Tag: india

Villagers armed with smartphones can help stem the rising rate of suicides in India

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

The stigma attached to mental illnesses is hurting India. Few are brave to speak about it to someone and fewer still get treated. The result is that, for every 100,000 Indians between 15 and 29 years old, 36 commit suicide annually—the highest rate among the youth in the world.

Worse still, according to Vikram Patel, professor of mental health at the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine and one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2015, without urgent improvement in treating mental disorders, suicides will soon become the leading cause of death among the young.

Read more on Quartz. Also published in Lokmat Times.

Image credit: cgiarclimate under CC-BY-NC-SA license.

Glorifying the past is just a way of avoiding today’s grave problems

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History beat out Marathi, marginally, as my least favourite subject at school. I would have loved history textbooks if I were allowed to read them like novels. But, no, we were made to mug up facts. Battle of Plassey took place on 23 June, 1757. The University of Oxford received its Royal Charter on June 26, 1214. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June, 1914 … and so on the facts kept coming in thick packets and without time to digest.

And I kept asking, “What’s the point of studying history?” But never got a satisfactory answer till my teenage hormones had been supplanted by adult maturity. When I did get one, I could finally lay to rest all the unjust curses various historical figures had to bear because they committed historically important acts on bizarre dates and under twisted circumstances.

The real value of history is not, as most think, in “teaching” us to avoid mistakes made in the past. For history is never repeated and no two years are ever alike, how much ever writers would love to draw parallels. Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker contends that not studying history would commit humanity to the trouble of “presentism”, where we might exaggerate “our present problems out of all proportion to those that have previously existed”. Thus believing that “things are much worse than they have ever been”.

Making history do our bidding

In India, the exact opposite happens. Historical facts are misinterpreted or, worse, made up and turned into jingoistic propaganda. Instead of worrying about the troubles we face today, we proudly boast about our historical achievements and claim that independent India’s potential is no different.

When talking about the country’s achievements, our leaders like to skip the period when conquerors pillaged and the British ruled, and look at the “golden past”. A time when, they believe, India’s wealth in the world was unparalleled and our achievements unprecedented.

Because a lot of Indian kings of that supposed golden era were no benevolent dictators, these leaders choose to talk about our intellectual achievements, especially those in science. You must have heard from respectable people about how we had invented planes that could fly to Mars and back, how plastic surgery was used to stitch an elephant’s head on a human, and how we made medicine to bring the dead back to life.

“This effort of creating a false history of science in India is a spectacularly bad example of the absurd lengths to which attempts at glorification of our past can go,” said leading scientist Roddam Narasimha in an editorial in Current Science.

If Gopnik’s worry for the West about not studying history is suffering from presentism, then Indians need to worry about suffering from pastism. Our perception of our past is blocking us from working on the grave problems we face today.

And we find ourselves in this position because of two reasons. First, we have not invested enough in studying the history of science in India. Second, we ignore the voices of the few scholars who have uncovered at least some of the true history of science in India.

In 2009, the Indian National Science Academy celebrated 50 years since the conception of the history of science programme. In an article that year, AK Bag, editor of the Indian Journal of History of Science, said that despite the programme’s efforts only about 40 source manuscripts have been thoroughly studied, leaving more than 100 such documents untouched in oriental libraries.

To be sure, there have been some remarkable achievements made by ancient Indian science. These include the first recorded use of plastic surgery to heal broken noses, the development and application of many key theorems in algebra, and even correctly predicting the motions of the solar system (centuries ahead of the Greeks). And, as we scour source documents, more are bound to be revealed. But that is no reason to make up fantastical notions of what our ancestors achieved.

This kind of behaviour may come about because, according to Narasimha, we do not have reliable history-of-science books for the masses. Without the right facts, teachers suffer, education is incomplete and it is easy to manipulate public perception. “Somebody needs to write such books,” Narasimha concluded.

First published in Lokmat Times. Image from Wikipedia. This post was corrected to attribute the Current Science quote to Narasimha.

Rotavac is not India’s first indigenous vaccine

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

While the recently released low-cost rotavirus vaccine, Rotavac, is a great achievement for the country, it is not the “first indigenously developed vaccine”, as the prime minister’s office claims and then was parroted by newspapers. The honour goes to the bubonic plague vaccine developed in Bombay in 1897.

This is also not just a matter of semantics, where we ought to assume that the prime minister’s office implies “indigenous” to mean developed in Independent India. Because, as we have seen in the past, the prime minister is only too happy to (wrongly) claim centuries-old achievements to be “Indian innovations”.

India has played an important role in the history of vaccine’s use to fight disease. Their use means that the poorest of the poor today can live well beyond the age at which most kings died not too long ago. And the least we can do when we take vaccination forward in India today is to honour our past achievements.

Honouring history

The use of the first vaccine was pioneered by English scientist Edward Jenner in 1798. In the two centuries since, we have developed vaccines to fight 25 diseases. Fittingly, the disease against which the first vaccine was developed – smallpox – has been eradicated globally. The next disease on the list of diseases to be eradicated by the use vaccines could be polio.

But for nearly 100 years after the smallpox vaccine came in to use, the process of developing vaccines against other diseases remained difficult. This is because a vaccine then needed a naturally existing weak form of the disease. In the case of smallpox, that weak form was found in cowpox.

However, almost by accident, Louis Pasteur developed a laboratory method to generate a weak form of a disease. He used the method to create a vaccine against anthrax and chicken cholera. This is what revolutionised the work against infectious diseases.When injected into or ingested by the human body, vaccines work by stimulating the immune system and preparing it for when the real thing attacks in the future. Many vaccines provide lifelong immunity to a disease.

A young Russian, Waldemar Haffkine, was keenly following Pasteur’s work. At the time, cholera epidemics were common worldwide and someone had claimed to have isolated the bacteria that caused the disease. Despite Pasteur and Jenner’s work, many believed that that bacteria can’t be the sole cause behind cholera.

However, Haffkine agreed with the theory and worked hard on developing a cholera vaccine. He achieved success in 1892 and conducted the first human trial of the vaccine on himself. Having survived, he made the findings public but was dismissed by senior scientists.

The Plague Laboratory

Determined to see his invention have some impact on the world, he travelled to India where cholera epidemics had caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. His trials in Uttar Pradesh succeeded and he managed to vaccinate thousands. In 1895 he returned to France having caught malaria. But in 1896 was requested by the Governor of Bombay to help develop a vaccine against plague, which was ravaging the population of Bombay and Poona.

Against the advise of his French doctor, Haffkine travelled back to India and worked persistently to develop a plague vaccine. He succeeded within months, and, like the last time, tested the vaccine on himself. Within a few years, the vaccine was used to inoculate millions of people.

In 1899, a former residence of the Governor of Bombay was turned in to the Plague Laboratory and Haffkine made its director. The lab was renamed the Haffkine Institute in 1925, and remains an active institute for biological research in the country.

Haffkine was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1897. A London magazine wrote this about the announcement: “a Russian Jew, trained in the schools of European science, saves the lives of helpless Hindoos and Mohammedans and is decorated by the descendant of William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great.”

If you forgive the colonial tone, it is an apt eulogy in a rapidly globalising world that was being created then. His work is arguably no less “indigenous” to India than Rotavac, so it is sad that we forget such a legacy in celebrating the country’s new achievements.

First published in Lokmat Times. Image from Wikipedia.