One of the key problems, while handling the pandemic, was dealing with multiple regulatory ecosystems even for straightforward matters, Raghavan said.
The government is trying to clear up and sort the existing regulatory ecosystems so as to make it function smoother in the future, said Professor K Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India. He was referring to projects that were required to be undertaken to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, when it was at its peak last year.
Raghavan was speaking at the inaugural address of ‘Innovation and Science Bharat Series 2’, organised by the PSA Office on Friday. The forum was an online roundtable meeting between industry and academia, which discussed immunology, epidemiology, diagnostic lab networks, medical device makers, post-vaccination research for pharmaceutical companies and healthcare CSR organisations.
One of the key problems, while handling the pandemic, was dealing with multiple regulatory ecosystems even for straightforward matters, Raghavan said.
“Even though we wanted to get an issue addressed, the existing regulatory systems, requirements of clearances — sometimes delving into multiple ministries and departments existed. We are now trying to clear up some of the matters,” he added.
The central government had constituted a Covid-19 Task Force — which had multiple research labs and institutions entrusted with specific roles in fighting the pandemic.
Raghavan highlighted the existing knowledge clusters in Pune, National Capital Region, Bengaluru and Hyderabad — all of which came handy and offered platforms to get multiple institutional expertise onboard.
“But what we needed was linking problems and solutions and scale them up considerably. Now, there are such portals set up and they will be running smoothly in future. Aggregation of resources was facilitated through these clusters and more such clusters will come up,” he added.
2020 was a year when several barriers were broken down, even though this involved the handling of resources with very modest changes, said Raghavan.
With the Covid-19 cases on the rise again, the Covid-19 Task Force will facilitate all required help from the Centre, states or similar agencies to researchers and industry from time to time, Raghavan said.
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