Lifestyle Diseases Cause More Young Deaths

An article that appeared in Forbes- An eye opener

A study led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that non-communicable ailments like pulmonary heart disease and diabetes, or injuries from accidents, domestic violence and self-harm have been responsible for a majority of deaths among young people between 1990 and 2010. Deaths due to malnutrition, neo-natal disorders and communicable diseases have declined.

UK
80% +
More than three-fourths of premature deaths are caused by non-communicable diseases. The country’s population would be healthier if it cut down on smoking, including passive smoking.


US
80% +
Average life expectancy increased by 4.1 years; the share of nutritional deaths came down too. But the number of healthy years lost to lifestyle diseases increased by 0.88 years.

INDIA
40-49%
India has the highest number of people dying from heart diseases. In
a decade, 26 million people died of cardiac problems. There’s been a 136% rise in deaths from self-harm and a 63% increase in road accident-related deaths.

CHINA
70-79%
The Chinese government needs to check air pollution, the leading cause for premature deaths. People suffer from ischemic heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Mexico
70-79%
Ill treatment of children,  domestic violence and sexual assaults, along with road accidents, are the most common causes for deaths among young people.


Source: The Global Burden of Disease: Generating Evidence, Guiding Policy published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, at University of Washington, in December 2012

India and the $20 trillion innovation opportunity in these 12 disruptive technologies

An article that appeared in the Economic times

McKinsey recently identified 12 technologies that could
lead to a $20 trillion to $30 trillion economic impact on the world in 2025. ET outlines these 12 technologies and unpacks the role they could play in India.
As global growth slows down, people look towards technology innovation to put it back on track. Over the last two centuries, technology innovation has provided the major impetus for economic growth, but now some economists question whether sustained innovation is possible at such scale, putting long-term global growth into doubt.

Three weeks ago, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) published a report on 12 disruptive technologies that could have a combined economic impact of $20-30 trillion a year by 2025. "It is not a perfect picture of the future," says Michael Chui, MGI partner, "but similar technologies have resulted in a lot of economic growth in the past."
Not all technologies in the list affect India, but some are already making significant impact on the economy, and some others will cause tremendous disruption by 2025. A few others would have begun to make their impact felt within a decade, and then cause big change for a decade or two after that.
We give our pick of those relevant to India, and describe how they will impact the country over the next decade and a half. Says Anu Madgavkar, MGI senior fellow and head in India: "Technological change could have a bigger role in driving India's GDP impact than in advanced economies, as it can stimulate demand and achieve productivity gains in a variety of low-productivity sectors."
Immediate Impact Technologies
- Mobile Internet
- Cloud technology
- Knowledge work automation
- Internet of things
India's rapidly rising middle class with increased spending power will drive the rapid adoption of many technologies, although India will still not be a leader in technology innovation by global standards. This adoption will drive tremendous change across some sectors. Mobile connectivity and advancing healthcare tech will lead to hospitals monitoring and treating patients continuously, rather than just during hospital visits.
Banking and retail will switch to mobile in a big way. Tablets and digital technology will change how education is delivered in schools and universities. Connected sensors will proliferate, improving agriculture and factory productivity, improving traffic safety, reducing water wastage, and so on. Automation will disrupt many business models, particularly outsourcing.
In all these areas, India will remain an adopter rather than an innovator. The share of domestic innovation will of course continue to increase, but the economic impact of technology adoption will be felt more significantly than of innovation over the next decade. Domestic innovation over the decade will be an important factor though, as it will keep the technology gap between India and the innovators to the minimum.


Pockets of innovation will also produce some uniquely Indian business models, particularly in mobile internet, as India begins to close the technology gap with the developed countries. "The healthcare and education sector will see the biggest applications of mobile technology," says Mohan Kumar, partner in Norwest Venture partners.
Intermediate Impact Technologies
- Energy storage
- Renewables
- Genomics
The impact of next generation genomics will be felt within three or four years, and continue to increase over the next decade. Whole genome sequencing is set to arrive in India within a year. As the technology improves and costs come down, it will impact healthcare in three ways: for predictive diagnostics, for cancer treatment, and for drug development.

Cancer would be classified as a chronic disease, while diabetes and cardiovascular disease could be predicted well in advance and so probably prevented, or even reversed in some cases. Clinical research will proceed hand in hand with sequencing, making next-generation treatments possible.

As India expands its renewable energy programme, improvements in energy storage could help remove the intermittency problem and thereby helping even larger deployments. Energy storage technology would make microgrids even more of a possibility.

 

By 2025 solar energy would be approaching grid parity with coal, and biofuels far more economically and technologically viable. Pressure for climate change action will also drive renewable adoption, but India is unlikely to be an innovator in renewables, while it will see some pockets of innovation in genomics. "Doctors in India follow the West, and so we could see sequencing adopted as standard of care quickly," says Vijay Chandru, CEO of Strand Life Sciences.

Long-term Impact Technologies
- 3D manufacturing
- Robotics
- Autonomous vehicles
- Advanced materials

3-D printing is a technology that is revolutionising manufacturing, but it could be a full decade before India would feel its impact fully. 3-D printing would democratise manufacturing, leading to mass customization, and make possible the manufacturing of many new objects. Advanced robotics would take people away from dangerous tasks, and make possible tasks that are too difficult - like high-precision surgery - for human beings.

Autonomous vehicles would make highway accidents a thing of the past. Wonder materials would let us do all kinds of unimaginable things like self-healing concrete or self-cleaning clothes. Yet, these technologies will take a decade or beyond to fully impact human lives and the economy. "When you are looking to replace an established material," says National Research Professor R.A.Mashelkar, "you are looking at long periods of testing and development."

These technologies could take even more time to establish in India, as the R&D ecosystem in India is not good enough to develop them, and the industrial infrastructure far from adequate to absorb them fully. This is an area where India is likely to remain a near-total adopter till 2025, the period under our purview, thereby diminishing their full economic impact.

Enter India's amazing world of frugal innovation

A story on Innovation covered by CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Indian inventors recycle old technology to solve local problems
• Inventions include amphibious bicycles, wind-powered irrigation systems and tree-climbing machines
• Frugal innovators around India have patented their inventions and received awards

 In 2001 a huge earthquake shook the state of Gujarat in India. 2,000 people were killed, 400,000 lost their homes, and countless more lost their businesses in the devastation.

One young entrepreneur, Mansukhbhai Prajapati, lost everything, but found an innovative way to get back on his feet. Prajapati designed a low-cost clay fridge which required no electricity and continued to function in the event of major catastrophes or blackouts such as the one that devastated his village.

Prajapati's invention is part of a growing trend in India that has become known as "frugal innovation" -- below-the-radar inventors across the country devising low-cost solutions to local problems, often borne of necessity, using bespoke technologies of their own creation.

So striking has the trend for frugal innovation become, that last year the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), an independent charity in the UK, commissioned and published a major research paper on the phenomenon

 The paper said "frugal innovation is found throughout the Indian system: from ... efforts to crowdsource drug discovery driven by government labs, to Bharti Airtel's approach to cutting the cost of mobile phone calls, to the Keralan approach to palliative care which is providing access to support at the end of life for thousands in a void of formal healthcare."

At the forefront of the frugal innovation movement is Professor Anil Gupta who, for the last 20 years, has been travelling across India in search of local inventors whose creativity has had a positive impact on rural poverty. In 1989, Gupta founded the Honey Bee Network, an organization that uncovers grassroots inventors, and helps bring their inventions to the world.

"I have walked about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years," says Gupta. "I have tried to map the minds of people who are creating around the country."

Gupta's journey has brought him into contact with inventors who are solving common problems in frugal ways, using traditional knowledge and readily available materials.

By his own reckoning, Gupta believes that the Honey Bee Network has helped unearth over 25,000 new inventions, including a motorbike-mounted crop sprayer, a device for climbing trees, an amphibious bicycle and a wind-powered irrigation system.

Kirsten Bound, the author of Nesta's report, says "frugal innovation is all about creating advantage out of constraint. Faced with scarce resources and institutional voids, frugal innovators develop radical new solutions to problems. It's not just about making things cheaper, but better, more appropriate and scalable. It involves leveraging available resources in new ways, reducing or re-using waste or even re-thinking an entire system around a product or service."

Mansukhbhai Patel, a Gujerati farmer devised just such a product. Picking cotton in Gujarat is a manual task which, in the past, has frequently been undertaken by children. In a bid to reduce the work involved, Patel invented a cotton-stripping machine that can be operated by one person. Professor Gupta believes the invention has helped significantly reduce child labor in the region.

Frugal Digital, a research group run by the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, seeks to promote exactly this kind of invention. The group runs projects in conjunction with Indian inventors to build cheap, "hackable" devices to solve enduring problems across the subcontinent.

Priya Mani, project manager for Frugal Digital, says that there is a lot to learn from "thinking about how you can hack everyday castaway objects." The projects the organization has run in conjunction with Indian inventors have already yielded products that are being used around India today, including a classroom projector fashioned from repurposed cell phone components and a low-cost health screening tool made from an old alarm clock.

But Mani believes that work being done by frugal innovators in India has yet to have a significant international impact: "People thought we were totally nuts trying to create something new out of old parts."

Bound believes that the philosophy of frugal innovation and the practice of repurposing technology could be applied globally. "Frugal innovation coming out of India could have important implications for the rest of the world" says Bound.

"General Electric has shown with its now famous ultra-low cost ECG machine that there is a Western market for products born out of the constraints of the Indian healthcare market. It forces multinationals to think about how their existing investment intensive models of innovation can face inevitable growing competition with Indian and Chinese multinationals."

Of course, not all stories of frugal innovation have a happy ending. In 1975, flooding across India brought the province of Bihar to a standstill. The rising waters in the village of Jatwa-Janerwa made it impossible for many people to work, shop or go about their daily lives.

Local honey salesman, Mohammed Saidullah, was forced to cross the swollen Ganges river for sell honey, but every trip came at a price -- the boat was expensive and paying the levy was driving him towards penury -- so he came up with novel solution.

Saidullah locked himself away for three days of solid design and construction. When he emerged he had constructed an amphibious bicycle, which would allow him to contend with the annual monsoon.

It looked like a regular bike, but had large retractable floats attached to the sides of each wheel. Saidullah's invention earned him a raft of awards including the National Innovation Foundation's lifetime achievement award. Yet in spite of the recognition, the inventor still lives in poverty.

Gupta says there is work to be done yet in connecting creative people with funding, and not all of it can come from the public purse.

According to Gupta, connecting grassroots technologists with big business will be key to development not just in India, but around the world. "Nothing," he says, "can justify preventing people from learning from one another."

Four Mahindra group firms join hands to nurture start-ups

Business line article ;

 

Four Mahindra group companies have joined hands to launch a programme to incubate start-ups, a move that would help in accelerating the pace of innovations in the country.

The companies — IT firms Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra and mobile VAS providers CanvasM Technologies and Mahindra Comviva – would support start-ups in the information and communications technology (ICT) space.

“There are a lot of start-ups out there with a number of innovative and disruptive ideas. By collaborating with these companies, we would be able to create an ecosystem and speedup the process of innovations,” said Manish Mehta, Chief Solutions Officer (Verticals) and Global Head (Consulting and Enterprise Solutions) at Mahindra Satyam.

I5 STARTNET

The programme – i5 Startnet – would scout for innovative ideas in cloud, mobility and networking and other emerging technologies. The companies would also support start-ups that are into developing for verticals such as retail, consumer goods, infrastructure and construction among others.

If selected, i5 Startnet would provide financial support and access to markets and customers for these start-ups.

The companies have already initiated discussions with about 10 companies from Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai, and expect to announce at least a couple of collaborations within the next one month.

“We will decide on it depending on the products,” Mehta said, when asked about the timeframe for incubation.

Apart from start-ups, the companies would also look at supporting institutions and academicians who provide research and programmes that are of interest to the group.

$50-m FUND

The companies could dip into the $50-million technology focused venture capital fund, set up jointly with Mahindra Satyam and Tokyo-based financial service firm SBI Holdings (SoftBank Investment Group), to nurture the start-ups. In February last year, SBI Holdings entered into an agreement with Mahindra Satyam to set up the $50-million global fund, with equal commitments from the partners.

Further funds could be raised, depending on the projects or start-ups, internally, Mehta said, adding that “all channels are open”.

He, however, declined to provide a corpus the companies have earmarked for investing in start-ups.

Recently, Nasscom – the representative body of Indian IT industry - had also announced plans to incubate 25 start-ups that would be set up by young entrepreneurs across the country.

Potential of papaya leaf juice

An article in the Hindu on the benefits of the Papaya leaves in treating Dengue 

Clinical trials done in Malaysia and India have come up with evidence to prove the efficacy of Carica papaya leaf in augmenting platelet count in patients with dengue fever.

In March this year, a Malaysian team comprising researchers from the Institute for Medical Research, Kuala Lumpur, and the Tengku Ampuan Rahimah Hospital, Klang, published a paper showing that Carica papaya leaf juice was capable of significantly increasing platelet count in patients with dengue fever and dengue haemorrhagic fever.

Led by Soobitha Subenthiran, the clinical trial covered 228 patients from the dengue ward of the hospital, with half of them administered 50 gm of fresh papaya juice for three consecutive days and the other half receiving standard management.

Blood count

Their blood count was monitored for 48 hours and gene expression studies conducted.

The paper published in Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, an open access journal, showed a significant increase in mean platelet count in the intervention group but not in the control group, 40 hours after the first dose of the juice.

The ALOX 12 and PTAFR genes influencing platelet production and activation were strongly expressed in patients on the juice. Toxicity studies carried out by the team also showed that the juice was safe for human consumption.

A study conducted by a team from the K.M. Kundnani College of Pharmacy, Mumbai, and Orchid Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals, Chennai, found that Carica papaya leaf extract was capable of increasing the platelet count in rats administered a synthetic agent for low platelet count.