Chayakkada Chats

There is a major debate over intellectual property rights and life-saving medicines, particularly Covid19 vaccines. One year has passed since the pandemic broke out. On the one hand, we have only a handful of vaccines. On the other hand, more than 80% of the world’s vaccines have gone to people in high-income countries, and just 0.3% to people in low-income countries. A major campaign for a "people's vaccine" is now ongoing, which asks for exemption of COVID-19 vaccines from IP protections. They say that removing IPRs would incentivise new producers and help address disparities in vaccine access. But proponents of IPRs argue that it would only disincentivise new producers and investors, which will adversely affect the prospects of vaccine development in the long-run.

To understand this debate better, we are today joined by Dr Arjun Jayadev, who is a Professor of Economics at the School of Arts and Sciences at Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India. He was previously Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also closely involved with the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

I speak to him about the basic links between IPRs and the pandemic; the long-held orthodoxy in economic theory on the importance of IPRs, especially in areas like health; how IPRs lead to suboptimalities like hoarding of knowledge, vaccine grabs and other global inequalities; the relationship between public funding and vaccine production; whether private profits being produced from public investments; and finally, the problem of vaccine nationalism.

Welcome to Episode number 9 at Chayakkada Chats. Just as everyone thought that the Covid crisis was on the ebb, a second wave of infections has spread across large parts of the world. India has been no exception. As of today, we record more than 200,000 infections every day with the total number of active cases at 1.6 million. About 175,000 people have died till now. As we stare at the grim prospect of another lockdown, it is important to ask a few basic questions. How is the second wave different from the first wave?

Has India learnt anything from the first wave?

What is the story of the new variant of the virus?

Is there a shortage of vaccines in India?

Was the Indian government too conservative in allowing more vaccines to hit the Indian market?

Should India deregulate prices of vaccines so that private players will respond to the price incentives and supply more?

To discuss these and more, we are joined today by one of India's foremost public health experts: Dr T. SUNDARARAMAN. Dr Sundararaman spent the first 22 years of his professional life as a member of the faculty and professor of Department of Internal Medicine, JIPMER. He then moved to working with public health systems. He was head of the State Health Resource Center Chhattisgarh from 2002 to 2007. Then he was executive director of National Health Systems Resource Center, from 2007 to 2014. He returned to academics later, as Professor and Dean of the School of Health Systems Studies in Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He is now an independent health consultant. All along, he has also been an activist for health rights and an organizer of people’s health movements or Jan Swasthya Abhiyan as it is popularly known.

Last week, in a historic event, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), the party of Evo Morales, was returned to power by the people of Bolivia. Evo Morales was the President of Bolivia from 2006 till 2019. In October 2019, though he had conclusively won the elections, he was forced to flee the country by the military and forces aligned to the CIA and the OAS. They argued that the elections were rigged. But it was nothing but a coup. Morales has been living in Mexico and Argentina since 2019. But the October 2020 elections have shown that the verdict of 2019 was not rigged. Loius Arce of MAS will be the new President and David Choquehuanca will be his deputy. These elections have represented a major victory of the Bolivian people against US-led imperialism.

To speak about the Bolivian elections, we are joined today by Sonya Surabhi Gupta, Professor of Latin American Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Sonya's interests are in the area of contemporary literary and cultural studies of India and Latin America in a comparative cross-cultural context, as well as translation studies. She remains active in her work as a researcher and social activist. In her dual role as a Latin Americanist and a social activist, she is part of the Committees of solidarity with Cuba and Venezuela in India, and is currently one of the General Secretaries of the All India Peace and Solidarity Organization, which is affiliated to the World Peace Council. She has also served as a translator for important Latin American personalities during their official visits to India, such as Nicolás Maduro (when he visited New Delhi as Foreign Minister in 2012), Aleida Guevara and Nora Cortiñas among others.

On 14 September 2020, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped in the Hathras district of the Uttar Pradesh State in India, allegedly by four upper caste men. After fighting for her life for two weeks, she died in a hospital in Delhi. No arrests were made in the first 10 days after the incident took place. After her death, the victim was forcibly cremated by the police without the consent of her family. The case and its subsequent handling has received widespread media attention and condemnation from across India. To speak about the incident, we are joined by Subhashini Ali. Subhashini Ali is a senior member and leader of the women's movement in India. She is a senior leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). She was also formerly the President of the All India Democratic Women's Association and Member of Parliament from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh.

Welcome to Episode 6 at Chayakkada Chats. Today, we will speak about the use of randomised control trials or RCTs in economics. In 2019, the Nobel Committee awarded the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019” to three economists – Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer – for their contributions to the experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. For a while prior to this award, and most certainly afterwards, there have been many debates on whether the RCTs have made a deserving contribution to the field of development economics, and specifically poverty alleviation. While its proponents celebrate the award, serious questions have been raised on whether RCTs are statistically valid, whether they have heralded, as is claimed, a credibility revolution in economics, whether ethics are violated in the practise of RCTs and whether they have made any meaningful contribution to the understanding of poverty around us.

Our guest for today is Dr Sanjay Reddy. Sanjay Reddy was an early critic of RCTs as a method; he wrote an article in the journal Review of Agrarian Studies, in 2013, titled “Randomise This!”. Dr Reddy has a

PhD in Economics from the Harvard University.

He is an Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research in New York.

Today, we speak about the future of economics as a subject in a post-Covid world with Dr J. Mohan Rao, a renowned economist. In this conversation, Mohan talks to me about his long journey in economics as a researcher and teacher, and the way he has seen the subject of economics evolving. He speaks about the evolution of the subject of economics, how the class struggle in the society has influenced the way the subject of economics shifted grounds by the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the split between political economy and economics, why he remains underwhelmed by the new fads in the field of economics and the importance of trying to create alternatives to the dominance of mainstream economics. Mohan Rao retired in 2019 as a Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He

completed his PhD from the Harvard University in 1982, and later taught at Harvard, Boston University, UMass Amherst, University of

Rome, NIAS Bangalore, Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New

Delhi. Between 2006 and 2007, he also served as the Director of the

Institute of South Asian Studies attached to the National University

of Singapore. His research has focused largely on agricultural economics, development

economics and the Indian Economy.

We all remember the

heavy floods that the state of Kerala in India experienced in 2018

and another relatively milder one in 2019. This year too, Kerala has

witnessed heavy rainfall and some extreme rainfall

events. One of the regions in Kerala acutely affected by the floods is

the Kuttanad region in the Alappuzha district, which is

globally well known for its scenic backwaters and traditional

houseboats. Kuttanad lies 2 to 3 m below the mean sea level, which is

what makes it extremely susceptible to floods.

For the same reason, historically, Kerala has always looked up to

another part of the world with similar features, The Netherlands. More

recently, Kerala has been closely studying a very innovative project

implemented in the Netherlands from 2000 called the “Room for the

River.” Informed by this intervention in the Netherlands, Kerala has

begun to implement what the state calls as the "Room for Pamba" project

in the Kuttanad region. To understand the basic features of the Room

for the River project in the Netherlands and its applicability to the

Kuttanad region of Kerala, we are today joined by Paul van Meel. Paul

knows the Netherlands and the Kuttanad region from close quarters. By

training, he is a civil engineer from the Delft University. He has over

45 years of global experience in integrated water resources

development. In the

Netherlands, he has been involved as deputy project director in two

large flood protection programmes: the Meuse Works and Room for the

River.

The last week saw a number of landslides being reported

from the Western Ghat region of Kerala, the most significant of them

from the Pettimudi region of the Idukki district. Pettimudi is not far from the tourist hotspot of Munnar. The

death toll in Pettimudi itself is likely to cross 50. In the last year

as well, a number of landslides had taken place in the northern districts of Kerala,

particularly in the districts of Wayanad and Kozhikode.

To speak about the increasing incidence of landslides in Kerala, we are

joined today by Dr KP Sudheer, who is the Principal Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, Government of Kerala and the Executive Vice President of the Kerala State Council for

Science, Technology and Environment. Dr Sudheer is an engineer by training

who completed his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. He

was earlier a Scientist at the National Institute of Hydrology, Rourkee;

a Visiting Faculty at the IIT Kanpur; and a Professor at the IIT Madras.

In his official capacity, in 2019, he was the Chairperson of an

expert committee appointed by the State Planning Board, Government of Kerala to study the

increasing incidence of floods and landslides and provide

recommendations.

The situation related to the covid-19 pandemic continuous to be worrisome across India. But one Indian State, Kerala, appears to have attracted considerable media attention for its response to the pandemic. It had an quick response strategy; it introduced mass testing early enough; it had very effective systems of home quarantine, room quarantine and reverse quarantine; it's response strategy was genuinely decentralized; and it introduced an innovative public campaign by name "Break the Chain". Today, to speak about Kerala response strategy, we have with us Dr B Ekbal, who is the member of the Kerala State Planning Board in charge of health and the Chairperson of the expert committee advising the Kerala government on its response strategy. A neurosurgeon by training, he is also one of India's most respected public health activists.

I am an economist based in Mumbai, India. In this podcast series, I intend to have freewheeling conversations with friends and experts in multiple fields. In this episode, we speak to Dr Ajit Navale, the Secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha, India's largest farmer's organisation, on the struggles of milk farmers in Maharashtra. This conversation proceeds in Hindi, and was recorded on the 3rd of August 2020.