India must oppose surging protectionism

It should aggressively voice its concern about increasing restrictions on the movement of professionals at both bilateral and multilateral forums

India’s second largest information technology company Infosys Ltd has announced that it will hire 10,000 Americans over the next two years. This comes after the US administration’s criticism that Indian technology companies are taking jobs away from Americans. Last month, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to review the H-1B visa programme. Indian IT companies earn the bulk of their revenue from the US market and are big beneficiaries of the work visa programme. Legislation has also been introduced in the US House of Representatives, aiming to double the minimum salary of H-1B visa holders to $130,000 per annum. According to analyst estimates, this could affect the operating margins of Indian technology companies by up to 300 basis points. One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.

The H-1B work-visa programme has been a fiercely debated issue in the US. Critics argue that the programme has been used by Indian outsourcing companies to bring in cheap labour, which hurts American workers both in terms of employment and income. Supporters, on the other hand, are of the view that the programme attracts required skills and helps US firms remain competitive. For instance, The Economist reported in December that in the US, “vacancies in computing and information technology could easily top a million by 2020”. The bigger question that US policymakers should address is this: will increasing the cost of hiring foreign workers and raising wages make American firms more competitive?

The overhaul of the visa programme is part of a wider protectionist agenda of the Trump administration, which has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and intends to renegotiate existing trade deals.

However, the US is not the only country which is taking protectionist measures. Australia and New Zealand have also made movement of professionals difficult, and the UK has tightened visa norms. The chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Maurice Obstfeld, has fittingly described the evolving situation in his foreword to the latest “World Economic Outlook”: “Mainly in advanced economies, several factors—lower growth since the 2010-11 recovery from the global financial crisis, even slower growth of median incomes, and structural labour market disruptions—have generated political support for zero-sum policy approaches that could undermine international trading relationships, along with multilateral cooperation more generally.”

India will have to tread carefully, given this situation. Union commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently hinted at counter moves against US companies operating in India. Indian policymakers should avoid taking such measures for multiple reasons. First, Indian IT services companies have themselves to blame in part at least for not realizing in time that the labour-cost arbitrage model has limitations. Second, the US is not the only country which is making movement of professionals difficult.

Third, India needs foreign direct investment (FDI) to fund its growth. The Narendra Modi government has done well to liberalize FDI rules in various sectors, which has resulted in a significant surge in foreign investments. Any retaliatory action against companies from the US—or any other country, for that matter—will affect the confidence of international investors and will bode ill for the economy in the medium-to-long run. FDI not only creates jobs but also has a spillover impact in terms of knowledge transfer, which helps increase productivity in general. A 2015 working paper, Impact Of American Investment In India, published by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations had highlighted how investment from US companies has benefited India in various sectors. India has gained significantly after opening up its economy in 1991 and there is no reason why it should not take the process forward.

Thus, rather than replying in kind, India should aggressively voice its concern against increasing restrictions on the movement of professionals at both bilateral and multilateral forums. Global leaders did well to avoid protectionist policies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. India should play an active role in reviving a similar global consensus through multilateral forums as rising protectionism will have implications for global trade and growth.

At a broader level, even as some of the advanced economies are facing difficulties and are growing at a slower pace, the basics of economics have not changed. This is the reason why the work of early writers in modern economics remains relevant even today. In his classic work, An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of Wealth Of Nations, the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, noted: “…nations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbours. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss. Commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity.”

Wise words given the current situation—and as worth heeding now as they were when he wrote them.

How can India deal with rising protectionism? 

Why governments make poor economic choices

Governments take a populist turn in economic policymaking for different reasons—primarily because they think it is a formula for success in elections

My most recent column interrogated the putative relationship between good economics and good politics, suggesting that we have reason to be sceptical of the oft-repeated claim that there is a causal relationship between the two. Good economics, in short, may or may not be good politics. It falls, therefore, on incumbent politicians to pursue good economic policies, if they choose to, not purely looking at short-term electoral calculus, but taking the long view.

Aye, there’s the rub. Incumbent politicians must be convinced that good economics is, indeed, embedded in an understanding of the state which sees government as the guarantor of the rule of law and property rights, provider of internal and external security, and of a small and well-circumscribed set of public goods and services, or, more broadly, as intervening in sectors characterized by chronic market failure.

Unfortunately, such a view, which one might dub a “classical liberal” or (moderate) libertarian position, is not the norm amongst India’s political class, which still harbours unreconstructed predilections towards statism and government command and control.

It is not hard to understand the genesis of such views. I have had the opportunity to speak at some of the best university campuses in India over the years, and am consistently struck by how fundamentally anti-free market the prevailing intellectual currents run and how strong remains the faith that the government knows best. And these views are prevalent not just in the humanities departments, as you would expect, but even among students of economics and business. And their professors are often worse! There are, in other words, multiple drivers of poor economic policy choices by governments, not merely political expediency.

Governments take a populist turn for different reasons—first and foremost, of course, because they think it is a formula for electoral success. Yet, the success of advocacy for populist policy interventions is not merely a matter of cynical electoral math but reflects also this statist mindset. After all, you have to believe in the primacy of liberty and of free markets, to push for it aggressively when you are in office, unless your back is to the wall and you are doing so out of necessity.

Readers of my work will know that I have dubbed this failure to make an intellectual, principled case for pro-market reforms going back to 1991, the “original sin” of reform in India. The trouble is, if the rationale for good policies is that they are done in a mode of crisis, the resolve to persist with those policies will fail to stick when the crisis has passed.

Please note that I am not here re-litigating the tiresome and already settled debate of whether economic reforms were imposed on India as part of a so-called Washington Consensus. That bogey has been debunked, and it is now, or should be, well understood that there were important indigenous intellectual drivers of reform—the work of economists such as Jagdish Bhagwati notable amongst them. In other words, there was an ideational background to the 1991 reforms, but this does not mean that the politicians who carried them out after the initial crisis receded carried conviction.

The notable exceptions in India were, of course, prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, the godfather of Indian economic reforms in the early 1990s, and prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the father of the far-reaching reforms of the late 1990s—yet these are the exceptions, within their own parties, and more generally.

As I and others have argued in detail elsewhere, the 10 years of Congress-led rule from 2004-14 were marked by a notable lack of conviction in pursuing the second generation of economic reforms, with, instead, a penchant for entitlement-based welfare schemes.

In part, this reflected a smug complacency driven by the high rates of gross domestic product (GDP) growth that India managed to achieve without much reform. Indeed, 2010 saw year-on-year GDP growth touch a magical 10.26%, according to World Bank data—marking India’s very brief entry into the double-digit growth club. If you have already been admitted to the club, after all, there’s very little short-term incentive to pay the entrance fee after the fact.

But this is not the whole story. Again, as I have argued elsewhere, the last Congress-led government evidently lacked intellectual conviction in favour of reforms, making it easy to push these into the future as long as growth was good. And, when growth turned down, it was too late to turn things around before the electoral defeat of 2014.

Former Congress leaders, and writers sympathetic to them, point out, with some justice, that several of the flagship schemes of the current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government are the progeny of schemes going back to the previous government. Perhaps the would-be reformers in that government might now be looking back with regret at missed opportunities, maybe even former prime minister Manmohan Singh.

We are again in a situation with acceptably high but not double-digit growth, and again without a clear sense that the government of the day feels any particular urgency in pursuing potentially unpopular reforms in its remaining time in office. We have seen this movie before. Let us hope for a different ending.

IIT Roorkee scientists create low-cost solar cells using Jamun

IIT Roorkee researchers used naturally occurring pigment found in jamun as an inexpensive photosensitizer for Dye Sensitised Solar Cells or Gratzel cells

Gratzel cells are thin film solar cells composed of a porous layer of titanium dioxide coated photoanode, a layer of dye molecules that absorbs sunlight, an electrolyte for regenerating the dye, and a cathode

Scientists at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee have used the juicy, delectable Indian summer fruit Jamun to create inexpensive and more efficient solar cells.

Researchers used naturally occurring pigment found in jamun as an inexpensive photosensitiser for Dye Sensitised Solar Cells (DSSCs) or Gratzel cells.
Gratzel cells are thin film solar cells composed of a porous layer of titanium dioxide (TiO2) coated photoanode, a layer of dye molecules that absorbs sunlight, an electrolyte for regenerating the dye, and a cathode. These components form a sandwich-like structure with the dye molecule or photosensitizer playing a pivotal role through its ability to absorb visible light.
“The dark colour of jamun and abundance of jamun trees in IIT campus clicked the idea that it might be useful as a dye in the typical Dye Sensitised Solar Cells (DSSC),” lead researcher Soumitra Satapathi, assistant professor at IIT Roorkee in Uttarakhand, told PTI.
Researchers extracted dyes from jamun using ethanol. They also used fresh plums and black currant, along with mixed berry juices which contain pigments that give characteristic colour to jamun. The mixture was then centrifuged and decanted. The extracted coloured pigment called anthocyanin was used as a sensitiser.
“Natural pigments are way economical in comparison to regular Ruthenium-based pigments and scientists are optimising to improve the efficiency,” said Satapathi, who is also a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in the US. “The increasing pressure on fossil fuels and concern of global warming has inspired continuous search for alternate energy,” said Satapathi.
Uncertainty over the pace at which new large dams or nuclear plants can be built means strong reliance on solar power—an area where India has high potential and equally high ambition—to deliver on the country’s pledge to build up a 40% share of non-fossil fuel capacity in the power sector by 2030, researchers said.
“In principle, we have a large social need for renewable energy especially solar energy. For quite sometime, our lab is actively engaged in low cost high efficiency solar cells production,” said Satapathi. The research team, which includes Nipun Sawhney and Anubhav Raghav, is very optimistic that the process can easily be replicated for mass production of solar cells.
The simplicity and cost effectiveness of the overall fabrication process, widespread availability of fruits and juices, and ease of extraction of anthocyanin dyes render them novel and inexpensive candidates for solar cells application, researchers said

 

Is lack of development driving the Kashmir conflict? Among Indian states facing armed militancy, Jammu and Kashmir has the best development indicators

The current crisis in Kashmir is characterized as much by the mass protests of youngsters as it is by the militancy of Pakistan-backed terrorists. The signs of growing discontent were visible in the abysmally low turnout in the recently held Srinagar Lok Sabha bypolls. In a visit to the state last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to the Kashmiri youth to choose tourism over terrorism.
Is lack of development the reason for growing discontent in Kashmir?
A look at some of the key development indicators suggests that Jammu and Kashmir fares better than the rest of the country when it comes to most development indicators. In comparison to other insurgency-affected states, Jammu and Kashmir appears to be far more developed.
For instance, on the human development index (HDI)—a summary measure of income, educational attainment, and life expectancy—Jammu and Kashmir fares better than the average Indian state, according to a 2011 ranking of states by HDI, published by the erstwhile Planning Commission.
More recent data from the fourth round of the National Family and Health Survey, which was conducted in 2015-16 (NFHS 2015-16), also shows that Jammu and Kashmir fares better on development indicators when compared with all-India averages, or with insurgency-affected states such as Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and Chhattisgarh.
While the data suggests that there is no simplistic link between disaffection and development, it would be hasty to dismiss the role of socio-economic factors altogether.
Here’s why. According to the 2011 census, the share of 0-14-year-old population was slightly higher in Jammu and Kashmir (34%) than all-India (31%). Today, a part of this cohort would be in high schools and colleges, whose participation in anti-state demonstrations and stone-pelting has been widely recorded. Not only does Jammu and Kashmir have more people than the rest of country in this age-group, its youth population (15-34 years) also has a bigger employment problem. According to the 2011 census, Jammu and Kashmir had a much smaller share of main workers (who are employed for more than six months in a year) in comparison to the rest of India and other conflict-ridden states. This trend is in keeping with Jammu and Kashmir’s low share of main workers in the total population as well.

Click here for enlarge

These numbers show that the lack of quality jobs may be one reason for the frustration of Kashmiri youth.
Yet, a conflict such as that in Kashmir can rarely be pinned down to just one cause. Years of armed conflict and the heavily militarized environment has taken an emotional toll on the state’s population. The 2015 Kashmir Mental Health Survey conducted by the international humanitarian organisation, Doctors Without Borders, found that 45% of adults in the Kashmir valley display major symptoms of mental distress, with about one in five adults, or 19% of the adult population, displaying major symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The survey put the prevalence of depression in adults at 41%. In contrast, the National Mental Health Survey of India 2015-16 puts the weighted prevalence of depression at the all-India level in single digits.
The period of this survey broadly coincides with the NFHS survey of 2015-16. So, at a time when Jammu and Kashmir was ahead of India in most developmental indicators, its population was suffering from high levels of mental stress and trauma. Kashmir needs development with a healing touch that creates good jobs and reduces stress levels in the valley

Growth problems for India’s medium-size cities

In countries like the US and China, they are engines of economic progress—but in India, megacities still dominate

Although India has experienced rapid growth over the last two decades, spatial disparities have increased. India’s growth is concentrated in mega cities. This stands in sharp contrast with the spatial development in China and the US, where intermediate cities have become the new drivers of growth and job creation. Why is economic activity concentrated in high-density clusters in India? Have the manufacturing and services sectors shown similar or different patterns of spatial development? Will megacities experience decreasing returns in future? Why are medium-size cities not growing? Do they suffer from poor infrastructure? We examined these questions with the help of enterprise data in 900 districts (Klaus Desmet, Syed Ejaz Ghani,Stephen D. O’Connell and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, The Spatial Development Of India, policy research working paper series 6060, World Bank).

Spatial transformation

The spatial development of the manufacturing and services sectors behaves very differently. Globally, manufacturing has been dispersing from high-density clusters to less-dense areas, whereas services have been experiencing increasing concentration, except for the densest locations where congestion is the dominating force.

Empirical evidence has shown that “young” industries tend to become spatially more concentrated, whereas “old” industries have a tendency towards greater dispersion. The manufacturing sector is now an old industry. The fourth Industrial Revolution is still evolving, with informational technology making services more tradable and a young industry.
The services sector in India shows some similarities with the services sector in the US, with both exhibiting agglomeration economies. However, there are also some differences. In the US, agglomeration economies in services dominate in medium-density locations. Three of the main high-tech counties in the US are in Santa Clara, California (Silicon Valley); Middlesex, Massachusetts (Route 128); and Durham, North Carolina (Research Triangle). In contrast, in India, agglomeration economies are more dominant in high-density locations, such as Hyderabad and Chennai.
The evidence of agglomeration in the services sector in the US is in cities with densities of employment below 150 employees per sq. km, while in India, agglomeration is found in cities with densities above this threshold. In other words, if the US is used as the efficient benchmark, then 150 employees per sq. km is the ideal density to take advantage of agglomeration economies. In India, these medium-density cities are the worst places.
For Chinese locations with a density above 150 employees per sq. km, service employment growth strongly decreases with size, indicating important congestion costs. China looks more like the US, where congestion costs also dominate for locations above the 150 employees per sq. km threshold. Given that the overall level of local infrastructure is better in China than in India, this finding is consistent with the interpretation of frictions holding back the growth of medium-density cities in India, but not in China.
Identifying the frictions and barriers to growth in medium-density cities in India can be a challenging task. There is evidence to suggest that two policy variables have the potential to account for the relative advantage of high-density clusters—the percentage of the population with post-secondary education and the percentage of households with access to telecommunication services. Controlling for either of these two variables, there is no longer evidence of high-density service clusters growing particularly fast. In other words, if all locations had the same percentage of their population with post-secondary education, or if households’ access to telecommunication services in all locations was the same, then high-density service clusters would lose their attractiveness in India.
If India had the same scale dependence in growth rates as the US, different areas of the country would benefit from growth in the services sector. Growth would be more concentrated in the coastal regions, especially in southern states such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala, as well as in northern states such as West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Of the well-known IT clusters in India, the medium-density cities such as Ahmedabad and Pune, and especially Bengaluru, would grow much faster in the future, whereas the high-density cities, such as Chennai and Mumbai, will face slower growth.
What should policymakers do?

India’s rapid growth has been accompanied by increasing spatial disparities within India. India’s megacities have continued to grow, fed by a steady stream of migrants from the countryside. The spatial evolution of India has continued to favour districts with high levels of employment density. This is especially the case in services. The evidence in manufacturing is more mixed. In the services sector, agglomeration forces still dominate dispersion forces in high-density areas. In other words, these high-density clusters of economic activity continue to be India’s engines of growth.

This raises a number of important policy questions. Should India focus on the development of infrastructure, and in general facilitate the location of employment, in its large cities in order to exploit the still important agglomeration effects? Or should India develop infrastructure in medium-density locations in order to remove some of the impediments to growth present in these areas?
The future drivers of growth and jobs will be the medium-size cities in India, just like in China and the US. But the medium-density locations currently are the worst places. What is preventing medium-density locations in India from growing and taking full advantage of agglomeration forces? Why is their evolution so different from that in advanced economies? This is a major concern in India’s spatial development.

India’s dominance in Indian Ocean is intact

India does not have to match China in the number game. The former has the geographical advantage

China recently launched its first indigenous aircraft carrier. Construction of the 70,000 tonne Type 001A carrier which may be named Shandong started in 2013 and it is likely to be commissioned in 2020. It will be China’s second carrier after it commissioned a modified Ukrainian Kuznetsov class aircraft cruiser Varyag into its navy as Liaoning in 2012.

Many Indian commentators have written about the implication of China acquiring its second aircraft carrier on India’s security. A column in Bloomberg View said the Shandong “will give China an edge for the first time in the carrier race with its Asian rival, a literal two-to-one advantage”. The premise is wrong on various counts.
First, China’s existing carrier, the Liaoning, is being used to train the crew to operate aircraft carriers and is not on operational deployment yet. Compare this with India’s aircraft carrier: The INS Vikramaditya is fully operational. And India also has decades of experience in operating aircraft carriers, it has used them in warfare.
Second, the Shandong has only been launched, it doesn’t mean it’s ready for operational deployment. It will undergo outfitting with various systems and then undergo sea trials before being commissioned around 2020. India launched its first indigenous carrier, Vikrant, in 2013 and it is likely to be commissioned in the early 2020s after delays for various reasons.
Imagery expert Colonel Vinayak Bhat, who analysed the pictures of the Shandong, says it is at least two years away from commissioning. He says that the engines of the carrier have not yet been started and no radar or weapons installed. It also does not have the arrestor cables and the pictures suggest a lot of areas being covered up where work probably has not been completed, such as the ammunition elevator and jet blast deflectors. Moreover, they don’t have enough J-15 fighter jets for the carrier.
Third, even after China commissions the Shandong, it will not send both its carriers on permanent deployment in the Indian Ocean. China’s primary areas of interest are the hotly contested waters and islands of the East and South China Sea. The US maintains a potent naval presence in the area. China will maintain both its carriers there although it will make symbolic port visits in the Indian Ocean region especially to Gwadar in Pakistan.
China plans a four- to six-carrier navy which will give it the capability to permanently deploy in the Indian Ocean. But that will take a couple of decades at best and depends on the trajectory of the Chinese economy, which is slowing down. By that time, India will have three aircraft carriers in service.
Fourth, the two Chinese carriers are conventionally powered, not nuclear, which means they cannot be put on extended deployment. They lack the logistics capability to operate far away from Chinese shores.
Fifth, China has to contend with India’s two unsinkable aircraft carriers: the Andaman and Nicobar Islands located close to the choke point of Malacca Strait and the Indian mainland itself which juts into the Indian Ocean. The Andamans has India’s only tri-services command and there are plans to beef up military presence there. India will be able to target PLAN (People’s Liberation Army Navy) warships and interdict supplies using land-based assets like aircraft and missiles. India has deployed its premier fighter aircraft, the Su-30MKI, in the Andamans and also in southern India.
To break India’s dominance in the Indian Ocean, China has invested in a number of port projects in India’s neighbourhood, referred to as string of pearls. All of them, including China’s expected naval base in Gwadar in Pakistan, are within range of India’s land-based fighters and missiles.
Finally, India does not have to match China in the numbers game. The former has the geographical advantage. With over 40 warships under construction, it will have nearly 200 warships by 2025. China has to contend with multiple naval powers in its core areas of interest. The US navy looms large. Japan has a powerful navy with advanced warships and submarines. It recently commissioned its second helicopter carrier, which could carry the F-35B stealth fighter. South Korea has a potent navy and Vietnam has acquired Russian Kilo-class submarines to counter the mightier Chinese navy.
India has multinational cooperation in the maritime domain primarily with the US and Japan. India and the US share information on China’s maritime movements and train extensively during Exercise Malabar. India’s chief of naval staff has said that India has plans in place for China’s naval presence in Gwadar.
India has to prepare for any Chinese threat. It should beef up its air defence and land-based anti-ship missiles in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as well as peninsular India. Stationing the S-400 surface-to-air missile system that India plans to acquire in the Andamans will cover 500,000 sq. km of airspace over the Bay of Bengal. All major Indian warships are being equipped with Barak 8 long-range surface-to-air missiles along with the supersonic Brahmos anti-ship cruise missiles. India is going to acquire nuclear and diesel-electric attack submarines. While there are delays in the acquisition process, there is no need to panic as the Chinese dragon will not be in a position to breathe fire on India in the Indian Ocean anytime soon.
Yusuf Unjhawala is editor of Defence Forum India and a commentator on defence and strategic affairs.

The Escherichia coli, or E. coli, is undoubtedly the most studied bacterium on our planet today and our planet is a better place for humans, as a result

E. coli: Why so famous?

The Escherichia coli, or E. coli, is undoubtedly the most studied bacterium on our planet today and our planet is a better place for humans, as a result

Escherichia coli” rings a vague bell in many heads. And if I say the famous abbreviation “E. coli” to break the silence that follows, many of these vague faces light up in recognition. A brave soul then utters, what most are wondering, “Isn’t it like a virus or something which causes a fever of some sort?” My insides squirm with a strong desire to blurt “No, it ain’t no virus and it does a lot more than causing a fever”. Earth is home to billions of different kinds of bacteria and yet only a few, one of them being E. coli, have attained some fame. Why? What makes E. coli special? Not so fast! Let us begin from the beginning.

Discovery
German-Austrian paediatrician, Theodor Escherich, is credited with the discovery of this bacterium. He isolated a new bacterium from the faeces of his patients suffering from diarrhoea, then studied it carefully under the microscope, noted its properties and selflessly named it Bacterium coli commune. Escherich noticed one very important property: its immense speed to grow in laboratory conditions. By the time of Escherich’s death in 1911, his discovery was already being used in several laboratories and in 1919 the bacterium was re-christened as Escherichia coli in his honour.
Size and shape
We, microbiologists, are not unlike fashion pundits when it comes to our subject of interest. Size, shape and colour are the first things we like to notice. The protagonist of our story, the bacterium Escherichia coli, can be usually found shaped like a rod approximately 1-3 µm long and 0.5 µm wide; a single grain of salt can comfortably harbour hundreds of E. coli bacteria. The E. coli, however, can also change its shape. When the environmental conditions are unfavourable —less food, high temperatures, etc.—the bacterium can increase its length many times or form long chains or even adopt an attractive L shape too. This skill—of changing its shape and size—is not a rare talent in the bacterial world, and is known as “pleomorphism”. The colour identification in case of microbes is much simpler though, unlike the daunting array of begonia, beige and bisque that a fashion critic usually frets over. The very small size of bacteria demands staining procedures before they are put under the microscope.
Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram developed a simple technique to stain bacteria, which at the same time classifies them into two kinds: Gram positive (violet in colour) and Gram negative (pink in colour).
E. coli appears vivid pink after Gram staining and hence it is a Gram negative rod.
Sighting
If you want to hunt for an E. coli, you need to look within. This is factual advice and not a philosophical one, as E. coli resides in the gut of all mammals, including humans. You might assure me that you haven’t got any diarrhoea currently. But E. coli not only lives in the gut of a healthy human being, but also contributes to keeping its host healthy.
Within a year after birth, it occupies part of the mucous-rich lining (yum! if you were a bacterium) of the large intestine, along with other neighbours. If not for these early settlers, our intestine would be a holiday resort for disease-causing bacteria. But this cooperative relation between host and bacteria can be formed with only some kind of E. coli and not with others.
What we know as “E. coli” actually contains a diverse group which shares the properties of being “E. coli”—for instance, the shape of a rod or a certain gene. On the other hand, these kinds differ in other aspects which will decide whether a particular E. coli can cause an infection or not, and more importantly where will that infection occur. Urinary tract? Digestive tract? Skin? Gastrointestinal infections are the most common kind, and food or water sources contaminated with animal waste matter are the likely culprits. In fact, absence of disease-causing E. coli is used as one of the indicators of clean water. In spite of its versatile infective abilities, most groups of E. coli are rarely life-threatening and the associated mortalities remain low.
Why so famous?
But then, if it isn’t a deadly pathogen, why so famous? The part of the answer lies in the question. The fact that most varieties of E. coli are benign make the bacterium an excellent lab pet. You can perform experiments without a hell lot of sophistication.
Additionally, it grows very fast. A single bacterium placed on a nutritious jelly can form more than millions of its own kind within 24 hours. This makes it further amenable for experimentation.
Unravelling the questions of biology demands that you look inside the living being. And when it comes to the building blocks of life, humans, mice, plants, E. coli, and pretty much everything that lives, have vast similarities. Now, imagine a scientist in the beginning of 20th century. He wants to study why kids are similar to parents. But it is impossible to study it in humans or cows or even mice for that matter.
Then he sees the same is true for E. coli. The daughter cell has properties similar to the mother cell. It is easier to look at them under the microscope, follow multiple generations, even break the envelope of the cells and take out what is inside for further investigation. And while he works with one of the million things inside that envelope, someone else can investigate some other thing inside the E. coli, using the same lab protocols. Putting their findings together will be much less hassle due to the use of same kind of bacteria. In fact, this is exactly what happened. As more and more people started using the same “model system”, more and more was known about it and more people wanted to use it further.
The number of biological insights assisted by use of E. coli is thus humungous—a complex, long chain-like molecule called DNA is the basis of heredity which can harbour errors; the position of the errors is necessarily random; enzymes are machines that help draw energy from food; viruses can infect bacteria (yes, there exist such a thing); bacteria have sex (again, yes)—the list is never-ending. These insights have further allowed us to utilize bacteria for our benefit. We effectively control the cellular “factories” of bacteria that can ferment sugars to form yogurt or alcohol or idli. We can utilize the same machinery to make antibiotics and insulin. E. coli is undoubtedly the most studied bacterium on our planet today and our planet is a better place for humans, as a result!
“Anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants,” Jacques Monad, a French biochemist and a Nobel prize winner, had said. Nineteenth century research primarily exploited these similarities to understand how life works and how we can mould these systems for our own use.
Recently, which means 20-odd years in the slow world of science, we have also started asking “what if” questions. Answers to these questions can allow us to predict the possible outcomes of certain conditions. For instance, large changes in climatic conditions are now evident, over short as well as long time periods. Such fluctuations can affect all living beings, albeit to different extents.
What if the environment changes every day? What are the ways in which living beings can respond to such changes? How are these responses relevant to us human beings? These and many such questions can be answered by conducting a ‘laboratory evolution experiment’. Imagine Age of Empires with real populations of E. coli and real environments created by the experimenter (sounds like fun, doesn’t it). These evolution experiments, when repeated enough number of times, can provide very important insights. For example, if E. coli is exposed to ever-changing doses of salts and acids, as it might in sewage water, it can evolve to make cellular machines which will protect the cell from such insults. These evolved machines are nothing but pumps which can remove the unwanted. But then, the same machines can also protect the E. coli against the antibiotics that we use for treating the infections. The changes in the environment can surprisingly result in serious ramifications for us.
What next?
Of course many properties of life cannot be studied using E. coli. How does an entire animal or plant develop from an embryo? Why do there exist only two sexes in sexually reproducing animals? How did photosynthesis evolve? And so many more. In fact, with golden age of biology in effect, scientists want to know more about the “non E. coli” species and use them for research or efficient production of fermented foods. Some might argue that E. coli is at the end of its days of glory. But many grad students are still found gawking at the E.coliwiki for hours and coli-poems are still being written with deep passion. Younger model systems (with better growth rates) still have a long way to go before they replace E. coli. And whatever the future may be, E. coli has made a permanent mark on 20th century biology.