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From mud to medicine A major breakthrough in antibiotics

The discovery of a new antibiotic with a unique anti-bacterial action has altered the perspective in the endless war on disease. The recent announcement of the discovery ofteixobactin has led to hopes that an entirely new class ofantibiotics that does not trigger drug resistance could be deployed, by using a new approach which makes it easier to culture antibiotics. There have been no new classes of antibiotics released as prescription drugs for 32 years. Although new antibiotics have been discovered in that time, none had promising drug potential and most could not be easily cultured. In that time, a wide range of bacteria has mutated to develop resistance to most of the commonly used antibiotics. This has led to the resurgence of diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis in new "superbug", drug-resistant forms, as well as the emergence of new superbugs such as MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and the so-called Delhi superbug. Drug-resistant superbugs kill an estimated 700,000 people every year.

The new antibiotic, teixobactin, seemed to tackle drug-resistant superbugs effectively in its initial clinical trials with mice. It also seems to do this without setting up detectable resistance within the bacteria. The implication is that this antibiotic may actually have evolved in such a fashion that pathogens will not develop immunity to it even after long exposure.

What is more, teixobactin was isolated and cultured using new methods. There is the promise that more new powerful antibiotics, with good drug-potential, might be found using such an approach. It is early days and it may take two years or more before teixobactin is tested and cleared for clinical trials with humans. It could take five years or so to become a prescription drug, assuming all goes well. But this discovery definitely creates the possibility of deploying new weapons against superbugs, just when it looked as though drug-resistant bacteria would gain the upper hand.

The researchers who found the drug and pioneered the new approach were drawn from several academic institutions. The team was led by Kim Lewis and Slava Epstein, of Northeastern University, Boston, who co-authored the technical paper, published in Nature. It included scientists from the University of Bonn, and researchers from pharmaceutical development lab, NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, set up by Prof. Epstein and Prof. Lewis.

Antibiotics have generally been discovered by screening micro-organisms present in the soil. Penicillin was found by accident in bread mould, back in 1928. But very few natural antibiotics can be cultured in the laboratory and many have dangerous side-effects. The team has developed new means of growing and studying bacteria and antibiotics in their natural environment - literally in dirt. They have built a tool they call the iChip ("isolation chip") which allows single cells of an antibiotic to be isolated and cultured. They have so far found 25 new antibiotics, of which teixobactin is the most promising. The new antibiotic is produced by a bacterium called eleftheria terrae, which was found and cultured using iChip technology in a field of grass. Teixobactin has an unusual action, which allowed it to destroy a range of drug-resistant pathogens in mice by multiple attacks on the cell walls. Despite lengthy exposure, these pathogens did not mutate to develop strains that were subsequently resistant to teixobactin's action. Teixobactin itself will need to be studied in much greater detail.

The iChip (which is patented by Northeastern University and licensed to NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals) will need to be deployed on a wider scale across multiple geographical and climatic regions to see if it can be used to culture more such drugs. If these antibiotics do work, they will have to be deployed with care to ensure that pathogens don't eventually develop some new resistance to their actions. Despite those caveats, this is potentially an enormous breakthrough which could transform drug research.

Nehru, Indira and the Indo-US legacy

Both Nehru and Indira Gandhi developed an antipathy to the US for personal reasons. US policy had very little to do with itLike a score of other heads of state before him, US PresidentBarack Obama is about to face a gruellingly boring couple of hours on January 26. It probably serves him right for ignoring India ever since he became US President. Stupidly, he even forgot to mention India in his latest State of the Union address, delivered two days before he comes here.

Many old-fashioned Indians, especially retired foreign services types, will sigh in quiet contentment. For them, this will be India's long-awaited revenge on America.

After all, it is no secret that until Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister, Indian diplomacy was predicated on a simple formulation: American governments are anti-Indian.

Over the years, I frequently tried to find out how this perception had grown. My question was simple. Please cite just one instance of when US actions and or/advice had done India actual harm?

No real answer was forthcoming, even though many words were spoken. The burden of the song was that the US ignored us.

Then one day, a few years ago, I got an answer: a retired foreign secretary said the only thing he could think of - that did actual harm instead of an imaginary one - was the advice John F Kennedygave to Jawaharlal Nehru to not to use the Air Force against the Chinese in 1962.

And, yes, we must not forget: it was the Americans, and not our bosom friends, the Russians, who came to our aid in 1962. They sided with China.

That aside, as harmful US acts go, many have muttered about 1971 when the US openly sided with Pakistan. But, remember, no harm came to India as a result of that support.

Prejudiced Indian
What explains the anti-US attitude in Indian officialdom? Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about it, but when you come right down to it, the prejudice came from the very top.

Both Nehru and Indira Gandhi developed an antipathy to the US but for entirely personal reasons. US policy had very little to do with it.

The late Sarvepalli Gopal, historian and biographer of Nehru, has written that Nehru was most upset that the US gave exactly the same sort of reception - confetti to confetti almost - to Liaquat Ali Khan, the Pakistani Prime Minister in 1952, as it had to Nehru. His ego was deeply hurt.

Likewise, Indira Gandhi became anti-US despite US help on the food front (PL-480) and defence (1962-64). This happened when, after she had personally negotiated the rupee devaluation of 1966 on the promise of aid, it was withheld. In case you are interested, Volume 2 of the Reserve Bank of India's history has a brief account of her negotiations.

Lyndon Johnson treated her badly, though he did ask her to dance with him. That annoyed her even more. Richard Nixon also treated her shabbily.

She turned firmly anti-American after that. Also, during 1969-71, she was dependent on Communist support in Parliament for survival.

More amazingly, even as they claimed non-alignment, both Nehru and Indira Gandhi turned to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and then blamed the US for being nasty to India. But the USSR's technology was useless. Its support, except when it used the veto in the UN Security Council, was also useless. The KGB interfered in internal affairs. Worse, it collapsed in 1990.

And guess who India turned to after that? Not Cuba, for sure.

Un-ugly American
All this happened despite the fact that US advice - when taken - actually helped India enormously. One now-forgotten instance is the advice given in the mid-1960s, which eventually led to the Green Revolution and liberation from famines.

The US also throughout gave us the same industrial advice as it did to East Asia - go for labour-intensive, export-oriented production. They took it and prospered. We didn't and failed.

In 1948, the US had offered preferential access to Indian goods in return for some mess of pottage from India. Nehru failed to act on it because of other preoccupations.

In 1978, China also took the advice that the East Asians had taken. It has emerged as a global power that is challenging the US. We didn't and a billion Indians are paying the price.

The irony
There is, however, one major instance when US actions led to a lot of harm being done to India. This was in the 1980s when, ironically, Rajiv Gandhi had decided to reverse India's persistent anti-American attitude.

One, of course, was the tacit go-ahead to Pakistan's nuclear programme. This has been widely documented.

The other is less well known: the acceptance of Zia ul-Haq's condition that in return for help in Afghanistan, Pakistan would be free to do as it pleased against India, short of a 'military adventure'. The US agreed.

Pakistan started with Punjab and went on to Kashmir. It is only recently - after Pakistan-based terrorism started to hurt it - that the US has taken back that support.

The only mitigating aspect of our absurd US policy is that every genuine friend of the US has behaved in exactly the same way with it.

How to enable disruption

India has one of the world's most inefficient supply chains for products. The supply chain and logistics costs for instance are 12 per cent of our GDP, vis-à-vis six to seven per cent for developed countries. In developed countries, retailers like Walmart, Tesco, and so on have become the channel masters of the food supply chain, taking over from the manufacturers. In India, there is no equivalent. Practices like data integration, financial flow management, supply-demand matching, forecasting, efficient transport scheduling etc., need to be integrated into our system. This would make the supply chain more efficient, giving the customer better pricing and the farmer a better realisation for his products.

The story of ground transportation in India is no different. Public transportation, save and except a few stray cases, continues to be abysmal. All of us thus have to deal with errant and arrogant autowallahs on one side or on the other have to endure the trappings of owning a vehicle - EMIs, fuel, maintenance, etc. Enter the cab aggregators - Uber, Ola, Taxi for Sure, and so on. Barring stray instances, they offer customers a good vehicle on demand, a courteous driver, transparent and convenient billing and at a cost that is comparable to local autos and cabs, all through a click or two. Not only are they trying to disrupt the model of car ownership but are also offering an alternative to the obnoxious auto and cab drivers who refuse passengers with impunity or charge arbitrarily. The reason behind this metamorphosis is the "platform play", where a marketplace for demand and supply has been created and made efficient, resulting in the customer getting a better value for money and clearly a superior experience.

Historically, middlemen have fulfilled an important role in getting goods from the manufacturer to the end-user. Because the intermediaries don't really change the physical attributes of an item, the only function they seem to perform is moving information. Electronic commerce thus reduces the cost of goods through the elimination of brokers and distributors, by automating the exchange of information directly between the producer and the user.

The proliferation of the internet and smartphones has led to massive consumer empowerment. With 250 million internet users in India and an expected growth rate of 39 per cent in rural and 29 per cent in urban areas, and with the smartphone user base expected to grow by 45 per cent next year, the internet is powering businesses and disrupting them. It has shifted the supplier-distributor relationship from a hierarchically layered structure to an open structure, the magnitude of which is still underappreciated. Many technological innovations have enabled businesses to expand exponentially. Many new start-ups don't really make anything. Instead of cutting out middlemen, they've become middlemen themselves, connecting people with specific genres of services or merchants. Successful examples of this globally include transportation providers Uber and travel rental startup Airbnb.

A similar transformation is taking place in the online retail space. Of India's $500-billion retail sector, $6 billion is presently transacted online. This might hit $100 billion by 2019. Thus middlemen will see redundancy growing, physical retailers will see business being taken away and retail real estate will witness low occupancy. Landlords will also need to adapt to the changes to their lessees' requirements. For example, real-estate developers may feel threatened on the retail side, but they will have other big opportunities - building warehouses, for instance.

Governments who treat "layered supply chain" players as their vote banks will be under immense pressure to increase protectionism. However, they need to understand the new world order and proactively frame legislation that creates better value and not hurdles for both producer and consumer.

Technology entrepreneurs generally focus on a unique opportunity and then scale up rapidly, in some cases making it a "winner-take-all market". Legislators cannot view these businesses from the prism of their traditional legislation of competition and monopoly. As long as the customer is not being compromised, monopolistic behaviour may not necessarily be a bad thing.

A couple of instances suggest that government response globally is not very thoughtful. Regulators and politicians in Europe are trying to strongly reduce the influence of US internet companies in general - and to damage Google and Facebook in particular. Both China and Russia have pushed for new international treaties governing cyberspace. China has also been heavily criticised for censoring the internet by blocking news or comment that it deems damaging.

Back home the response of our government is no different. The government expected everything to be hunky-dory once Uber was banned. It should have reacted not by banning taxi companies, but by putting in place the very regulations that they haven't implemented up until now. It singled out Uber, perhaps more because it is a high-profile, politically weak service, than because of any risks riders may face. Not so long ago, the Karnataka government also banned Amazon from selling electronics and several other products from its warehouses in the state. The government wanted Amazon to pay VAT as it wanted the company to take ownership for the products stored in its warehouse well before a customer orders them.

A forward-looking proactive government can be ahead of the curve and facilitate the ushering in of technology for better and more efficient business models. They must work towards helping in nurturing the development of a healthy internet ecosystem, one that boosts infrastructure and access, builds a competitive environment that benefits users, lets innovators and entrepreneurs thrive and nurtures human capital.

This kind of government support might be a key enabler in addressing some of India's own grand challenges - like the Digital India vision and the aspiration to create a number of smart cities. Gone are those days where a government could protect its businesses by playing the big daddy. In a country like ours where 60 per cent of our population is below 60 years of age, of which most are tech-savvy, the government cannot deprive its customers of any opportunity. This very population that has elected the government could be the one to oust it.

In other words, they need to consider the long-term societal impact rather than short-term political gain. Technology is after all just a tool to facilitate change

How to never give up?!

Why is it that we fail in life? 

Is it because we are not smart enough? Is it because we don’t know the technicalities of something? Is it because our people skills are bad? Is it because we didn’t do well in school to get good grades? I am sure I can come up with a lot of similar sounding questions and the answers would be equally varied. But I have never come across an answer more convincing than “I gave up”. I guess that perhaps is the single most important and sensible reason for failure in life. It reminds me of a dialogue from the movie Tin Tin -

“There is something you need to know about failure Tin Tin, you can never let it defeat you”

Without much ado, let us try and see what the above brochure is trying to tell us

1) Stay Alive

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Yes of course! This is the most important thing. There will be a lot of situations which push you down, which make you feel sad, which make you worry and also make you think that life is over. But find a way to stay alive. There will be light in the darkest corner of the sky. Just ensure that you are there to see it. It is very easy to give up and put your hands on your head and say it is all over. You can do that any day. It takes guts to stay alive, it takes guts to believe, it takes guts to stick to your guns when everything around you is falling apart. Success doesn’t lie in never falling, it lies in getting up as soon as possible and STAYING ALIVE

2) Lower your expectations

It is very optimistic of us to say that we are going to invent a product and the next day there would be a queue of people who would want to buy it no matter what price we quote. I am not here to shatter that dream of yours but I am going to tell you that inventing is just a part of the business. There is marketing, there is sales, there is brand building, there is negotiation, there is compromises and so much more. Though I would like to shoot to the stars, I would also like to know that it is sometimes unreasonable that a star comes in search of you. It takes time, it takes effort but it does come. Over 99.9% of the success has taken time, it has not happened overnight. So.. respect the time and cling on to your belief, it is bound to come with the right approach

3) Don’t be a wimp! 

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You are way stronger than you tell yourself and others know you as and infact stronger than you yourself know you as. You are more capable to handle the pain than you think. It is very natural and easy to drown in the glory of self pity and keep feeling sorry for yourself. If you keep feeling sorry about the way things are, you will keep feeling sorry for the rest of your life. So.. Buck up, it is going to be a tough wind out there, brace it. You were not born or raised to be a quitter!

4) Persist! 

We don’t mean to say that you should be stuck in the same loop forever. If plan A doesn’t work, go for plan B and then plan C. You have 26 letters there and if that doesn’t suffice you have A1 to An and then keep going on.. Point is, it depends on how much you believe in the dream, how much you believe in whatever you have put in for it. Nowhere on the birth certificate was it said that you would succeed at everything you put your hands on in life. You are going to miss out on a few things and the reasons might be as simple as a wrong timing or a big trust issue. But you gotta persist, the moment you give up or think of giving up, the dream dies and so does all the effort to get there.

5) Fake it! 

If you are falling short of motivation, FAKE IT! Think of how it will be to succeed. Think of all the dreams you would be realizing, think of how people around you would respond to it. You don’t have to wait for that one final day when success will sweep you off your feet, you can celebrate each day, be motivated by every event and that drives you forward and keeps driving you forward.

6) Don’t compare! 

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Your life will always be different compared to your peers. The efforts they have put in and the efforts you have put in are different. There is something very special told about an entrepreneur – success comes to you like an exponential scale, all the effort that you have put in, all the sacrifices you have made will pay you back. You just have to wait till the tipping point where the scale changes. It will never be similar to what your friends or peers have but it will be that much better. So don’t worry about comparing, you are fighting with a bigger target here.

7) The night is the darkest before dawn.

We have heard of a hundred inspirational stories where people have flipped their lives in that one decisive moment the moment where they decided to persist, it may be SONY or KFC or APPLE or MICROSOFT, they have all had those bad days, the days which have made them think whether they should wind up. But what made them stay was that they decided to test the waters a little more and that little more made a hell lot of a difference !

So…

Still thinking of giving up?

Shanta Kumar Committee on Restructuring of FCI submits report to PM

The High Level Committee (HLC) for Restructuring of Food Corporation of India (FCI) chaired by Shanta Kumar has submitted its report to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Some Recommendations of Shanta Kumar Committee

On procurement related issues:  

• FCI should hand over all procurement operations of wheat, paddy and rice to Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Punjab as they have sufficient experience and reasonable infrastructure for procurement.
• FCI procurement should focus on eastern belt, where farmers do not get minimum support price.

On stocking and movement related issues:

• FCI should outsource its stocking operations to various agencies such as Central Warehousing Corporation (CWC), State Warehousing Corporation (SWC), Private Sector under Private Entrepreneur Guarantee (PEG) scheme.
• It should be done on competitive bidding basis, inviting various stakeholders and creating competition to bring down costs of storage.
• Movement of grains should be containerized in order to reduce transit losses. While, railways should have faster turn-around-time by having more mechanized facilities.

NFSA and PDS related issues

• Restructuring the National Food Security Act (NFSA) by virtually diluting its scope and coverage from 67 per cent of population to about 40 per cent population.
• In order to curtail leakages in PDS, government should defer implementation of NFSA in states that have not done end to end computerization.

End to end computerization:

• It recommends end to end computerization of the entire food management system, starting from procurement from farmers, to stocking, movement and finally distribution through PDS.
• It will help for real time basis monitoring in order to curb leakages.

Background

In August 2014, Union government had set up 8 members High Level Committee (HLC) on FCI restructuring. It was restructuring chaired by Shanta Kumar.

Other members are: FCI Chairman-cum-Managing Director C Viswanath, Electronic and IT Secretary Ram Sewak Sharma, Former Chairman of Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) Ashok Gulati, Chief Secretaries of Punjab and Chhattisgarh; and Academicians G Raghuram and Gunmadi Nancharaiah of IIM-Ahmedabad.