 Welcome to Dispatches from India where we bring you major news developments from the country. In this show we are going to be talking about the plan to change the very face of India's capital that is New Delhi, the prospects for India's economy in the coming months and the latest debates on patents and the vaccine. Let's first take a look at the Central Vista project in the capital New Delhi. The Central Vista project has been conceived as an attempt to change the very face of the capital through massive construction work. Now among the structures coming up are a new parliament building and new residence for the Prime Minister. On the other hand we have a few iconic buildings in the area which will be pulled down. From the time the project was announced there has been opposition due to its impact on the history of the space and ecological reasons. Critics said that the main purpose of the project was to ensure that the right wing Bharati Yajrata Party which is a ruling party in India led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi can leave its mark on the capital. They called it a waste of money when it was needed for other uses. Now this criticism peaked during the recent second wave of the pandemic when work on this project was categorized as an essential service. Opposition parties and civil society questioned this when they demanded that this work be stopped and the resources instead be diverted to fighting the pandemic. However, the government refused to heed this demand. Urban issues expert, Tikanthar Singh talks to social anthropologist Bobby Lutra Sinha on the various dimensions of the project and what it tells us about the government of the day. What I really think what has happened right now is that there is an extraordinary circumstance which has hit us and our lives and as you rightly pointed out it's the pandemic. In this pandemic while the first stage reality is in the first phase the realities for India were very different and the needs. In the second phase what we see is that once again the realities have really hit us hard on the face and most of them are indicating not only a scarcity of resources but they are indicating a lack of will on the part of our political and elected representatives to take on the leadership and divert much needed funds and resources into pandemic management. So the central vista therefore stands out because not only is it an architectural, it's not an architectural protest now that one sees against the central vista. The protest is all about a humanitarian welfare and we as Delhiites and also a network of independent minded citizens see that the government has a great opportunity to correct all that has gone wrong in the pandemic management by diverting the precious resources from central vista into humanitarian welfare and that perhaps will be a better memory for all of us not just the government but for all of us. We now move on to an issue that's on the mind of many Indians that's the economy. The second wave of the pandemic is slowly beginning to subside very slowly of course however this does not mean that there will be a magical recovery as far as the economy is concerned. In fact the next few months might see the incomes of working class Indians suffer further as corporates are likely to pass on their losses to them. Journalist and economics expert Arundhya Chakravarti looks at what's in store for the coming months in the Indian economy. We were so worried about surviving the second wave that we didn't really think about the other part which is required for living which is our livelihood our incomes. There are lockdowns in various parts of the country and this is likely to continue for two three months. The only answer India had was universal vaccination and that's not likely to happen before March April next year. So we have almost another fiscal at least one entire calendar year which is 2021 when the economy is going to face certain setbacks. Now is this going to be a technical recession and what do I mean by technical recession. You know that a technical recession is when you have two quarters of negative growth which mean that the economy contracts might not be that but still when it comes to your income my income it might be a mega recession we might see a contraction of our income. Why am I saying this think about it when there's a lockdown we know what happens shops are shut people don't buy things restaurants are shut various dealerships are shut cars don't sell right. So what happens people who are employed by these companies sooner or later they have to take pay cuts sometimes they lose their jobs we know that several companies again announced pay cuts right after this lockdown that had that has hit some of our metros right now because of that even those who don't get pay cuts are not likely to get increments and what happens when you don't get an increment when you don't get an increment but prices rise your real income falls again those who are self employed if there's a lockdown what will happen if there's a fear not just lockdown fear things which are essentially services which depend on people coming and coming to the stores coming to the restaurant coming to a dealership coming to a shop those are going to be affected and trade hotels restaurants retail wholesale these drive a huge part of our economy drive a lot of jobs in our economy all of these people will be affected it's very clear what does that mean when you don't have money in your hands what do you do you start reducing your consumption there's certain things you cannot cut down on that you have to buy and there are certain things which are discretionary which you don't really need to buy you can postpone so that kind of consumption is going to go down even further right what does that mean companies won't be able to sell and if they're not able to sell their sales will go down and when their sales go down the only way they can retain their profit is what one they cut the salaries and wages they cut their wage bill the other is that they cut down on their other costs last year there was a global slow down remember that the slow down and recession was global what that meant is that raw materials were not being bought by companies right that is the case crude oil was not being used petroleum diesel was not being consumed so all these things became cheaper whether it is steel whether it is crude oil whether it is coal whether it is cement anything that goes into making things right plastics everything the demand fell and because the demand fell what happened the total sales fell but the cost of raw materials fell as well globally cost of raw materials fell what that allowed India's corporates to do mind you is to have higher than normal profits their profits grew because the wages were stagnant right but their costs in terms of raw materials fell so even though their top line or their revenues dropped they were able to make profits because their costs reduced at a faster rate this year the rest of the world is actually back on track and they're going to make up for the lost consumption of 2020 right so we know that we saw visuals of people dancing on the streets of Spain because Spain has lifted many restrictions we know restrictions have been removed in Israel we know in parts of the US you no longer need to wear a mask we know in UK restrictions are being lifted many parts of Europe are gradually lifting restrictions so what does that mean consumption is coming back there employment is coming back they are going to consume all these raw materials and when they start consuming these raw materials what is going to happen the prices of those raw materials are going to increase so here's the problem for Indian manufacturers and any Indian business which depends on any kind of raw material whether it is electricity or petrol as small as that their costs are going to go up but they mostly sell to India right those who export will be in a good position but those who mostly sell to the domestic market they are going to face lockdowns they're going to face reduced income for people they're going to face a further contraction of demand in the economy and what does that mean they'll have to cut prices so even if their raw material costs go up they'll have to reduce prices and what does that mean this year things will go reverse their profits will shrink and finally we go on to one of the biggest debates in India right now that of patents on vaccines there have been a number of debates on who holds the intellectual property right for the co-vaccine vaccine which is manufactured by a private firm but whose development was conducted with the involvement of a government agency in recent weeks it has been revealed that the government and the private company which is called Bharat Paiyatik jointly hold the intellectual property rights for the vaccine now the question is there isn't that the government considering the fact that the government had this access and the fact that India is facing a vast issue in vaccinating its population why didn't it license other companies especially in the public sector to produce this vaccine newsflakes premier purkaya sign immunology is doctor Satyajit Rath discussed a broad trend of corporate strategies with respect to intellectual property rights across the world that it is true that it's not about one patent and in part that is because most big pharma big IT once upon a time even today big pharma tend to build not one patent for one product but a whole patent hedge of literally hundreds of patents fitting overlapping between each other covering the entire process of making the product formulation so this is this is still admittedly a patent issue but it is a point to say that we're not talking about one and it's quite possible that some of these patents in the patent hedge are the specific patents for which a waiver is being discussed but others are drawn from a far more general patent pool and have been fitted here and oh those are not about this particular vaccine so they shouldn't be part of the waiver is quite plausibly an argument that may come up sooner rather than later so that's one point which is tactical the second point is increasingly over the past centuries ever since the patenting system has been put in place where originally the whole point was to describe the invention in a way that anybody could reproduce it in fact that was the original intent of the patent itself the original intention of the entire patent process itself to shift to that from a trade secret based practice but increasingly what has happened inevitably is that while lip service is paid to full disclosure in the patent in reality there is actually not sufficient information in the patent document itself to allow replication and reproduction and as a consequence you need to know all the little tricks of the train which effectively are then trade secrets in order to make the published patent work in somebody else's hands and this then becomes an additional lever of effectively intellectual property over and above formal published filed accepted patents in order to restrict distribution and maintain control for in this case so that's the second component the third component of this restriction is the argument most notably apparently at least implicitly made by Mr. Will Gates recently that it's also a matter of the manufacturing landscape in a particular place in a country and its level of sophistication its level of sophistication both in terms of the benchmarking and the reliability of its supply chains for all the small products that go into the final product as well as the skill levels and the new take absorptive capacity of the professionals of the human resources who are going to do this and it's at these three interlocking but distinct levels that this entire argument is functioning about oh what are the many limitations and restrictions for the global south to be simply taking these miraculous vaccine technologies and implementing them in large-scale manufacturing. There are two civil rights arguments one is they're stealing our intellectual property which I think was made recently by the American pharmaceutical industry that if we wave patents on these miraculous drugs or vaccines then China and Russia might start making good medicines against other diseases too now why that should be something we should be looked upon with a great deal of suspicion is another matter but the idea is not very different from saying the third world countries like India are stealing our property so it's really going hand in hand with that and we actually saw that argument with the AIDS epidemic as well and this was essentially the reason why American pharma companies sued South African government rather shamelessly to see that cheap genetics from India does not reach the AIDS patients in South Africa so that was the big AIDS battle and it's interesting when you look at the profit margins for instance of Pfizer or Moderna and this year Moderna has said they expect to make something like 19 billion dollars they've never made profit before 19 billion dollars this year so you are really talking about astronomical level of profits from companies who have always been at a loss of course that is what venture capital does but coming back to the crux of the issue that if we want to scale up production to the level that we need that which is really 14 at least 14 billion doses this year which means at least 12 to 13 billion will get into people's bodies then we are really talking about scaling of the capacity of the world very significantly otherwise we'll not probably exceed 7-8 billion doses this year and of course India and China have a big role to play and interestingly enough South Korea as well because these have all looks like capacities for producing vaccines at a scale now if I look at the three major vaccine shall we say processes that are being followed one is the inactivated virus vaccine by form that's being used which is Sinovac Sinofarm as well as Bharata biotech the second is the adenovirus platform which is again it is AstraZeneca of course serum institute India is following that and then you have the demalia russian sputnik vaccine you have also a can Sinovac vaccine which is available and there are also the other vaccines that come from the US policy Johnson and Johnson Janssen vaccine which all of them seem to be variants of the adenovirus vector vaccine and of course the two which have become the star of the show at the moment at least in advanced countries economically advanced countries which is the Pfizer Pfizer biotech and the Moderna vaccine now can we separate them into the three groups say the inactivated virus vaccine vector virus vaccines and the MRNA vaccines and look at what are the scales involved and can we start with inactivated virus vaccines and what could the world do and are there any intellectual property rights issues involved with this so I seriously doubt that for inactivated virus vaccines any substantively restrictive patent or intellectual property rights would be available at most if you are using as Bharata biotech in its co-vaccine is using if you're using a particularly new adjuvant the adjuvant may be under patent rights but adjuvant patent rights typically are given non-exclusively because the whole point in an adjuvant is that it should be used as widely as possible so I don't think that an adjuvant patent right is ever going to be a restrictive matter also in the mara biotech got access to it fairly easily and as far as the technology itself is concerned an inactivated vaccine of a virus vaccine technology um on the one hand it's simple let's all keep in mind that every year we make and distribute worldwide influenza vaccines every year a new set of influenza vaccines all of which are essentially inactivated virus vaccines now admittedly they're still grown in chicken eggs because influenza viruses do grow in chicken eggs but whether you grow them in chicken eggs or you grow them in human cell lines in industrial scale bioreactors essentially all you're doing is growing the original virus that's just a wild organism there's nothing to patent in it that it grows in a cell line is common knowledge so there's nothing to patent in that all you're going to do is in at bioreactor scale at commercial manufacturing scale you're going to you're going to culture cell line you're going to infect it with the virus you're going to harvest the virus you're going to clean up the virus you're going to inactivate the virus um the commonest method of inactivation is a chemical inactivation such as beta proprio lactone which is what for example mara biotech uses for its co-vaccine inactivated and formulated either formulated by itself which i think is how for example synovax vaccine is formulated or add for good measure a little adjuvant to it and formulate it these are all very straightforward technologies mammalian cell culture at a manufacturing scale is a technology that any pharma manufacturer who is manufacturing so-called biologic drugs is familiar with and is competent to execute as far as growing virus is concerned clearly mara biotech has shown the capacity to do so a whole range of others have shown the capacity to do so in fact india has been meeting virus grown like that for polio vaccine for this that and either in fact icmr many many decades ago made a well an antiviral vaccine for what is now an obscure disease called casano forest disease which was exactly the same grow the virus inactivate the virus and immunize with it so that's a technology the technological capacity for which is very widely available intellectual property restrictive regimes are likely to be very lax if it all present and therefore that's a technology that's very easily implemented across the world the only catch there is that because you're growing growing infectious virus in large amounts industrial amounts and this is an infectious virus that causes disease because of that as you scale up the amount of infectious virus that you're carrying in any one place becomes larger and larger and therefore your biosafety containment security provisions and technologies become more and more demanding more and more robust and so on and so forth and the simplest way to think about that is but if many people were growing it in small scale many small manufacturers were growing it in small scale it would be feasible absolutely yes it would be feasible there's a point I would like to make about this before we move on to the admiperesis and that is given these circumstances given the fact that the government of India is along with the government of South Africa one of the major players in this demand for intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines I find it incomprehensible that the government of India licensed an Indian council of medical research generated inactivated virus technology vaccine to one single private sector company that remains true even now and it might be worthwhile asking the government why is it has it done this you know that's something which is very interesting because we have at least 20 officially registered vaccine manufacturers in the country all of whom have the ability to do what exactly you talked about in fact that's what routinely they do this includes seven public sector undertakings which have actually most of them seem to have stopped making anything and out of that one of that was of course the famous Havkin Institute's derivative which is the vaccine biopharmaceutical company which is again Maharashtra public sector undertaking as of now which has restarted doing this COVID vaccine hopefully with ICMR technology and it is it still is one of the largest suppliers of the oral polio vaccine in India in fact I think it has a 9% global share of vaccines by volume so we have apparently we have a large number of companies in India who can do it China is actually the Sinovac vaccine and the Sinofarm vaccine have been farmed out to a number of producers and they seem to be scaling up exactly the way you suggested that it has been developed in the public sector in the universities and in the public sector and this has been the technology has been farmed out to a number of vaccine manufacturers and they are scaling up and that's why China has been able to scale up production quite rapidly not having the kind of serum institute facility it is just there by adopting the strategy Satyajit was talking about so this is for our viewers that this is a technology which is which is being used unfortunately India decided to go only with Bharat Biotech and this as he says is not explicable not only from Indian come point of view because you could have really ramped up manufacture much faster but also that others could produce instead of becoming a bottleneck that's all we have time for today we'll be back next week with more news from India until then keep watching People's 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