-The Hindu As the job market is tight for those with PhDs in science, it is important that they develop other skill sets The number of PhD graduates has proliferated over the decades — while there were only a dozen doctorates till 1920 in India (the first was awarded in 1904), there were 24,000 in all disciplines from about 900 institutions in 2017. While the number may not be surprising, what is...
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Right to clean air -Anurag Agrawal
-The Hindu As I write this column, my gaze is on the post-Deepavali haze that has enveloped Delhi. As a third-generation asthmatic, with a fourth-generation asthmatic daughter, it is set me wondering whether returning to Delhi, the city of my birth, from the United States a decade ago was a mistake. This haze is smog (smoke + fog), a hazardous mix of noxious gases and very high levels of suspended respirable...
More »The End TB strategy -Soumya Swaminathan
-The Hindu The Global TB Report 2016, recently released, has revised the estimates for the tuberculosis (TB) burden in India upwards. The country has 27 per cent of the global burden of incident tuberculosis and 34 per cent of global TB deaths. For the year 2015, the updated estimate of incidence (new and relapse TB cases per year) is 2.8 million cases. India diagnosed and notified 1.7 million incident TB patients...
More »Centre plans alternative to Bt cotton -Jacob Koshy
-The Hindu To develop genes that can be integrated into traditional varieties for larger outputs The Union government is working to develop a suite of Bt cotton genes that can be integrated into traditional varieties and be made available to farmers as a viable alternative to the current technology, which is largely sourced from Mahyco Monsanto Biotech India Ltd. (MMB). The Indian Council of Agricultural Research has for many years unsuccessfully tried to...
More »Patently a missed opportunity -Achal Prabhala and Sudhir Krishnaswamy
-The Hindu India’s first IPR policy trots out the worn western fairy tale that more IP means innovation, and encourages the pointless privatisation of indigenous knowledge India’s National Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy, released in mid-May, is a bewildering document. There are two ways to read this policy. The first is as a gigantic exercise in dissimulation, with a terse declaration — India is not changing its IPR laws — tucked inside...
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