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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Red tape bites home talent by GS Mudur

Red tape bites home talent by GS Mudur

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published Published on Jun 20, 2011   modified Modified on Jun 20, 2011

The health ministry has erected bureaucratic hurdles against a bio-pesticide for mosquito control developed by Indian researchers, denying it entry into the public health programme while accepting similar imported products, scientists and entrepreneurs have said.

The bio-pesticide was developed at the Vector Control Research Centre (VCRC) in Puducherry during the 1980s. It is a powder or spray formulation containing a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis that can kill the larvae of several mosquito species, including those that can spread dengue or malaria.

A panel of health ministry experts earlier this year ordered a reassessment of the bio-pesticide although the Central Insecticides Board, India’s apex authority for approving pesticides, had cleared the product in the year 2000 after independent scientists evaluated it at multiple geographical locations.

Over the past decade, at least six Indian biotechnology companies had acquired the VCRC bio-pesticide technology to try and grab a share of India’s bio-pesticide market which, one industry expert estimates, is currently worth about Rs 50 crore a year.

But a technical advisory committee (TAC) of the health ministry’s mosquito control programme has repeatedly denied approval to the VCRC product without which state and city health authorities are unlikely to use it, VCRC scientists and the entrepreneurs who invested in the bio-pesticide said.

“It has been a most frustrating experience --- the TAC demands keep changing,” said Ravi Kumar, director of the Chennai-based firm R.K. Biotech, which had acquired the VCRC bio-pesticide in 2004.

“It appears there’s an effort to keep this product out of the market as long as possible,” Kumar said.

Each time the entrepreneurs approached the TAC, it modified the requirements for approval, two scientists with the VCRC who requested anonymity and two of the entrepreneurs told The Telegraph.

The companies seeking approval were first asked to repeat a one-year trial, and then asked for trials at multiple geographical locations ---- ignoring the previous studies by scientists at the VCRC itself, and independent groups at the School of Tropical Medicine in Calcutta, the University of Mysore, and the University of California, Riverside.

But the TAC has approved two similar but imported versions of bio-pesticides, which are alternatives to synthetic pesticides routinely sprayed by state and municipal public health authorities each year over water bodies and other mosquito-breeding grounds.

“If this is a country of scams, this is another one,” said P.K. Rajagopalan, a former VCRC director.

The TAC has successfully blocked the emergence of the VCRC bio-pesticide, Rajagopalan had written in a commentary in the journal Current Science earlier this year.

He had said that an arm of the health ministry tasked with mosquito control was “sabotaging” efforts by another arm of the ministry (the VCRC) that had been trying to promote an indigenous technology to control mosquitoes.

“We feel we’ve been cheated,” said Dhirendra Dubey, director of the Bhopal-based Kilpest, which bought the technology in 2010.

“We’ve paid licence fees, invested in production and infrastructure, and trained our staff — all for what? For a small-scale industry, this hurts.”

India’s director-general of health services, R.K. Srivastava, who chairs the TAC, did not respond to email or phone queries on the VCRC bio-pesticide but asked the director of the mosquito control programme (the National Vector-Borne Disease Control Programme) to explain the health ministry’s position.

“We want to encourage the indigenous bio-pesticide,” said A.C. Dhariwal, the programme’s director.

Dhariwal said a study by the National Institute of Malaria Research (NIMR), New Delhi, had raised questions about the dose, or concentration, of the bio-pesticide needed to kill mosquitoes.

“We do not want a discrepancy between the dose approved by the Central Insecticides Board and the dose observed by the NIMR,” he said.

But, Kilpest’s Dubey said, a fresh study to determine the concentration will further delay the bio-pesticide’s entry into the mosquito-fighting arsenal of municipal authorities across the country.

“A fresh study also ignores all the data on its efficacy generated over the past two decades,” said a VCRC scientist.

The Telegraph, 20 June, 2011, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110620/jsp/frontpage/story_14135114.jsp


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