'Right to Quality Civic Infrastructure' as a fundamental right

This is a reproduction of the petition I published today on Change.org. For once, I'd be happy seeing more signatures on the petition there than seeing likes on my post here :-) - Happy Independence Day to all my compatriots. https://www.change.org/p/prime-minister-of-india-include-right-to-quality-civic-infrastructure-to-the-list-of-fundamental-rights

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I was pleased when my city figured in the 100 shortlisted during the stage-1 of recently launched Smart City Mission. I was baffled though when I realized that this 'smart upgrade' is primarily about attempting to implement the following 'features'

• Adequate water supply,
• Assured electricity supply
• Sanitation, including solid waste management
• Efficient urban mobility and public transport
• Affordable housing, especially for the poor
• Robust IT connectivity and digitalization
• Good governance, especially e-Governance and citizen participation
• Sustainable environment
• Safety and security of citizens, particularly women, children and the elderly
• Health and education

Wait, aren’t the above 'core infrastructural elements' as labelled in this self acclaimed 'bold, new initiative' in reality the default amenities any tax-paying citizen would/ should expect?, let alone one living in a city but even by those in a town or village?

As I reflected deeper on this apparent irony, I realized how in the past 44 years of my existence I haven’t yet once walked around my house without getting depressed about the apathetic layout, bad roads, lack of usable footpaths, absent green lungs, unreliable garbage & sewage management systems and the general lack of finesse around where I live. My childhood optimism that things would greatly improve when I grow up was shattered when I found out in a recent visit that my native town is a far worser dump than it was a good 30 years ago!

It's clearly not a lack of ideas nor a paucity of requisite engineering capability to develop infrastructure at par with world standards, a fact clearly demonstrated by the amazingly executed projects such as Bandra-Worli Sea link; the Pir Panjal tunnel dug through the Himalayas; the multitudes of express highways such as the fully elevated one between Mumbai, Pune; the top-rated airports & terminals operational in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai et al. As a highway commuter in India, you wouldn't want to reach the destination too soon, the infrastructure within the destination invariably is always a let down - This dichotomy is perplexing.

This dichotomy isn't limited just to civic v/s high-way infrastructure. All the governments over the past seven decades have created & nurtured a class system of human habitats across the Indian republic - consider the following;

• Between urban; semi-urban and rural centers the quality of civic infrastructure is tellingly different from being inadequately maintained in urban centers to shoddily executed in semi-urban to non-existent in the rural habitats
• Within a city there are pockets that are highly developed while some are semi-developed and some are completely ignored for example the sheer difference in the layout and upkeep of Lodhi Estate v/s Shahdara in N. Delhi; Banjara Hills v/s Nallakunta in Hyderabad; Bandra Bandstand v/s Dadar in Mumbai et al. The difference in the amenities in the elite v/s middle-class localities is shamefully blatant - It's as though one has to pay a price for not being economically strong enough to acquire property in a posher locality. This discrimination doesn't make any sense considering the property tax collected so aggressively by the civic administration is calculated and charged using the same unit rates across all localities, elite or otherwise.

I am not sad anymore, I am now furious with this senseless state of affairs. I think I am as entitled to good civic infrastructure as the denizen of any other developed country is. As a citizen of India I believed it’s my right to be provided enabling civic infrastructure.... Or is it?

Propelled by this desire to better understand my entitlements as an Indian citizen I looked up for supporting information only to realize that;

The word “infrastructure” occurs just twice in the Constitution of India......

…….quite innocuously only in context of a district &/or a metropolitan planning committee preparing a ‘draft development plan’ and submitting to the GOI. (Ref: Part IXA.—The Municipalities.—Arts. 243ZB—243ZD.)

Neither the fundamental rights nor the directive principles touched upon this aspect in any specific detail.

I do understand the times were very different when our sacred constitution was drafted, adopted and enacted. I fully comprehend the fact that all aspects covered under fundamental rights and directive principles were of paramount importance for a nation that just liberated itself from alien rule & as a diverse people that were yet to get the full import of governing themselves and in understanding what it actually takes to behaving as a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic.

Sixty nine long years hence though the rights as perceived by an average globally-aware Indian citizen are far more evolved though not very frequently voiced. A mere ‘right to life’ won’t suffice no more, there has to be necessarily a ‘right to a right quality of life’.

Even if as a symbolic gesture towards triggering an attitudinal change that we so badly need to make, I as a citizen of India request the prime minister of India & ‘the state’ (as defined in constitution of India) to initiate an amendment to the constitution that;

1. Expands the list of Fundamental Rights by including of “Right to quality civic infrastructure”
2. Expands the bandwidth of Directive Principles to reflect the above inclusion as a necessary duty of the state
3. Expands the scope of Fundamental Duties to make maintenance & upkeep of civic infrastructure as much a duty of the citizen as it is of the state

Let's give the rational & ambitious gen-Y of our country a more compelling reason to be proud of their country than continuing to burden them with an expectation of unquestioned nationalistic pride.

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I request all my fellow citizens to support this petition by signing it (& sharing it on their social networks) thereby making a meaningful impact on the 69th Indian Independence day!

The cat's on the prowl

First published on Linkedin on 10 July 2015

On 9/11/14 I published a rather longish speculation on Calico.

Almost an year since then, while nothing earth shattering some serious stuff is surely happening at Calico.

Towards making its journey to tackling ageing a smooth affair, Calico has started to identify some fun-n-fit travel-mates, hoard the essentials, chart-out the best road to take & mark-out the detours to make.

• Partnered with The Buck Institute, which is the foremost Geroscienceinstitution & works on aspects as diverse as understanding & altering neurodegenerative processes; Dietary Restriction as a way to modulate ageing to pinpointing Stochastic aspects of cellular degeneration.
• Collaborating with UCSF primarily on their focus area on understandingIntegrated Stress Response (ISR)
• Partnered with Q3B, which is pursuing the biomedical promise by way of seeding dozens of start-ups in its incubators
• Collaborating with Broad Institute that’s crisping up the human genome by resolving the operational portion of it & importantly is developing a new way to discover & re-purpose drugs

The above partnerships are a mix of investment into longer-term scientific breakthroughs and shorter-term stake in innovative biomedical start-ups challenging the routine (Q3B) and showcase Calico’s adherence to its core purpose. But looking at the high focus on neurodegenerative research at Buck Institute (6 out of 9 research components) and UCSF, it's likely the first milestone Calico wishes to reach is tackling cognitive decline linked to ageing.

Make it fast Art, age is catching up!

Don’t serve noodles al Dente

Like for most of my generation & the later ones, Maggi has been an integral part of my growing up and I felt it’s my nostalgic duty to put up a defense in favor of its beleaguered maker. However as more details started emerging, it became clear to me that an outright defense will be an aberration. So here I go serving up a steaming bowl of instant wisdom to Nestle.

React don’t respond

When trust issues like these crop-up, a quick reaction from the effected brand, however half-baked, will still help assuage the consumer fears than a measured but delayed response would – a typical consumer will only view this time-lag as hesitation (stemming from guilt..) and hence lose faith.

Now again, even this measured response shouldn’t come across as an ill-articulated stand that raises more questions than it answers. CEO Paul Buckle says “Nestlé’s safety measures and standards are same all over the world” - Safety measures, perhaps yes but this statement can’t be factual when it comes to standards as these can differ depending on the market – If Paul meant to say Nestlé’s compliance adherence is the same all over the world, he should say that. This clarity becomes that much more significant given the lack of clear-set of applicable standards in the Indian context & hence one sees FSSAI oft-quoting FDA while interpreting various facets of the results.

Screw brevity, be verbose

Any attorney worth his salt will vouch for the fact that there are no short cuts to drafting safe harbor clauses & the more verbose; the lower is the chance of it being interpreted unsuitably.

It’s perhaps not a lie when Nestle says ‘No MSG added” & it is absolutely possible that the proteins within the noodles & taste-maker put together can throw up a peak for glutamic acid on the chromatogram. But considering FDA clearly considers this label as misbranding and as misleading the consumer, Nestle should’ve used some discretion and printed a more elaborate disclaimer to the effect

‘No MSG has been added to this product during manufacture. It is however possible that the product does contain trace quantities of Glutamic acid that occurs naturally in many proteins’

Challenge the rulebook, but before breaking the rule

I believe there is some merit in Nestle contesting the test method(s) used by FSSAI et al to ascertain lead-content in Maggi and its good they want to ‘engage with the authorities’ on the same. Why wasn’t this done early on Paul? I’m sure the inadequacy of the method prescribed by FSSAI &/or BSI was crystal clear to Nestle for over two decades as compared to their probably superior internal STP – what’s the consequence of talking about method integrity after failing?

It is also a valid contention that applying lead-limit set for noodles to the separately-packed taste-maker isn't logical and that it should be sufficient if the combined ingredients meet the limit. But again it's not clear why Nestle chose to ignore this potential risk of regulator considering both as separate products while enforcing limits.   

Finally, isn’t it a regulatory thumb rule that in order to comply with a specific standard, product should be tested using the prescribed method of the regulator & not by the manufacturer’s internal method?

Don’t serve noodles al Dente

That’s for pasta. So rather than quoting technicalities, tell the consumer clearly what they can expect and expect consistently. The consumer deserves to know that your latest variant is approved or if it is still a test marketed item.

Trusted brands need to work on keeping the consumer trust – it’s a double edged sword. No company let alone a top brand like Nestle can afford to get complacent in any market about quality, compliance and transparency however lackadaisical the enforcement is &/or however half-aware the consumers there are of their rights - This is tantamount to a brand-harakiri & for no noble purpose either.

A final dash of taste-maker

Since my intention was a defense to start with I would still close it thus – I believe Nestle has the requisite stature, maturity and still sufficient consumer trust to pull itself up from this mess and shine again.

This war-on-Maggi by the Indian regulators will hopefully stir other slumbering giants in food & pharma industry who have gotten used to using the Indian regulatory lacunae & its ineffective enforcement to their advantage and instead start prioritizing consumer interest above all.

As for the warring lords in the Indian regulatory arena, my appeal is three fold

• Keep up the heat and not just on Nestle
• Demand compliance but only after setting & implementing standards
• Let science prevail not sentiment

Wake-up and smell the soup!

Post thought - 08 June '15

It's imminent that the Maggi saga will rake-up a huge public debate with respect to the general quality of the mostly uncontrolled unprocessed food out there in India. While this sounds great, I’m worried this unplanned extrapolation may bloat-up the debate & dilute its impact.

Before throwing in unprocessed food into the simmering pot of processed-food debate, it should be noted that the challenges with unprocessed foods are a very different devil and it's more an public distribution issue while Maggi noodle fuss is all about enforcement & adherence to quality standards for processed food.

Also, this is a more immediately addressable consumer rights issue as problem with quality of processed food amounts to a breach of contract between seller/ maker & buyer/ consumer. A much complex scenario however will be in play for unprocessed food where such clear definition of roles isn’t easy and the debate cannot solely happen on the merit of what an end-consumer expects.

For the sake of efficiency I think it'd be ideal for regulators & activists alike to channel the current enthusiasm towards addressing the gaps in processed food segment first - else it could be a classic case of biting off more than one can chew.