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Maneka removed from panel monitoring tests on animals

By P. Sunderarajan

NEW DELHI Dec. 23. The Centre has removed the animal rights activist and former Union Minister, Maneka Gandhi, as chairperson of the high-power Central committee for the control and supervision of medical experiments using animal models, giving a new twist to a three-year-old battle between medical researchers and animal lovers.

V.K. Duggal, Special Secretary in the Union Environment and Forests Ministry, has been given temporary charge of the panel till alternative arrangements were made.

Ms. Gandhi has been removed on the ground that the post was an office of profit and, according to the rules, a member of Parliament cannot hold such a post.

Speaking to The Hindu, the Union Environment Minister, T.R. Baalu, said the Government was in the process of selecting a new chairperson who would be able to strike a balance between the need to protect the interests of the animals and promote medical research.

Ms. Gandhi's removal from the Central Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA) had been on the cards ever since she was removed from the Union Cabinet in July following a raging controversy between her and the then Union Health Minister, C.P. Thakur, on the issue of treatment of animals used in animal research.

The conflict between the two had reached such a stage that an attempt by the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, to mediate came to nought. He convened a meeting to find a common meeting ground between them, but they stuck to their respective stands. While Ms. Gandhi held that research institutions were not providing state-of-the-art facilities in their animal houses, Dr. Thakur said that despite financial and other constraints, scientists were taking as much care of the animals as they could.

A major fallout of the conflict was that medical research and also production of vaccines and anti-rabies and other important sera in several leading institutions, including the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institute of Science, the BCG Vaccine Laboratory at Guindy, Chennai, the Central Research Institute (CRI) at Kasauli and the National Institute of Virology, Pune, had been disrupted for the past three years.

At the CRI, for instance, production of anti-rabies and anti-snake venom sera had been badly hit as, on a direction by the CPCSEA, supply of horses, which are used for making the sera, had been stopped since December last. The horses were ordinarily provided by the Army and the supply was stopped on the ground that they were older than the protocol developed by the CPCSEA.

At the BCG Vaccine Laboratory, likewise, following the restrictions imposed on the use of animals, there has been a sharp reduction in the production of vaccines, which has had an adverse impact on the national immunisation programme.

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