RIS Blog

Mr Abhinav Jha Policy Manager, GDC Established at RIS, the GDC aims to contribute to the evolving alternative development paradigm and promotes the virtues of inclusiveness and sustainability. With deeper understanding of theories and practices, GDC intends to promote newly acquired knowledge from India’s successful programmes and initiatives among partner countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and facilitate learning from other country experiences through empirical research, sharing of skills, expertise and best practices, and exchange of human resources. Started in 2019, the GDC has implemented a set of important activities to advance its core objectives, including the publication of the Development Cooperation Review, GDC Fellowship Programmes, meetings with policy leads and Line Ministries, to forge and consolidate links with partner countries and institutions. As the COVID pandemic paralyzed physical interactions, GDC adopted the digital path to reach out to constituents i...

  Dr. Sneha Sinha   Research Associate, RIS Two scientists, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were recently awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of a gene manipulating technology. Though genetic research has advanced enormously in the last 50 years, the revolutionary ‘Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short  Palindromic Repeats’ in association with the Cas9 DNA-cutting enzyme (CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors) is ‘one of gene technology’s sharpest tools for re-writing the code of life’. [1] Its discovery can be traced to the efforts of Japanese scientists at Osaka University, who in 1987 noticed an aberrant pattern of DNA sequence, followed by tremendous incremental research . In 2011, these two scientists jointly initiated the investigation of the Cas9 enzyme. [2] CRISPR allows targeted changes in the genetic material by removing, replacing or adding more than one segments of DNA at a time in plants, animals and humans. [3] There is consensus...

  Dr P K Anand, Visiting Fellow, RIS A T20 side event was jointly organized by RIS, New Delhi; Center for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity and Growth (CIPPEC), Argentina; Dublin City University (DCU); African Network of Early Childhood Education (AfECN); and GIGA Institute for Latin American Studies on 4 th   November 2020. [1]   The event was spurred on the T20 deliberations carried out through various task forces that evolved Policy Briefs on both the development and finance track. Notably, the early childhood care and sustainability has already become an integral structured part of T20 work programme since 2018. The criticality of early child care and education in averting deepening of inequalities by giving fair chance to a vulnerable family to catch up with the mainstream cannot be overstated. The challenges of early childhood systems as a G20 priority area, need closer collaboration on the aspect of ‘leaving no child behind’. The firs...

  Amit Kumar Research Associate, RIS   With the on-going pandemic caused due to COVID19 outbreak, the centrality of biopharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing has been quite evident. The quest for effective medicines and vaccines for treating COVID19 is going vigorously across the world. India, dubbed as “Pharmacy of the World” has also seen the exponential rise in the biopharma research and manufacturing in this period. In this scenario, it will be interesting to explore the prevailing regulatory framework for ensuring environment protection, biosafety and biocontainment requirements arising due to the biopharma R&D and manufacturing practices. In India, the 1989 Rules under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 regulates the “ production, manufacture etc. of drugs and pharmaceuticals and food stuffs distilleries and tanneries, etc. which make use of micro-organisms/ genetically engineered microorganisms one way or the other ”. [i]   Six competent statutor...