My 1$ became 10$ overnight

Once in a while I indirectly contribute 1$ to Medecins sans Frontieres. Each of these dollars has gone up in value by a factor of at least ten, on April 1, 2013. Note the date, but rest assured this is not a silly April Fool’s gimmick. If anything the returns on my investment may as well be as much as an order of magnitude higher (depending on where one sources the data from).

It was on April 1, 2013, the transnational pharma giant was stripped naked in the lofty confines of the Indian Supreme Court. The court said that Novartis is showing age and its makeup, evergreening of Gleevec, is running.

The newspaper The Hindu ran a headline article on the day after, carried an editorial and also devoted a full page for a series of articles on the matter. The issue found mention in The New York Times (a column and also an editorial), The Guardian, and also The Economist. I have not checked the Wall Street Journal, but I should be able to write an editorial for them, if you catch my drift!

Well, everything I have read is in public domain and there is no point in my repeating them. Here it is my intention to bring to light a few things that have not been mentioned in these discussions, at least not prominently enough.

One, while Novartis claims that it requires patent protection to be incentivized to indulge in R & D, there is a curious silence on the issue of what one may call the “rights of free withdrawal” of knowledge from the public domain, like from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health in the US. If only access to research results from such public funding came at a cost to downstream research, with the proviso that these costs cannot be passed onto the consumers, the tax payers (that would amount to double cost jeopardy for the latter)... As of now, patent protection, grant of monopoly comes at no cost to the industry. Let them open up their books; show how they get their 15% RoI. This is a demand from, inter alia, The Economist, which claims that the patent regime is broken. This is not a left-wing plea.

Two, the analysis has been focused on benefits to public and this is indeed the crucial issue. But there is another matter, the obverse of the coin – benefits to the Indian generic firms. This must be taken in the context of the demand for the government to let industry just be, no regulations, no interference. Patent protection and its legal violation are endorsed by arms of the government, by making the laws and interpreting them. In the current heady days of Indian generic pharma industry, let us think also on this – do they need Indian government?

Three, there is no mention of an unsavory episode involving a government panel headed by a scientific luminary tasked with finding out whether the critical Section 3 (d) of the Indian patent law fell afoul of the nation's international commitment. It was about copying verbatim a paragraph from a technical paper arising out of a research funded in part by Novartis. The panel concluded in its report that indeed Section 3(d) violated such commitments. Fortunately the ruse was exposed and the report was withdrawn. The silence is unedifying.   

However, what is encouraging about this judgment is that the typical Indian middle class lament that Indian governance is nonexistent is given the lie, and dramatically so. The judgment is engaging all countries, being discussed worldwide. Indian Supreme Court is setting the terms of the global debate. I am sure China, Brazil and other countries are ruing that they had not taken the lead. This instance must be treated as a crowning moment of Indian governance. And, I am here to celebrate it.

The issue transcends Glivec and applies to any and all patented medicines and Medecins sans Frontieres is obviously cued into the extended reach of the judgment, across the frontiers. It would now get 10$ worth of Indian generics for the one dollar I had caused to be donated.

That is, my RoI is 1,000 percent overnight! I just beat Warren Buffett hollow!

Raghuram Ekambaram