Towards an India-specific biobanking law
Dear Reader,
I hope you are doing well. Over the past week, we’ve studied and discussed India’s biobanking policies, lessons from Sri Lanka’s move to organic farming, Climate change in the Indian Ocean region, and more. Here’s some of it:
Biobanking Policies in India
Sunila Dixit, Priyal Lyncia D’Almeida, Manjulika Vaz and Shambhavi Naik authored an issue brief on biobanking policies in India. Biobanks are repositories of human biological materials that are linked to personal and health information. The samples are usually collected through voluntary donations or post-mortem. Biobanks are set to become the norm as large scale datasets appear likely to drive the future of life science and healthcare research.
However, there are concerns around ethics and consent processes that need to be addressed. In India, there is no specific law to address these concerns. In its absence, vulnerable sections of the society may be left open to abuse. The paper does a literature survey of biobanking policies and concerns of consent and privacy in the context of India. It lays the foundation for a discussion around biobanking policies and the formation of an India-specific biobanking law.
Sri Lanka’s Organic Farming Gamble
Nitin Pai, in The Mint, wrote about Sri Lanka’s ban on fertilizer imports and the consequent shift to organic farming. Running out of foreign exchange amid an economic downturn and with looming debt-servicing obligations, the Sri Lankan government imposed a slew of import controls earlier this year. Arguing against a universal, moral case for organic farming, Nitin wrote:
Whether or not organic farming is a ‘good thing’ depends on crop, soil, geography and economic context. Pushing organic farming in a one-size-fits-all policy will inevitably lead to the kind of disaster that Sri Lanka currently faces. It is far better to leave cropping and farming decisions to the farmers themselves.
Ball-park estimates suggest that organic yields are 20-30% lower than their conventionally farmed counterparts. Subsidies trickling through an inefficient government system cannot override this.
Indian Public Policy Review’s Anniversary
September 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the Indian Public Policy Review. IPPR is a peer-reviewed, bi-monthly, online and an open-access journal, published by Takshashila with the support of a grant from the Infosys Foundation. The latest issue carries a set of diverse and engaging studies. For instance,
Shikha Dahiya et al. note the growing centralisation in India's human capital interventions and instead suggest a more decentralised and targeted approach within India's federal structure.
Vivek Jadhav's paper measures and analyses the political concentration and inefficiency that characterise the disproportionate representation caused by the First Past The Post electoral system followed in India.
Aarushi Kataria examines the content of over a thousand press releases by the Government of India during the COVID-19 crisis and argues that they served as a mechanism for the government to shape narratives in a manner that showed it in a positive light.
Damodar Nepram and James Konsam explore how India's North Eastern states benefited from the introduction of GST.
Anantha Nageswaran reviews Paul Blustein's book "Schism: China, America and the fracturing of the global trade system."
The Climate Threat in the Indian Ocean
The IPCC Report released in early August revealed the potential impact of climate change on the Indian Ocean region. I spoke to Arjun Gargeyas about why the report ought to be a wake up call for collective action by states in the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). We discussed challenges of several kinds, including security, economic and environmental, and parsed out the possible role of the IORA in addressing these.
Much of the discussion in the podcast is anchored around an article Arjun wrote in The Diplomat.
Cost of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategic Embrace
In his weekly column in ThePrint, Lt. Gen. Menon argued that the strategic embrace between Afghanistan and Pakistan isn’t likely to have a happy ending. He wrote:
For the Taliban, the lack of economic support makes governance an uphill task. Having tasted material well-being and religious freedom of some sort or the other, the urban Afghan does not easily brook religious extremism — a factor that can upend the Taliban. Rural areas of Afghanistan may be relatively tolerant of the Taliban but if their livelihoods are hampered and repression is the style of governance, the Taliban will soon find themselves stretched to maintain control and stem the growth of resistance to their rule.
There are reports of the widespread use of Pakistani drones for surveillance and armed attacks. To most Afghans, this could mean that Pakistan has replaced the US as their repressor, but one without the economic largesse that provided fuel for governance.
In Pakistan, too, Lt. Gen. Menon argued, the internal political situation is volatile.
Rumblings of a power struggle within the military hierarchy of Pakistan and growing frictions with the civilian political leadership are evident. According to human rights activist Amjad Ayub Mirza, living in exile in the UK, the ISI chief is allegedly being investigated for charges relating to his conduct, including consumption of liquor and cavorting with female journalists during his stay at Hotel Serena in Kabul; proceeding to Kabul without informing the Chief of Army Staff; and maintaining relations with proscribed terrorist groups within Pakistan. The ISI chief, who enjoys the support of Prime Minister Imran Khan, if approved for command of a Corps, could replace Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa. The ascent of the Taliban to power could threaten Pakistan’s fragile internal polity and even the possibility of a coup cannot be ruled out. There have never been any free lunches for foreigners in Afghanistan, and Pakistan cannot be an exception.
The dangerous cocktail thus created between the two countries, is unlikely to benefit either.
Ethical Reasoning For Public Policy
The applications for our short credit course in ethical reasoning for public policy are closing soon. The cohort begins on September 25th.
Think about the policy issues that bother you the most: poverty, corruption, climate change, subversion of democratic values, etc. Inherent in each of these is an ethical question. Every rupee spent by a state on policy A is at the cost of something else that the state could have done with that one rupee. Often these decisions are not a straightforward economic calculation because the welfare of real people depends on them.
Ethical reasoning is thus crucial to the practice of policy-making and public policy analysis. The ethics of a policy, and indeed our own expectations from the state, must go beyond that policy's stated, often noble, intention. But that is a far easier thing to say than to do. That is where the Takshashila Institution comes in.
Our Special Credit Course in Ethical Reasoning is a short 6-week course that will introduce you to concepts, frameworks and case studies from moral philosophy that you can apply to public policy analysis. The course will be taught by Nitin Pai.
What We Have Been Reading
The last book we recommended was Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan. I hope you have been enjoying reading it. This week’s book, recommended by Manoj Kewalramani, is Rethinking Chinese Politics by Joseph Fewsmith. Manoj says:
This is an excellent, lucid study of the world of elite politics in China. Fewsmith challenges the conventional wisdom around institutionalisation of politics in China. He argues that elite politics within the Party-state system has long functioned on the basis of informal balances, norms and factional imperatives. Viewed from this perspective, Fewsmith argues that Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power within the Party and the constitutional changes that he has engineered have not implied an undoing of a process of institutionalisation. Rather, these are a reflection of the structural pathologies of the Leninist Party-state system.
Get reading!
That’s it from us this week. Take care and stay safe!
Regards,
Atish Padhy,
Assistant Manager, Digital Properties,
Takshashila Institution
PS: We have extended the deadline for the India’s Global Outlook survey to October 15, 2021. The survey is a unique exercise in understanding how Indians view the world and India’s role in it. Do take it at the earliest, if you haven’t yet done so.