Travesty of medical research
Yes, India does have a National Cancer Registry Programme (NCRP). It is run by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi. It is quite another matter that not a single report has come out of it since July 1992, when the NCRP published the Biennial Report 1988-1989: An Epidemiological Study .
Repeated requests from Down To Earth (DTE) for recent data from the programme drew a blank. The answer was simple: the data and its interpretations are being assessed by experts and it was not possible for the council to release data that was not reviewed by peers. In fact, ICMR officials refused to get into the details of why the data has not been published. The director general, N K Ganguly, could not find 45 minutes to explain recent trends in cancer incidence to DTE, although he was very polite about it. Despite everyone being so busy and tied up with work, it is ironic that no data from NCRP has been published in the past eight years.
Officials we contacted failed to understand why DTE wanted recent data. "Why do you need recent data? Use the data from 1989,' was the standard suggestion, as if it was a violation of the Official Secrets Act to find out the state of cancer in India. Perhaps a decade here or there does not make any difference to ICMR officials, who can turn down requests for information from taxpayers who pay for their salaries, without showing the slightest sign of remorse.
Not far from the ICMR office is the Shanti Avedna Ashram, which is run by some Christian nuns to shelter extremely poor people in terminal stage of cancer. If only cancer was as slow as our government babu s, and took a decade longer before killing its victims. Or the deadlines of India's premier medical research agency were as terminal as cancer's.
After the final attempt to get data proved futile, the DTE correspondent came back with three copies of the 1988-89 report. Irony of ironies, the report begins with the following quote by Sir Richard Doll, emeritus professor of epidemiology at the Oxford University School of Medicine: "Epidemiology is the simplest and the most direct method of studying the causes of disease in humans, and many major contributions have been made by studies that have demanded nothing more than an ability to count, to think logically, and have an imaginative idea.'