SJM wants India to uphold TRIPS flexibilities in UN forum on TB

Ashwani Mahajan, National Co-convener of Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM), an organisation affiliated with Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), tweeted a message this morning (July 24).

"Don't cave into US pressure tactics, TRIPS flexibilities are key to protecting public health", read the message, tagged to the twitter handles of Prime Minster Narendra Modi, Health Minister J. P. Nadda, Foreign Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and BJP National President Amit Shah.

Mahajan was attempting to sensitise Indian top decision makers on an issue where developing country members of the United Nations (UN) were allegedly facing immense pressure from the United States. The negotiators and representatives of UN member nations are currently finalising the text of a political declaration that will be made by its leaders after the first UN high level meeting on tackling tuberculosis (TB) scheduled to be held in September.

This declaration will set the tone of the policy direction in which global community will move to tackle the menace of TB. India and several other developing nations where TB is a major health problem would like to use all flexibilities provided in the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to ensure access to affordable TB medicines. This includes the permission to grant compulsory licenses to local drug manufacturers to supply low cost generic versions of patented TB drugs if they are not available in the country at affordable rates. The US does not want such an explicit endorsement of the use of TRIPS flexibilities in the declaration and hence wants the negotiators to drop all references to protecting the rights of individual nations to take fully legal actions to access affordable medicines for their patients.

The deadline to finalise the text of the draft declaration has almost ended. The US is yet to change its position. Mahajan's message was clearly aimed at the Indian negotiators the G77 Group of Nations meets to review its position for the last time.

SIGNIFICANCE

In 2016, TB was responsible for 1.7 million deaths the world over. Even there, the multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is increasingly causing much bigger harm thus making the fight against TB more complex. It is critical for India as BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) together account for over 40 percent of TB and over 50 percent of drug-resistant TB cases.

Incidentally, there are only two recent drugs that are effective against MDR-TB. The first one is bedaquiline, developed by US firm Johnson & Johnson, and the other is delamanid, from Japanese pharmaceutical company Otsuka. Both the medicines are relatively expensive and are being made available through charity or humanitarian programmes to the needy in India. While country level attempts are being made to get it sourced at a much lesser rate, the US move is meant to provide more negotiating power to the pharmaceutical companies.

As his tweet suggests, Mahajan wants India, and other developing countries, to retain and exercise their rights to get MDR-TB sourced at an affordable price, while retaining the option to get it locally made by exercising public health emergency related flexibilities in the global trade order. The absence of a political declaration at a UN meet will not take away that flexibility, but it may send a conflicting signal that does not align with the sustainable development goals of the UN, that give prominence to access and affordability of healthcare.