[Ip-health] TRIPS, Mashelkar and Administrative Perversion

[Daya Shanker]

TRIPS, Mashelkar and Administrative Perversion
Dear Gopa Kumar, Chan Park, Ravi and Anand Grover
I was stunned to see the decision of the Ministry
of Commerce, Government of India to again ask
Mashelkar to correct certain technical mistakes
that apparently crept in his report mischievous
and plagiarized report and not plagiarized from
some decent research but plagiarized from
international monopolistic industries financed pamphlet.
As a former administrator in the Indian
government I can think of the limit of perverse
orders but I cannot think of something more
perverse than this. Instead of taking any action
against Mashelkar and his gang of fellow
travelers, what we are witnessing is sheer
contempt for any decency and any accountability
by the Minister for Commerce, Mr. Kamal Nath and
his staff. If you remember my presentation at New
Delhi in 2005 during the conference =93Contested
Commons-Trespassing Public=94 at the Habitat
Centre, New Delhi arranged by sarai and
Alternative Law where I was speaking on Access to
Medicines, Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration
and Developing Countries in International Treaty
Negotiations,=94 I was a little curt to say during
the discussion that India is not an independent
country just because it has a colorful piece of
cloth which is raised on the day of so called
independence. In fact, I remember my remark had
upset quite a few people in the audience. What we
are witnessing in Mashelkar=92s case is just an
example of what I had said. Independent countries
do not appoint and reappoint crooks to plagiarize
from pharmaceutical industry paid reports. In
fact, independent countries do not sign the
charter of slavery called the TRIPS Agreement, do
not sign the Paragraph 6 solution and definitely
do not sign amendment of the TRIPS Agreement five
days before the actual Ministerial Delegation,
authorized to take the decisions, is supposed to
meet, do not appoint so called high powered
committee led by an agent of pharmaceutical
industry to see the compliance of its law with
the charter of slavery. Dr. Dutefield has very succinctly put it
=93It seems very odd to me (to Dutefield) that the
Indian Government, of course for reasons relating
to domestic politics (I still cannot fathom any
reason for the establishment of this committee
with Mashelkar at its head unless and until the
Minister wanted to help increase of control of
foreign multinationals in providing access to
medicines in India as this has got nothing to do
with innovations) commissioned a high level group
to be seen by many as effectively performing in
public the task of a WTO dispute settlement panel
and allowing (encouraging?) its conclusions to be
construed as finding India to be guilty of TRIPS violations.=94
I also discussed the actual process of control by
international pharmaceutical and other
monopolists and I pointed out the deep corruption
among the ministers and the bureaucrats as one of
the ways to influence the decision making. In
fact, quite sometime back, in my correspondence
with Shamnad Basheer (he used to ask a number of
questions but I had no idea that he was working
for pharmaceutical industries and paid by them),
I had discussed corruption and its role leading
to the signing of the Paragraph 6 solution of the
TRIPS Agreement of 30th August 2003 and
subsequent amendment. I will quote from there
=93It takes all of us quite some time to work out
underlying understanding. Till I read the
decision in Glaxo v. Dowelhurst, I couldn=92t have
understood the game played by negotiators from
major developing countries. Each and everybody
must have been obliged. Cheap and nauseating
corruption among the negotiators. Some Western
scholarship for children, some green cards for
relations, some jobs in the International
Monterey Fund, World Bank and the WTO, some jobs
with multinationals who have entered in a big way
in major developing countries, some grants for
connected institutions and others. I remember
Prof. Michael Davis did mention that it was money
which led to the Paragraph 6 Solution of 30th
August 2003 but it took sometime for us to understand the falling of pieces=
.
The reading of the present Indian ordinance
dealing with the Paragraph 6 Solution, 92(A)
gives quite a pathetic picture in section 92(A)(3)
=93The provisions of sub-sections (1) and (2) shall
be without prejudice to the extent to which
pharmaceutical products produced under a
compulsory license can be exported under any other provision of this act.=
=94=94
  If the export under other provisions need not
be precisely controlled, then what was the actual
need for nonimplementable  and exceptionally
precise control of export to countries which
cannot manufacture the drugs themselves to the
extent to kill access to medicines in the form of
non-executable rules? The whole of the paragraph
6 solution was to establish an absolute and total
control not only on manufacturing of medicines
but its distribution and pricing and the
legitimacy is provided by authors like Frederick
Abbott and John Barton with academic appellations
and crooks such as R. D. Mashelkar through the
chairing of the high powered committees (I
believe he was chairman of 12 high powered
committees =96 apparently as a director general of
CSIR, he was doing nothing but writing committee
reports). When I am talking about corruption in
developing countries, it is not only confined to
developing countries such as Indian Ministry of
Commerce, I mentioned about media corruption in
my note Thailand, Wall Street Journal and Media
Prostitution and corruption among academics
which  leads to the appointment of people such as
Amir Attaran to Harvard University, Daniel
Gervais to Ottawa University, Patricia Danzon to
Pennsylvania University, Henry Grabowski to Duke
University and now Shamnad Baheer to Rutgers
University. The universities are not much behind
in corruption to the Ministry of Commerce, Government of India.
I expected this to happen and this was the reason
I suggested filing of a criminal complaint
against Mashelkar and others for criminal
misappropriation of fund to plagiarize,
plagiarize not from any research paper or
research book but plagiarize its recommendations
from the pamphlet paid for by the interested
parties in this case by multinational
pharmaceutical industry. Can one think of worst administrative perversion?
Daya Shanker