GS Analyst: Daily Current Affairs

Context:

Drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) is a big challenge for India that demands urgent attention. With a quarter of the world’s DR-TB cases, India’s response can shape how other countries deal with this growing threat.

Drug resistant TB statistics for India:

• Continuously increasing burden: The WHO estimates that 119,000 new cases of multidrug/rifampicin resistant TB (MDR/RR-TB) emerge in India each year.
• Policy malfunction: The Indian TB programme has notified only a little over half the estimate about 64,000 MDR/RR-TB cases in 2022.
• Delayed Identification: However, last year in India, only about 23 per cent of those presumed with TB underwent few initial diagnostics tests.

Loopholes in India’s Policy:

• Gaps in TB diagnosis: Our inability to diagnose DR-TB rapidly is a huge gap which needs accurate tools for detection, medication and curing it.
• Ignoring BPaL regimen: India is the only global supplier of pretomanid, a key drug within the BPaL regimen. However, only 403 patients in India have so far been administered the pretomanid-containing BPaL regimen through a clinical trial.
• Century-old tools used for detection: Microscopy, which is now became old method and cannot detect drug-resistance, and detects only half of all people with these tests.

Efforts to overcome TB cases:

• WHO’s stand on BPaLM/BPaL: It has released a Standard on Universal Access to Rapid TB Diagnostics, recommending the use of molecular diagnostics as the initial test as these are highly accurate, detect resistance to drugs, are cost-effective, and reduce treatment-related delay.
• Modification in Drug usage: Shortening the duration of DR-TB treatment from 24 months to 6 months is a big improvement.
• Cost efficient method: Studies estimate an annual saving of 740 million dollars globally because of transition to BPaLM/BPaL.

Context:

The National Statistical Office (NSO) has released the 2022­23 GDP fourth­ quarter growth rate figures. Measured against fourth­ quarter ?gures of the previous year, the data give a gloomier picture than what the media publications of the Press Information Bureau present.

Picture presented by NSO data:

• First, the growth rate of GDP, since 2015­16 had been declining annually, and has fallen in the fourth quarter to what it was earlier and sneeringly referred to by economists as “The Hindu Rate of Growth” — 3.5% growth rate in GDP.
• Second, it is essential to recognise that since 2014, the economy has achieved the so-called “Hindu rate of growth” in GDP of what had been achieved in the period 1950­77, the socialism period.
• Third, during the tenures of P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, GDP growth rates rose for the ?rst time to between 6% to 8% per year over a 15­year period, i.e., 1991­96 and 2004­2014 (with the usual cyclic ups and downs).

Reason for New Economic policy:

• State Intervention- There is increasing state participation and decreasing incentives for capital and labour providers, thus achieving a higher and faster growth of the economy.
• GDP growth rates- There is a serious and continuous decline in GDP growth rates which began in 2016. And that decline continues even now.
• Lack of structured policy- No policy structuring has been presented to ensure an annual doubling of GDP in five years, or, in other words, a 15% annual growth rate of GDP.

Way Ahead:

• Clear strategy needed- There needs to be a policy that is based on clear objectives, priorities, have a strategy to achieve targets, and spell out an intelligent and transparent resource mobilisation plan to finance policies.
• Interest rates on loans- Interest rates on loans to small and medium industries should be no more than 6% of the loans to increase production of these sectors, and thus employment.
• Interest paid on ?xed ­term savings - The annual interest paid on ?xed ­term savings in bank accounts should be 9% or so to increase the purchasing power of the middle classes.