“Sabka Sath Sabka Vikas” - Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana (PMBJP)

  Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi said,

“The poor must have access to affordable medicines; the poor must not lose their lives because of lack of medicines …That’s why Jan Aushadhi Kendras have been planned across the country”.

Ø  With a view to achieve the objective of making available quality generic medicines at affordable prices to all, ‘Jan Aushadhi Scheme’ was launched by the Department of Pharmaceuticals, Ministry of Chemicals & Fertilizers, Government of India in November, 2008 across the country. The Scheme is being implemented through the Bureau of Pharma PSUs of India (BPPI), under administrative control of Department of Pharmaceuticals, Ministry of Chemicals & Fertilizers, Government of India.

Ø  In September 2015, the ‘Jan Aushadhi Scheme’ was revamped as ‘Pradhan Mantri Jan Aushadhi Yojana’ (PMJAY). In November, 2016, to give further impetus to the scheme, it was again renamed as “Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana” (PMBJP). The Hon'ble Minister of Finance while presenting the Budget for the year 2016-17 in Parliament, made a special mention on PMJAY. The excerpt of the Budget Speech of Hon'ble Finance Minister is reproduced below:

“Making quality medicines available at affordable prices has been a key challenge. We will reinvigorate the supply of generic drugs. 3,000 Stores under Prime Minister’s Jan Aushadhi Yojana will be opened during 2017.”

Ø  Status of the Rollout: -

The year-wise status and present status of PMBJKs opened in the country is as under:

As on 31.03.14	As on 31.03.15	As on 31.03.16	As on 31.03.17	As on 30.04.2017
80	99	269	1080	1253

	Till 31st March, 2016	Till 30th April, 2017
No. of States/UTs covered	22	29
No. of Districts covered	149	419

Ø  Salient features of the scheme:

• Ensure access to quality medicines
• Extend coverage of quality generic medicines so as to reduce the out of pocket expenditure on medicines and thereby redefine the unit cost of treatment per person
• Create awareness about generic medicines through education and publicity so that quality is not synonymous with only high price
• A public programme involving Government, PSUs, Private Sector, NGO, Societies, Co-operative Bodies and other Institutions
• Create demand for generic medicines by improving access to better healthcare through low treatment cost and easy availability wherever needed in all therapeutic categories.

Ø  Quality assurance: To ensure high quality, medicines are procured from WHO Good manufacturing practice (GMP), Current Good Manufacturing Practice (USFDA) and CPSUs manufacturers for supplying to Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Kendras. Each batch of drugs procured is tested random at BPPI’s empanelled National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) accredited laboratories thereby ensuring quality, safety and efficacy of medicines and conformance with required standards.  Only after being certified by these laboratories, medicines are dispatched to C&F agents, Distributors and JAKs.

Ø  Likely Impact: PMBJP seeks to keep product price within 50% of branded product price to make it affordable for all, especially the poor. It has resulted in substantial amount of savings for the people.

Ø  Budget & Expenditure Status - Details of budget allocation and expenditure for PMBJP for financial years 2008-18 are as under:

Year	Amount Released (in Rs.)	Expenditure Reported as incurred (in Rs.)
2008-09	17250000/-	5505000/-
2009-10	20000000/-	10624000/-
2010-11	30000000/-	12039000/-
2011-12	NIL	10580000/-
2012-13	16600000/-	22482000/-
2013-14	152000000/-	14563000/-
2014-15	NIL	137612000/-
2015-16	169147000/-	135238000/-
2016-17	497500000/-	497500000/-
2017-18	NIL	-

Ø  Financial Support to the Applicants – following financial assistances are given to the applicants for opening of PMBJP Kendras:

(a) For opening PMBJP Kendras in Government Hospitals / Medical College premises, one-time financial assistance up to Rs. 2.50 lakh is provided as per the details given below:

(i) Rs. 1 lakh reimbursement of furniture and fixtures.

(ii) Rs. 1 lakh by way of free medicines in the beginning.

(iii) Rs. 0.50 lakh as reimbursement for computer, internet, printer, scanner, etc.

           

(b) For PMBJP Kendras run by private entrepreneurs / pharmacists / NGOs / Charitable organizations that are linked with BPPI headquarters through internet (using BPPI provided software) will get incentive up to Rs. 2.5 lakhs. This will be given @ 15% of monthly sales subject to a ceiling of Rs. 10,000/ per month up to a total limit of Rs. 2.5 lakhs.

                                                                           

(c) In north eastern states, naxal affected areas and tribal areas, the rate of incentive will be 15% and subject to monthly ceiling of Rs. 15,000/- up to a total limit of Rs. 2.5 lakhs.

(d)The applicants belonging to weaker sections like SC/ST/Differently abled are provided medicines worth Rs. 50,000/- in advance within the incentive of Rs. 2.5 lakhs which will be provided in the form of 15% of monthly sales subject to a ceiling of Rs. 10,000/- per month up to a total limit of Rs. 2.5 lakhs.

Ø  Potential for Job Creation: PMBJP gives self-employment and income opportunity. It will help unemployed pharmacist to start a business.

Ø  Progress made since the launch of scheme:

Parameter	2008-14	2014-17
Name of Scheme	Jan Aushadhi Yojana (JAY)	Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana (PMBJP)
Number of Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Kendrasoperational as on 31stMarch	2008-09 - 7 2009-10 - 36 2010-11 - 43 2011-12 - 55 2012-13 – 98 2013-14 - 104	2014-15 - 99 2015-16 - 269 2016-17 - 1080 2017-18 -  1253 (Till 30th April, 2017)
Eligibility conditions of operating agencies	Kendras opened in Government hospitals only	Kendras may be opened outside the premises of hospitals also. Any NGO/ charitable society/ institution/ Self Help groups/ Unemployed pharmacists/ doctors/ registered medical practitioners were made eligible for applying for opening of drug store
Coverage of Scheme – Presence	16 states /UTs	29 states /UTs
Product basket	361 medicines	600 medicines and 154 surgical and consumables
Available medicines	90-100	561 medicines and 128 Surgical
Coverage of Therapeutic Groups	Product basket was incomplete	Product basket covers all 23 major therapeutic categories such as Anti-infective, Anti-diabetics, Cardiovascular, Anti-cancers, Gastro-intestinal medicines etc.
Supplier	PSU’s for 138 medicines	PSU’s + 125 Private suppliers
Supply Chain Management	Non existent	IT enabled supply chain system Professional agency to manage Central Warehouse. 8 C&F and 43 Distributors as on date
Trade Margin for Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Kendras	16%	20%
Trade Margin for Distributors	8%	10%
Incentive to Private PMBJP Kendras	Rs.1.5 Lakhs	Rs. 2.5 Lakhs
Grant–in–aid to Government PMBJP Kendras	To PMBJP Kendras opened inside Government Hospitals	Has been extended to PMBJP Kendra opened by State government or Government agencies in any government buildings owned by government bodies like Railways/ State Transport Department/ Urban local bodies/ Panchayati Raj Institutions/ Post Offices/ Defence/PSU’s etc.
Assistance to SC/ST/Differently-abled persons	NA	The Applicants belonging to weaker sections like SC/ST/Differently-abled may be provided medicines worth Rs. 50,000/- in advance within the incentive of Rs.2.5 lakhs which will be provided in the form of 15% of monthly sales subject to a ceiling of Rs. 10,000/- per month up to a total limit of Rs.2.5 lakh

Ø  Pradhan Mantri Janaushadhi Kendras (PMBJKs) functional across States:

S.No.	State/UT	Functional PMBJKs till 30th April, 2017
1	Andhra Pradesh	65
2	Assam	19
3	Arunachal Pradesh	20
4	Bihar	11
5	Chandigarh	4
6	Chhattisgarh	149
7	Dadar & Nagar Haveli	5
8	Delhi	18
9	Gujarat	119
10	Haryana	23
11	Himachal Pradesh	17
12	J & K	18
13	Jharkhand	24
14	Karnataka	38
15	Kerala	193
16	Madhya Pradesh	37
17	Maharashtra	84
18	Manipur	5
19	Mizoram	3
20	Nagaland	11
21	Odisha	31
22	Punjab	31
23	Rajasthan	40
24	Tamil Nadu	53
25	Telangana	22
26	Tripura	8
27	UP	169
28	Uttarakhand	30
29	West Bengal	6
Total		1253

An Industry-Academia Collaborative Mission for Accelerating Discovery Research to Early Development for Biopharmaceuticals of Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science & Technology, GOI to be implemented by Biotechnology Research Assistance Council (BIRAC)

After announcing the National health Policy which commits Health for all, the Government has approved a Biopharma Mission for production of Indigenous affordable and accessible vaccine, Biotherapeutics and Medical devices. A US$250 m Mission with US$125 m coming as a World Bank funding, the mission I³ is “Innovate in India” for Biopharma. It will create an ecosystem for innovate indigenous product development by researchers Startups and SMEs and make Indian Biotech Industry Globally competitive. India which today occupies only 3% of the Global Market aims to reach 5% by 2022.

·         India has been one of the fastest growing economies (current growth rate of 7.5% in 2015). However, this growth is not translating into social development, measured by the Human Development Index, lags in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and high unemployment (averaging at 9% from 1983-2011).

·         Innovation is one of the key driving forces behind the sustainable growth of the biopharmaceutical industry and an important determinant of a nation’s potential for economic growth and global competitiveness. The Indian biopharmaceutical industry is around 10-15 years behind their counterparts in the developed countries and faces stiff competition from China, Korea in respect to innovation. According to the Global Innovation Index, India ranks at 81 out of 140 that is way below China (rank 29) and South Korea (rank 14).

Figure 1: Distribution of products across the Global and Indian biopharmaceutical market

·         Changing Paradigms - Next Generation Technologies increasing success rates

In recent times for the biotechnological sub-disciplines of biopharmaceuticals, areas such as translational research (including discovery and validation), early development and clinical development, are on the forefront of successful biopharmaceutical innovation programs.  The confluence of recent technological advances (e.g. systems biology and immune monitoring), if harnessed effectively, can yield a tremendous opportunity for biopharmaceutical product development (biopharmaceutical value chain outlined in Figure 2) and increase success of product development e.g. High Throughput platform technologies increase a manufacturer’s ability to work with small samples and shorten assay times.

Figure 2: Biopharmaceutical Product development Value Chain

Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Control (CMC) is also an important step in the value chain of biopharmaceutical development that defines the identity, strength, quality, purity and potency, and thus relates to the safety or efficacy of the product.  Focused efforts are therefore geared towards increasing productivity and yields by improving upstream (e.g., improving cell-line development and optimizing feed and media formulations to promote better yields) and downstream (e.g., developing platform technologies and decreasing purification steps) processing. There is thus a need for establishing accessible bio-manufacturing or CMC units, which are current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) and current Good Laboratory Practices (cGLP) compliant, are product-agnostic, have varied capabilities for modern enabling technologies, and are modelled to operate in a non-competitive phase.

Innovative medical devices for early screening and diagnosis of disease are also leading to substantial impact, particularly for cancers that have high mortality rate and are diagnosed at an advanced stage, when treatment is less likely to be effective and expensive.

Considering factors like the current market perspective, growing public health needs and the emergence of new technologies for translational research, bio-manufacturing and medical technology and the time is ripe to work towards defining a strategy for preparing India’s technological capabilities to a level that will be globally competitive over the next decades.

To meet this challenge the Government of India has launched a Mission programme for accelerating Discovery Research to Product development in Biopharmaceuticals.

Mission of the Programme is:

“Enable and nurture an ecosystem for preparing India’s technological and product development capabilities in biopharmaceuticals to a level that will be globally competitive over the next decade, and transform the health standards of India’s population through affordable product development

The mission will focus on:

•      Development of product leads that are at advanced stages of the product development lifecycle and relevant to the public health need by focusing on managed partnerships

•      Upgrade shared infrastructure facilities and establish them as shared Infrastructure for both product discovery/discovery validation and manufacturing

•      Develop human capital by providing specific trainings to address the critical skills gap among nascent biotech companies across the product development value chain, including in business plan development, technology transfer, intellectual property registration and market penetration.

•      Satisfy surplus demand for startup incubation space and services (through establishing and strengthening biotech clusters, pertinent consortia and clinical trial networks).

This is a US$250 M programme over 5 years to be led by Department of Biotechnology Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India implemented by Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) a Public Sector Undertaking of DBT

The anticipated social impact of this program could be direct (a.  Alleviated disease burden; increase in affordability etc.) and indirect (increase in funding opportunities; increase in innovation; building an entrepreneurship ecosystem; pandemic preparedness; reduction of out of pocket costs; reduced impact due to the disease on output, revenue, and profitability affecting business performance and economic growth etc

      The Mission will provide a holistic and integrated approach to strengthen and support the entire product development value chain for accelerating the research leads to product development. This will help not only in immediate product development addressing public health needs, but will also help to create an ecosystem which will facilitate development of a continuous pipeline of products.

Kashmir remains a tinderbox. Will it ignite again this summer?

On the afternoon of May 27, markets in Srinagar and other major towns of Indian Kashmir were filled with people shopping for household items, as the Islamic holy month of Ramadan was beginning the next day. Everything was routine until social media broke the news of the killing of a top local militant commander, Sabzar Bhat, in an encounter in south Kashmir, the hotbed of local militancy. As soon as the news spread, schools and shops shut down while traffic started disappearing from the roads. People rushed home hastily with whatever items they could purchase.

But in Tral, in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district, many young Kashmiris made a beeline to attend the militant’s funeral. Many of them blocked roads and threw stones at the security forces. Anticipating trouble, authorities shut down the internet and prepaid mobile services.

Hizbul Mujahideen commander Bhat was a close aide of Burhan Wani, whose killing in July last year is believed to have changed the narrative of Kashmir’s struggle for freedom. Wani’s killing triggered months of protest and a valley-wide shutdown. Fortunately, this time the protests subsided after a week but the anger persisted.

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Describing the situation after Bhat’s killing, Gulzar Ahmad, a villager from south Kashmir, told The Diplomat, “It was all chaos. I had gone to Anantnag early morning and walked back more than 20 kilometers to reach home. There was no traffic on roads. The situation was similar that of last year [after Wani’s killing].”

Bhat’s killing also demonstrated that people’s pent up anger and emotions can spark spontaneous protests in the Kashmir Valley. When street protests first began in 2008 during the Amarnath Yatra agitation, they used to last for weeks followed by months of quiet before another summer of protests. But those days are gone; spontaneous stone pelting incidents and protests have now become a daily affair.

It was during those early street protests and the excesses of the Indian security forces that the then-opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) — now ruling Kashmir in a coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — had captured people’s attention through its “healing touch” policy, by reaching out to the victims of the security forces’ abuses. The PDP capitalized on this in the last state assembly elections in 2014, but now people are questioning the hypocrisy of the party and its first family, the Muftis, which have increasingly sought to implement even more draconian policies in order to bring the security situation under control.

“The PDP too failed to bring the good governance. It was considered as trustworthy and the best alternative for the National Conference [the previous ruling party] rule, but nothing much has changed under PDP’s rule as well. In fact, matters have become worse,” Arshid Ahamd, a PhD scholar, told The Diplomat.

What has complicated the ruling PDP-BJP coalition’s challenge is the exponential growth of social media in the Kashmir Valley, which has been adroitly used by the militant recruiters to tap into people’s anger and get new recruits. Burhan Wani, for instance, famously used social media to spread his message and rally the people for the cause of freedom. This made him a charismatic leader, popular among the locals, who in any case were getting fed up with no political solution for Kashmir in sight. The increased sympathy for local militants then raised another challenge for the security forces and thereby the ruling coalition.

Unlike the early 1990s ,when people preferred to stay indoors or flee from villages during encounters between militants and security forces, the situation has taken a U-turn today. People, including women, now flock to the encounter sites to rescue the trapped militants by confronting security forces, hurling stones at them, and using loudspeakers to boost the morale of militants by chanting pro-freedom slogans. As a result, many times the trapped militants have escaped breaking the security forces’ cordon. In a double whammy for the security forces, there have been civilian casualties during some of these protests at the encounter sites, which tends to further worsen the security situation. Just this week, a youth was killed after security forces allegedly fired to disperse people protesting against a cordon and search operation in south Kashmir’s Shopian district on June 6.

This phenomenon has prompted many Indian Army officials to issue warnings to not to go near encounter sites. One such warning came from no less a figure than the Indian Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat, who speaking earlier this year warned that those who try to disrupt anti-terror operations in Jammu and Kashmir will be treated as “overground workers of terrorists” and can be fired upon.

But clearly these warning have fallen on deaf ears in the Kashmir Valley.

People have also been turning out in large numbers for the funerals of killed militants, in order to demonstrate their sympathies. These gatherings have caused concerns in the security establishment as many morph into protests and stone-pelting against security forces. Some militants have also made appearance at these funerals to pay their last respects to their fallen comrades.

Many in Kashmir believe that previously people used to fear gunmen, irrespective of their identities. That’s changed. “Earlier, [the] gun was misused for family issues, but now it is purely for the freedom struggle. This has emerged as an indigenous fight in valley,” Arshid Ahmad said.

Suhail Wani, an advocate from north Kashmir, told The Diplomat, “The masses of Kashmir have seen only a dark age, especially youth. Now they feel these militants are the only hope to get rid of Indian occupation.”

What made matters worse was the “human shield” incident in early May. A local man, described by the security forces as a stone-pelter, was tied to an army jeep by the Indian Army as a human shield in order to fend off stone-pelters while getting safe passage from a troubled area during the Srinagar Lok Sabha by polls on May 9. A video of the incident triggered a row, with many condemning it. But the act was praised by officials, including the Army chief, as an innovative approach to tackle the “dirty war.”

“This is a proxy war and proxy war is a dirty war. It is played in a dirty way… That is where innovation comes in. You fight a dirty war with innovations,” General Rawat was quoted as saying by Indian media.

This has not gone down well with the locals. “As we have seen from the last few years, security forces are using the pellet guns, tear gas shells, and even bullets to quell the protesters. Now with incidents like human shield, people are getting more alienated and taking up arms or helping militants,” Nisar Ahmad, a local from south Kashmir, told The Diplomat.

There is every sign that the conflict is only getting protracted, with fears it may degenerate into civil war.

In a recent message, Burhan Wani’s successor, Zakir Musa, threatened to behead the separatist leaders for terming the Kashmir struggle as a political movement. He said that militants are fighting to make Jammu and Kashmir an Islamic state. While Musa’s message divided the Kashmiris and the militants, it also sparked fears of fratricide. Pertinently, Musa’s message came days after the targeted killing of mainstream political activists and a Kashmiri Indian Army soldier by unknown gunmen.

With people’s anger and alienation at a peak, everyone is hoping that the coming summer months do not paralyze the region once again and cause more bloodshed. Clearly the days ahead will be crucial for both the security forces deployed on streets handling the protesters and the PDP-BJP coalition, which is still debating the political contours of how to handle the current crisis.

Thanking you

To successfully defend its economic interests in the 21st century, India must rethink its approach.

The world stands on the cusp of a great technological and political shift. Radical shifts in production technology and processes are rendering the old global value-chains redundant and competitiveness is being re-defined. The post-World War II global institutional consensus and strategic alignments are shifting as the power-centers in western Europe and North America seek to contain the gains from liberalization even while dealing with increasing demands of protectionism from large sections of their population. The rise of India and China has led to intense competition for energy and resource security, and various tools of economic diplomacy are being used to create dedicated corridors to secure such resources.

With the largest single cohort of young people in the world, which represent both a resource and a challenge, India finds itself at a crucial juncture in its growth trajectory. India needs a strong policy road map for its economic and geostrategic priorities in order to be able to harness the creative energy of its massive working age population and emerge as a global power.

While these challenges raise the bar for India’s economic diplomacy abilities, the question remains whether India’s economic diplomacy establishment is ready to up its game. The old 20th century ways of engagement are increasingly ineffective. The focus is increasingly on execution over atmospherics, and on specifics supported by domain knowledge over generalities. This is definitely a concern from India’s traditional economic diplomacy establishment, primarily led by the Ministries of External Affairs (MEA) and Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MOCI), which while already being relatively under-staffed, compared to other major economies, allow little time for its key officers to spend enough time on a specific desk and develop domain knowledge. The systems for retaining and using institutional knowledge within these ministries are also quite weak.

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The economic diplomacy objectives for India revolve around five key goals: to secure market access for its goods and services, ensure global labor mobility, develop physical connectivity that ensures energy and resource security, prevent restrictions on free flow of data, and ensure access to technology and knowledge for Indian industry. A brief discussion of each of these goals that follow clearly illustrate the need for domain expertise and long-term project based execution for ensuring successful policy outcomes.

New Models of Trade Diplomacy

There was a time when trade negotiations centered on simple tariff reductions and rules of origin issues. In a world where goods are produced through a network of manufacturers in many countries, and returns to technologies and brand names are several multiples of the returns to actual tangible inputs like materials and labor, tariffs have lost importance.

Trade negotiations today are about national laws that regulate the production and consumption of goods and services and the technical barriers to trade (TBTs) that such regulations give rise to. While tariffs have a seen a decline in most countries, the need to comply with product quality standards, environment protection, or even social responsibility legislation mandated by different countries often raises the costs of exporting well beyond many exporters’ reach. This is especially true of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies like India.

The design of trade agreements and negotiations has undergone a radical change, with the focus being on detailed sector specific regulations and rules that require substantive domain expertise. With increasing protectionist trends and appetite for overarching trade deals getting lower, traditional trade negotiations might need to be replaced with specific bilateral solutions; for example Indian officials might need to broker a bilateral agreement between the chemical sector safety regulator in Japan and its Indian counterpart to help Indian manufacturers of chemicals to get certified for sale of their products in Japan at a very low cost, thereby increasing their competitiveness vis-à-vis a competitor country that will not enjoy the same privilege.

International Mobility of Indian Workers

Aging populations in industrialized nations would need to import workers from developing countries to meet critical manpower requirements. India, with the world’s single largest cohort of young workers, should be a major beneficiary of these dynamics. However, security threats and fears about displacement of local workers in the short term have led to increasing restrictions on international worker mobility. For India, securing international worker mobility is an important objective since domestic opportunities alone might not fully optimize India’s work force, and remittances from expatriate workers are a major source of much needed foreign exchange.

But securing preferential access to global labor market for Indian workers would require out-of-the-box solutions. And these solutions would need to go much beyond India’s long-standing generic demand for liberalization of work visas in multilateral and regional trade forums, which has increasingly paid diminishing returns. The Indian state would have to invest in institutions and special agreements with key worker importing countries to address their legitimate concerns around security and illegal immigration. These agreements would have to address issues related to liability for overstay, punitive measures on illegal activities, and compliance with rules governing temporary employment of foreign workers. Such agreements might also call for relatively advanced protocols that make the Indian state legally responsible for some of the compliance, enforcement and monitoring of these rules.

A related challenge would be to ensure the well being and self-respect of Indian workers, and prevent any exploitation by the host country employers. In addition, the Indian government would have to ensure that Indian workers are not exposed to conditions that radicalize them, and they become a threat to India upon their return. All of these solutions require navigating a complicated set of legal and technical issues.

Physical Connectivity and Resource Security

There is an unprecedented scramble for resources under way today, being led primarily by China. China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are instruments of securing connectivity to critical natural resources across wider Eurasia: Central Asia, the Middle East, and Asiatic Russia. China has also invested heavily in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) in Southeast Asia.

As China develops this infrastructure of connectivity, it also acquires the ability to deny access through these corridors. The country that is most vulnerable to these developments is India. Its import dependence on raw materials would mean that inability to access these natural resources due to China’s overwhelming leverage over such connectivity corridors would have serious ramifications for its economic growth. Over time, the falling costs of rail or multi-modal movement that combines road, rail, and sea will also make these corridors important to trade.

While unable to match the Chinese scale of investment and trade in the short run, the Indian response would still have to be effective. At the very least this would require two things. First would be implementation of existing infrastructure projects on alternative corridors such as the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and multi-modal connectivity projects in BIMSTEC. Second, India would need a strategy to execute better agreements from energy and resource exporting trade partners, leveraging India’s rapidly increasing market size.

On both these fronts, India’s performance has been very poor to date. Execution of large infrastructure projects overseas requires the deployment of dedicated project management groups with both diplomatic and technical personnel. Negotiating longer-term mining and hydro-carbon agreements requires coordination among public and private sector interests and specialized expertise to support diplomats on the ground. Sustained progress in this areas cannot be achieved through ad hoc efforts that are based on the individual dynamism of a few diplomats.

Ensuring the Flow of Data Across Borders

The success of the Indian IT and IT-enabled services industry was built on the fact that various forms of data, including financial and individual consumer related data, could be transferred from countries like the United States, United Kingdom, or Singapore to offices based in Bengaluru or Gurugram in India. This industry is the catalyst behind the urban middle-class revolution that India has been witnessing since the late 1990s. Such free flow of data across borders needs to continue if India is to create opportunities for its large number of young workers trained in data processing and computing skills. Serious disruption to this model would create a potentially existential threat to the Indian IT and IT-enabled services industry and the millions employed in these fields in India.

However, an increasingly large number of countries are putting in place laws that prevent transfer of different types of data across borders. The issues of cybersecurity and data privacy being compromised are the stated reasons for such controls. But in many cases such regulations are a hidden form of protectionism to control the offshoring of data management and data processing jobs.

Once again, India would need to create out-of-the-box solutions that allow it overcome such current and future restrictions, while not compromising genuine concerns over security. One solution would be to negotiate bilateral agreements that assures key data origin countries of a strict liability regime, with the Indian state guarantying and certifying firms or institutions that handle foreign data. But such a solution would require developing domestic laws and institutions that can credibly provide such assurance to data origin countries, and a diplomatic push to convince key stakeholders in such data origin countries that India is indeed a safe destination for data processing.

Creating such an assurance would not just be a state-to-state exercise, but would require multi-dimensional opinion building with regulators, consumers, firms, influential technology commentators, and civil society groups working on data security issues. A necessary prerequisite for carrying out such an exercise would be government coordination with industry for lobbying in target markets and building alliances with non-state actors in these countries. Only a project-based approach and a diplomatic team that integrates personnel with requisite technical and legal skills can successfully undertake this exercise.

Access and Acquisition of Technology

With the coming new phase of automation and industrialization, the returns to technology intensive capital and labor will increase exponentially, while returns to less skilled and less technology intensive labor and capital will decline. This has significant implications for the global political economy, and the relative shifts in economic power.

Access to technology is increasingly playing an important role in strategic equations. The wars of the future will be technology intense. Air and sea dominance would only be possible for militaries that have incorporated substantive of sophisticated hardware. Communication-centric warfare, where military units use advanced networking platforms and robotics, is not a sci-fi scenario, but effective reality.

Thus, the ability to access technology, indigenize technology developed in other countries, and develop and innovate upon existing technology is a key economic and strategic objective.

Acquisition and access to the world’s best technology would require several different policies. Some of the more important interventions would include better use of India’s defense offset policies and large defense spending to ensure the transfer of military technology, which has enormous industrial spillover. It would also require the state to invest in an industrial and academic ecosystem that can attract the best talent, by offering Indian as a base for low cost but quality industrial innovation and academic research.

Facilitating negotiations and engagement with key science and technology stakeholders in other countries would be needed to support the investments made by the state in creating a better ecosystem for attracting innovators and technology start-ups to India. It would also mean that India takes the lead in developing new systems of global innovation and technology diffusion that leverage local talent in developing societies and help scale up and commercialize grass-roots innovation effectively.

Achieving all of these ends require multi-sectoral engagement with different sets of stakeholders in domains across business, defense, grass-roots innovators, academics, and even the non-resident community of Indian technologists and scientists.

Generalist and Transactional vs. Specialist and Program Specific

For each of these thrust areas, core teams would have to be built. But coordination and management and sustained progress would have to be conducted by senior bureaucrats who have domain knowledge and remain at their desks for longer periods of time. In other words, they would be specialists with a program-specific approach. India’s usual transactional approach and short-termism would have to end. The traditional pattern of “grand announcements” that remain on paper is a by-product of the current approach.

This not to undermine the great tradition of Indian diplomacy or its achievements, or to suggest that Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and Indian Administrative Service (IAS) cadres from which the leadership of MEA and MOCI is drawn from do not have exceptional officers who have made stellar contributions to India’s foreign policy goals. India’s ability in having successfully defended its interest in multiple global forums is testimony to their capabilities. But the future is very different from the past. Other G20 economies have been preparing for this brave new world and investing in the diplomatic institutions and personnel that can meet its challenges. India cannot be left behind.

There is an urgent need to revisit the existing model of economic diplomacy and reorient it to meet future priorities that require a large number of domain specialists and a clear focus on substantive implementation and follow through as opposed to just atmospherics. India’s political leadership would have to take note and set the ball rolling to bring in effective change to the existing structure and integrate specialist experts drawn from industry, academic, military, and technology sectors, among others, with traditional bureaucratic cadres to make India “future ready” to negotiate the deals that will make or break India’s economic priorities.

Pritam Banerjee is Senior Director, Corporate Public Policy, Deutsche Post DHL Group, responsible for South Asia. The views articulated in this article are his personal opinion and do not represent that of his employer in any manner.

Kashmir remains a tinderbox. Will it ignite again this summer?

On the afternoon of May 27, markets in Srinagar and other major towns of Indian Kashmir were filled with people shopping for household items, as the Islamic holy month of Ramadan was beginning the next day. Everything was routine until social media broke the news of the killing of a top local militant commander, Sabzar Bhat, in an encounter in south Kashmir, the hotbed of local militancy. As soon as the news spread, schools and shops shut down while traffic started disappearing from the roads. People rushed home hastily with whatever items they could purchase.

But in Tral, in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district, many young Kashmiris made a beeline to attend the militant’s funeral. Many of them blocked roads and threw stones at the security forces. Anticipating trouble, authorities shut down the internet and prepaid mobile services.

Hizbul Mujahideen commander Bhat was a close aide of Burhan Wani, whose killing in July last year is believed to have changed the narrative of Kashmir’s struggle for freedom. Wani’s killing triggered months of protest and a valley-wide shutdown. Fortunately, this time the protests subsided after a week but the anger persisted.

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Describing the situation after Bhat’s killing, Gulzar Ahmad, a villager from south Kashmir, told The Diplomat, “It was all chaos. I had gone to Anantnag early morning and walked back more than 20 kilometers to reach home. There was no traffic on roads. The situation was similar that of last year [after Wani’s killing].”

Bhat’s killing also demonstrated that people’s pent up anger and emotions can spark spontaneous protests in the Kashmir Valley. When street protests first began in 2008 during the Amarnath Yatra agitation, they used to last for weeks followed by months of quiet before another summer of protests. But those days are gone; spontaneous stone pelting incidents and protests have now become a daily affair.

It was during those early street protests and the excesses of the Indian security forces that the then-opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) — now ruling Kashmir in a coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — had captured people’s attention through its “healing touch” policy, by reaching out to the victims of the security forces’ abuses. The PDP capitalized on this in the last state assembly elections in 2014, but now people are questioning the hypocrisy of the party and its first family, the Muftis, which have increasingly sought to implement even more draconian policies in order to bring the security situation under control.

“The PDP too failed to bring the good governance. It was considered as trustworthy and the best alternative for the National Conference [the previous ruling party] rule, but nothing much has changed under PDP’s rule as well. In fact, matters have become worse,” Arshid Ahamd, a PhD scholar, told The Diplomat.

What has complicated the ruling PDP-BJP coalition’s challenge is the exponential growth of social media in the Kashmir Valley, which has been adroitly used by the militant recruiters to tap into people’s anger and get new recruits. Burhan Wani, for instance, famously used social media to spread his message and rally the people for the cause of freedom. This made him a charismatic leader, popular among the locals, who in any case were getting fed up with no political solution for Kashmir in sight. The increased sympathy for local militants then raised another challenge for the security forces and thereby the ruling coalition.

Unlike the early 1990s ,when people preferred to stay indoors or flee from villages during encounters between militants and security forces, the situation has taken a U-turn today. People, including women, now flock to the encounter sites to rescue the trapped militants by confronting security forces, hurling stones at them, and using loudspeakers to boost the morale of militants by chanting pro-freedom slogans. As a result, many times the trapped militants have escaped breaking the security forces’ cordon. In a double whammy for the security forces, there have been civilian casualties during some of these protests at the encounter sites, which tends to further worsen the security situation. Just this week, a youth was killed after security forces allegedly fired to disperse people protesting against a cordon and search operation in south Kashmir’s Shopian district on June 6.

This phenomenon has prompted many Indian Army officials to issue warnings to not to go near encounter sites. One such warning came from no less a figure than the Indian Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat, who speaking earlier this year warned that those who try to disrupt anti-terror operations in Jammu and Kashmir will be treated as “overground workers of terrorists” and can be fired upon.

But clearly these warning have fallen on deaf ears in the Kashmir Valley.

People have also been turning out in large numbers for the funerals of killed militants, in order to demonstrate their sympathies. These gatherings have caused concerns in the security establishment as many morph into protests and stone-pelting against security forces. Some militants have also made appearance at these funerals to pay their last respects to their fallen comrades.

Many in Kashmir believe that previously people used to fear gunmen, irrespective of their identities. That’s changed. “Earlier, [the] gun was misused for family issues, but now it is purely for the freedom struggle. This has emerged as an indigenous fight in valley,” Arshid Ahmad said.

Suhail Wani, an advocate from north Kashmir, told The Diplomat, “The masses of Kashmir have seen only a dark age, especially youth. Now they feel these militants are the only hope to get rid of Indian occupation.”

What made matters worse was the “human shield” incident in early May. A local man, described by the security forces as a stone-pelter, was tied to an army jeep by the Indian Army as a human shield in order to fend off stone-pelters while getting safe passage from a troubled area during the Srinagar Lok Sabha by polls on May 9. A video of the incident triggered a row, with many condemning it. But the act was praised by officials, including the Army chief, as an innovative approach to tackle the “dirty war.”

“This is a proxy war and proxy war is a dirty war. It is played in a dirty way… That is where innovation comes in. You fight a dirty war with innovations,” General Rawat was quoted as saying by Indian media.

This has not gone down well with the locals. “As we have seen from the last few years, security forces are using the pellet guns, tear gas shells, and even bullets to quell the protesters. Now with incidents like human shield, people are getting more alienated and taking up arms or helping militants,” Nisar Ahmad, a local from south Kashmir, told The Diplomat.

There is every sign that the conflict is only getting protracted, with fears it may degenerate into civil war.

In a recent message, Burhan Wani’s successor, Zakir Musa, threatened to behead the separatist leaders for terming the Kashmir struggle as a political movement. He said that militants are fighting to make Jammu and Kashmir an Islamic state. While Musa’s message divided the Kashmiris and the militants, it also sparked fears of fratricide. Pertinently, Musa’s message came days after the targeted killing of mainstream political activists and a Kashmiri Indian Army soldier by unknown gunmen.

With people’s anger and alienation at a peak, everyone is hoping that the coming summer months do not paralyze the region once again and cause more bloodshed. Clearly the days ahead will be crucial for both the security forces deployed on streets handling the protesters and the PDP-BJP coalition, which is still debating the political contours of how to handle the current crisis.

To successfully defend its economic interests in the 21st century, India must rethink its approach

The world stands on the cusp of a great technological and political shift. Radical shifts in production technology and processes are rendering the old global value-chains redundant and competitiveness is being re-defined. The post-World War II global institutional consensus and strategic alignments are shifting as the power-centers in western Europe and North America seek to contain the gains from liberalization even while dealing with increasing demands of protectionism from large sections of their population. The rise of India and China has led to intense competition for energy and resource security, and various tools of economic diplomacy are being used to create dedicated corridors to secure such resources.

With the largest single cohort of young people in the world, which represent both a resource and a challenge, India finds itself at a crucial juncture in its growth trajectory. India needs a strong policy road map for its economic and geostrategic priorities in order to be able to harness the creative energy of its massive working age population and emerge as a global power.

While these challenges raise the bar for India’s economic diplomacy abilities, the question remains whether India’s economic diplomacy establishment is ready to up its game. The old 20th century ways of engagement are increasingly ineffective. The focus is increasingly on execution over atmospherics, and on specifics supported by domain knowledge over generalities. This is definitely a concern from India’s traditional economic diplomacy establishment, primarily led by the Ministries of External Affairs (MEA) and Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MOCI), which while already being relatively under-staffed, compared to other major economies, allow little time for its key officers to spend enough time on a specific desk and develop domain knowledge. The systems for retaining and using institutional knowledge within these ministries are also quite weak.

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The economic diplomacy objectives for India revolve around five key goals: to secure market access for its goods and services, ensure global labor mobility, develop physical connectivity that ensures energy and resource security, prevent restrictions on free flow of data, and ensure access to technology and knowledge for Indian industry. A brief discussion of each of these goals that follow clearly illustrate the need for domain expertise and long-term project based execution for ensuring successful policy outcomes.

New Models of Trade Diplomacy

There was a time when trade negotiations centered on simple tariff reductions and rules of origin issues. In a world where goods are produced through a network of manufacturers in many countries, and returns to technologies and brand names are several multiples of the returns to actual tangible inputs like materials and labor, tariffs have lost importance.

Trade negotiations today are about national laws that regulate the production and consumption of goods and services and the technical barriers to trade (TBTs) that such regulations give rise to. While tariffs have a seen a decline in most countries, the need to comply with product quality standards, environment protection, or even social responsibility legislation mandated by different countries often raises the costs of exporting well beyond many exporters’ reach. This is especially true of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies like India.

The design of trade agreements and negotiations has undergone a radical change, with the focus being on detailed sector specific regulations and rules that require substantive domain expertise. With increasing protectionist trends and appetite for overarching trade deals getting lower, traditional trade negotiations might need to be replaced with specific bilateral solutions; for example Indian officials might need to broker a bilateral agreement between the chemical sector safety regulator in Japan and its Indian counterpart to help Indian manufacturers of chemicals to get certified for sale of their products in Japan at a very low cost, thereby increasing their competitiveness vis-à-vis a competitor country that will not enjoy the same privilege.

International Mobility of Indian Workers

Aging populations in industrialized nations would need to import workers from developing countries to meet critical manpower requirements. India, with the world’s single largest cohort of young workers, should be a major beneficiary of these dynamics. However, security threats and fears about displacement of local workers in the short term have led to increasing restrictions on international worker mobility. For India, securing international worker mobility is an important objective since domestic opportunities alone might not fully optimize India’s work force, and remittances from expatriate workers are a major source of much needed foreign exchange.

But securing preferential access to global labor market for Indian workers would require out-of-the-box solutions. And these solutions would need to go much beyond India’s long-standing generic demand for liberalization of work visas in multilateral and regional trade forums, which has increasingly paid diminishing returns. The Indian state would have to invest in institutions and special agreements with key worker importing countries to address their legitimate concerns around security and illegal immigration. These agreements would have to address issues related to liability for overstay, punitive measures on illegal activities, and compliance with rules governing temporary employment of foreign workers. Such agreements might also call for relatively advanced protocols that make the Indian state legally responsible for some of the compliance, enforcement and monitoring of these rules.

A related challenge would be to ensure the well being and self-respect of Indian workers, and prevent any exploitation by the host country employers. In addition, the Indian government would have to ensure that Indian workers are not exposed to conditions that radicalize them, and they become a threat to India upon their return. All of these solutions require navigating a complicated set of legal and technical issues.

Physical Connectivity and Resource Security

There is an unprecedented scramble for resources under way today, being led primarily by China. China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are instruments of securing connectivity to critical natural resources across wider Eurasia: Central Asia, the Middle East, and Asiatic Russia. China has also invested heavily in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) in Southeast Asia.

As China develops this infrastructure of connectivity, it also acquires the ability to deny access through these corridors. The country that is most vulnerable to these developments is India. Its import dependence on raw materials would mean that inability to access these natural resources due to China’s overwhelming leverage over such connectivity corridors would have serious ramifications for its economic growth. Over time, the falling costs of rail or multi-modal movement that combines road, rail, and sea will also make these corridors important to trade.

While unable to match the Chinese scale of investment and trade in the short run, the Indian response would still have to be effective. At the very least this would require two things. First would be implementation of existing infrastructure projects on alternative corridors such as the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and multi-modal connectivity projects in BIMSTEC. Second, India would need a strategy to execute better agreements from energy and resource exporting trade partners, leveraging India’s rapidly increasing market size.

On both these fronts, India’s performance has been very poor to date. Execution of large infrastructure projects overseas requires the deployment of dedicated project management groups with both diplomatic and technical personnel. Negotiating longer-term mining and hydro-carbon agreements requires coordination among public and private sector interests and specialized expertise to support diplomats on the ground. Sustained progress in this areas cannot be achieved through ad hoc efforts that are based on the individual dynamism of a few diplomats.

Ensuring the Flow of Data Across Borders

The success of the Indian IT and IT-enabled services industry was built on the fact that various forms of data, including financial and individual consumer related data, could be transferred from countries like the United States, United Kingdom, or Singapore to offices based in Bengaluru or Gurugram in India. This industry is the catalyst behind the urban middle-class revolution that India has been witnessing since the late 1990s. Such free flow of data across borders needs to continue if India is to create opportunities for its large number of young workers trained in data processing and computing skills. Serious disruption to this model would create a potentially existential threat to the Indian IT and IT-enabled services industry and the millions employed in these fields in India.

However, an increasingly large number of countries are putting in place laws that prevent transfer of different types of data across borders. The issues of cybersecurity and data privacy being compromised are the stated reasons for such controls. But in many cases such regulations are a hidden form of protectionism to control the offshoring of data management and data processing jobs.

Once again, India would need to create out-of-the-box solutions that allow it overcome such current and future restrictions, while not compromising genuine concerns over security. One solution would be to negotiate bilateral agreements that assures key data origin countries of a strict liability regime, with the Indian state guarantying and certifying firms or institutions that handle foreign data. But such a solution would require developing domestic laws and institutions that can credibly provide such assurance to data origin countries, and a diplomatic push to convince key stakeholders in such data origin countries that India is indeed a safe destination for data processing.

Creating such an assurance would not just be a state-to-state exercise, but would require multi-dimensional opinion building with regulators, consumers, firms, influential technology commentators, and civil society groups working on data security issues. A necessary prerequisite for carrying out such an exercise would be government coordination with industry for lobbying in target markets and building alliances with non-state actors in these countries. Only a project-based approach and a diplomatic team that integrates personnel with requisite technical and legal skills can successfully undertake this exercise.

Access and Acquisition of Technology

With the coming new phase of automation and industrialization, the returns to technology intensive capital and labor will increase exponentially, while returns to less skilled and less technology intensive labor and capital will decline. This has significant implications for the global political economy, and the relative shifts in economic power.

Access to technology is increasingly playing an important role in strategic equations. The wars of the future will be technology intense. Air and sea dominance would only be possible for militaries that have incorporated substantive of sophisticated hardware. Communication-centric warfare, where military units use advanced networking platforms and robotics, is not a sci-fi scenario, but effective reality.

Thus, the ability to access technology, indigenize technology developed in other countries, and develop and innovate upon existing technology is a key economic and strategic objective.

Acquisition and access to the world’s best technology would require several different policies. Some of the more important interventions would include better use of India’s defense offset policies and large defense spending to ensure the transfer of military technology, which has enormous industrial spillover. It would also require the state to invest in an industrial and academic ecosystem that can attract the best talent, by offering Indian as a base for low cost but quality industrial innovation and academic research.

Facilitating negotiations and engagement with key science and technology stakeholders in other countries would be needed to support the investments made by the state in creating a better ecosystem for attracting innovators and technology start-ups to India. It would also mean that India takes the lead in developing new systems of global innovation and technology diffusion that leverage local talent in developing societies and help scale up and commercialize grass-roots innovation effectively.

Achieving all of these ends require multi-sectoral engagement with different sets of stakeholders in domains across business, defense, grass-roots innovators, academics, and even the non-resident community of Indian technologists and scientists.

Generalist and Transactional vs. Specialist and Program Specific

For each of these thrust areas, core teams would have to be built. But coordination and management and sustained progress would have to be conducted by senior bureaucrats who have domain knowledge and remain at their desks for longer periods of time. In other words, they would be specialists with a program-specific approach. India’s usual transactional approach and short-termism would have to end. The traditional pattern of “grand announcements” that remain on paper is a by-product of the current approach.

This not to undermine the great tradition of Indian diplomacy or its achievements, or to suggest that Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and Indian Administrative Service (IAS) cadres from which the leadership of MEA and MOCI is drawn from do not have exceptional officers who have made stellar contributions to India’s foreign policy goals. India’s ability in having successfully defended its interest in multiple global forums is testimony to their capabilities. But the future is very different from the past. Other G20 economies have been preparing for this brave new world and investing in the diplomatic institutions and personnel that can meet its challenges. India cannot be left behind.

There is an urgent need to revisit the existing model of economic diplomacy and reorient it to meet future priorities that require a large number of domain specialists and a clear focus on substantive implementation and follow through as opposed to just atmospherics. India’s political leadership would have to take note and set the ball rolling to bring in effective change to the existing structure and integrate specialist experts drawn from industry, academic, military, and technology sectors, among others, with traditional bureaucratic cadres to make India “future ready” to negotiate the deals that will make or break India’s economic priorities.

Pritam Banerjee is Senior Director, Corporate Public Policy, Deutsche Post DHL Group, responsible for South Asia. The views articulated in this article are his personal opinion and do not represent that of his employer in any manner.

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