Indian medical research needs resurrection

Why is there so much of night blindness in Rajasthan, so many women suffer from cervical cancer and so many people die of malaria and other communicable diseases? Posing these questions Indira Gandhi wanted to know what the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) had done about them. That was some time in the 1980s.

The question she raised then is very much relevant today. Had she been alive she would have asked why there has been no progress towards control of dengue, chikungunya, Japanese encephalitis and malaria.

Dr C G Pandit, the first Director General of ICMR, was a visionary responsible for starting many research institutions, and under whom the maximum development of ICMR took place. His successors -- Dr C Gopalan, Dr V Ramalingaswamy and Dr A S Paintal -- will always be remembered for promoting quality research.

The decline of ICMR started in the 1990s. It created many new institutions in different parts of India because politicians wanted an institute in their constituency or some scientist had to be rewarded with a director's post. As far as I know there are many ICMR institutions replicating the work of their sister institutions.

The net result is their contributions are only on paper and not geared to solving problems on the ground. There has been no equivalent of green revolution or white revolution in the biomedical field. On the contrary, problems affecting human health are only increasing because, as the 12th plan document said, "health research in India has yet to make a major impact" on public health.

Things are very different now. The Director General does not attend the SAC meeting of any institute, and the meetings in some institutes are only tamashas. At a SAC meeting where I was a member, the chairman asked questions like how many Ph.Ds have you produced; how much money have you managed to get as project grants from abroad, and so on.

Not a single question on what work you have done and what problem you have solved. When the questions I raised were all deleted from the minutes, I resigned from the SAC. In olden days, to study basic and fundamental aspects of medical research, financial grants were made available to research scientists from universities and medical colleges who applied for grants for specific projects.

The project-oriented time-bound projects really helped in the development of fundamental research. It is a tragedy that ICMR discontinued this practice and tried to do everything in its own institutes but failed. The decline of the ICMR nosedived in the 90s.

Even now we tend to follow the directions from international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO always dangles a carrot - foreign trips, short and long-term consultancies -- to scientists from developing countries provided they do what they are told. (The writer is Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine)

By P K Rajagopalan