Aamir Khan’s latest movie - Fanaa has been banned in Gujarat due to the fact that he was against the increase in the height of the dam before displacing those who are affected by the Narmoda Sarovar Project. This is clearly an infringement on the part of the Gujarat Govt. on the individual fundamental right of Aamir Khan. This clearly shows that the Gujarat Govt. is playing the game of vendetta politics.

How can a Govt. decide to ban an individual’s film on the basis that he had said something against the Govt.? This reminds me of the Emergency era, an era which incidentally gave birth to the current version of the BJP. It amazes me that the Central Govt. kept quiet and so did the Gujarat Congress as it would have been political suicide if they had gone for it.

I am getting more and more worried about the carelessly and so effortlessly and ruthlessly the Govt. is abusing its powers to espouse its views. In a democratic nation they should have been ready for a debate which they were not and decided to twist the arms of the poor Gujarat film distributors and cinema owners and thus was able to ensure that no distributor picked up the copy of the same.

But, one thing this has exponentially increased the media coverage for Fanaa and Aamir Khan and in the showbiz anything and everything that comes for free is welcome and so is the free publicity being generated for Fanaa. If only the Gujarat Govt. could market itself so effectively in terms of tourism, etc.

I received a mail to my NGO’s Yahoo Group —-> We the Indians about the recent Patent Ordinance that the Government of India has framed. Again, the GoI proves that it has no spine in trying to protect the interests of the consumers. I fully understand that we need to comply with TRIPS, but when certain provisions of TRIPS that protect the consumers interest is excluded, I smell rat. A big, fat, ugly smelling rat. I feel this is an intentional omission. I am now attaching the contents of the mail to get in touch with the person who sent me this mail, mail him at naghrw@rediffmail.com, I urge to give this a very serious thought it will affect each and every one of us.

The real face of globalization and the danger it poses in poor country like India are now coming home to roost. This has reference to the Patent Amendment ordinance 2004 issued by Central Government by which India is going to switch over to product patent as against the existing process patent. It is a mystery as to why many of the redeeming provisions permissible even under the Trips agreement have not been included. The ordinance in its present form makes the accessibility; and availability of medicine at low cost very difficult thus affecting the health of people at large.
To give an instance the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs (to combat AIDS) for which multi-national pharmaceutical companies used to charge about US dollars 12.000 annually per person but were compelled to reduce price because India under the existing process patent regime introduced the generic version of the ARV drugs and the price fell down to US dollars 140 annually per person.

Countries like Pakistan under Product patent are already reeling under monopolistic prices charged by Multi-national Corporations (MNC) The network’s Newsletter of Pakistan of September 1996 notes “Pakistani consumers could have saved over rupees one billion on only nine medicines in 1995 if the companies would have offered the same price as they do in India. Pakistani consumers paid Rs.1,7,02,883.000 for buying these 9 medicines (14% of the retail market). These drugs are marketed by the same companies in India as well but at much lower prices.
If patients in Pakistan were offered by these companies the same prices, their medicine bills would have come down to one –third (a 66%
saving) or they would have saved a staggering amount of Rs.1,049,493.000″. The present saving could even be still more phenomenal at current prices. It may be noted that Anti Inflexilant Cipro Flexocine (10 tablets costing Rs.50 in India costs Rs. 400/- in Pakistan Anti Ulcer Medicine Rantidina costing Rs.5 per packet in India cost Rs. 74/- in Pakistan.

Faced with this reality of unbearable burden on the poor in India some of us have been urging the Govt. against amending the law to switch over to product patent. But even it does not have that political will to take on the challenge of multinationals supported by USA. Central Government has no justification not to make suitable changes permissible even under the Trips when Doha Declaration on public health declared that Trips should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO members rights to protect public health and particularly to promote access to medicine for all.

Our present Patent Act strikes a balance between the property rights of a patentee in medicine and the public interest involved in cheap availability of medicine, by empowering Controller of patent to grant a license to produce commercially any such product to any person on such terms as he think fits even if the patentee has refused to do so.

This equitable provision has also been accepted by Doha Declaration-2001. Following this, Brazil, Canada, China provide for compulsory license being granted on reasonable terms if the patentee has refused to do so in spite of commercial terms having been offered.
The deliberate omission of this public interest provision in the ordinance even though permitted under the Trips agreement is impossible to explain when it is well known that the absence of such provisions for compulsory licensing, will only benefit the MNC who will have a field day to charge any monopolistic prices.

Another serious flaw is that it proposes to do away with the effective pre-grant opposition procedure. Currently there are 6000 applications pending (received during 1995-2004).Though formally permitting a pre-grant opposition to the grant of patent, ordinance-2004 incredibly makes a mockery of this right by stating that a person who is opposing the grant will not be given any hearing by the controller. This reduces the pre-grant opposition virtually to a mockery, and is doubly objectionable when countries like Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan have granted full pre-grant hearing to the objector. This denial will lead automatically to the grant of Patent to the majority of these 6000 mail box applicants. This will have disastrous effect on those of local manufacturers whose products are already in the market. They will be in danger of being charged with infringing the patent. A provision has therefore to be made that any products which are already in the market between 1995 and 2004 would be immune from challenge for infringing any patent which may be granted to any of these 6000 applicants.

The Ordinance has not properly incorporated the August 30th Decision of the TRIPS General Council, which permits the grant of compulsory licenses for export purpose to countries with no or insufficient manufacturing capacity in the pharmaceutical sector. The Ordinance proposes to permit compulsory licensing to a country with no or insufficient manufacturing capacity in the pharmaceutical sector, if there is a corresponding patent in the importing country. This ignores the fact that in many instances, there may not be any patent protection in the importing country because the deadline for Least Developing Countries (LDCs) to comply with TRIPS is 2016. In such a situation the Indian Drug companies would not be able to export to LDCs thus leaving the field open to MNC.

With all these dangers concerning public health. Ordinance is not an option. These are matters which need to be debated fully in the parliament. The facile explanation that if ordinance was not issued, it would violate the 1 st January, 2005 deadline by which India was expected to change the patent law to comply with Trips and incur penalty is an imaginary ghost. UK, France, Argentina delayed making amendments to conform to trips by 3 years, 1 year and 4 year respectively without having been imposed any penalty. Why then such a panicky reaction from our Government remains unexplained.

The only option to the government claiming to speak for the poor is to immediately repeal the Ordinance-2004. This matter must be left to the wisdom of the representatives of the people in parliament .