Maneka backtracks on animal experiments

Scientists had contended that the draft rules that were unveiled in September would have stifled all bio-medical research and hence they had opposed them tooth and nail. The amended rules now seem friendlier towards the scientists.

Gandhi says she is now “satisfied with the rules” and all the apprehensions of the scientific community have now been properly taken care of. She now hopes to rope in all the “rogue firms” who have been flagrantly violating all the norms of decency while experimenting with animals. Shesays now it is merely a question of either you “put up or shut up”.

Thanks to her interest in animal rights, Gandhi has been at the receiving end of some of the harshest criticism from the scientific community for the last two months. Such was the passion and rage that N K Ganguly, director-general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, had recently warned that if the draft rules were to be implemented without amendments there would be “chaos and confusion leading to anarchy”.

Reacting to the final rules, P K Dave, director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, says that he is now “satisfied that science will not suffer”.

The draft rules had envisaged that no animal experimentation would be carried out without the explicit written approval of the central committee that is chaired by the Minister herself. This now stands withdrawn and instead institutional animal ethics committees have been authorised to grant permissions at the level of the institution itself.

Alsoresearchers will now only need to take blanket clearances for complete programmes and projects from their authorised institutional animal ethics committees and not on an experiment-to-experiment basis which was a major bone of contention in the draft rules.

The rules still envisage that all biomedical institutions will register within 60 days with the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA) but to avoid delays all the laboratory needs to do is to make an application and if they don’t hear of any objections from the ministry they can simply continue with business as usual.

It will now be mandatory that all laboratories to put in place animal ethics committees within 60 days of the rules being notified. These will comprise biomedical scientists both from within the institution and outside, a veterinarian, a non-scientific, socially aware member and a nominee of the government.

The central committee still retains the right to conduct surprise checks at anytime and if any laboratory it is found to be unsatisfactory its license can still be suspended or revoked.

The draft rules had banned all contract and collaborative research that many of the Indian laboratories carried out on behalf of overseas agencies. The final rules still ban all contract research — like testing of drugs on monkeys done on behalf of MNCs in India — carried out purely for monetary considerations but collaborative research carried out between institution has been permitted to go on.

It will still be difficult for Indian institutions to import animals from overseas labs, as the rules still require that transfer of animals can take place only between labs that are registered with the Indian government.

Interestingly, the new rules still do not define what is an animal’ but according to Gandhi, “it is taken for granted that anything that is a non-human is an animal”, thereby widely increasing the scope and reach of the rules.

Revised Rules

(Pallava Bagla is Indian correspondent of SCIENCE)