A tribute to the whistleblower, risking job and even life

Rahul Singh

IT takes guts to be a whistleblower. You risk your job, even your life. In 2003, IIT graduate Satyendra Dubey was an engineering service officer, posted in Bihar as project director for the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), working on the quadrilateral project. He found the project was mired in high-level corruption and decided to take on the mafia behind it, despite getting threats. He paid the ultimate price for his courage — he was gunned down while riding in a scooter-auto. Though his killers were convicted, those who ordered the murder were never identified.

The Insider, with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino in the main roles, memorably tells the true story of how a research scientist, Jeffrey Wigand (Crowe), working for a US tobacco company, blew the whistle on seven other firms. He revealed that even though they knew perfectly well that tobacco was addictive and cancer-causing, they suppressed the evidence. Wigand got threats to desist from testifying in courts, but was not deterred. The harmful effects of tobacco are now widely recognised, thanks partly to him.

Add to this list of those who put duty first, without thinking of the possible dire consequences, another name — Dinesh Thakur. Following his schooling in Hyderabad, he earned a scholarship to an American university. After graduation, he joined Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of the ‘big pharma’ American companies. He worked for them for 10 years, going up the ladder when, in 2002, he got an offer from a fast-rising Indian pharmaceutical company, Ranbaxy. Though it meant returning to India, he accepted it, impressed by what he had learnt about Ranbaxy.

In 1952, Bhai Mohan Singh, the highly respected son of a successful building contractor, bought Ranbaxy, a fledgling company selling medicines, from his cousins. When his son, Parvinder, returned from his US studies, he put him in charge. Parvinder had big plans for Ranbaxy and the company took off, aided by the liberalisation of the economy in 1991. But he fell out with his father and, in any case, died relatively young in 1999 from cancer.

The world’s pharma industry was then entering a new phase. Many drugs were going off-patent, which means that their equivalent, and much cheaper, generics could legally take their place. Ranbaxy grabbed the opportunity and soon became the fastest-growing foreign company in the US producing generic drugs. In 2004, its global sales were $1 billion. It was selling 200 products in 40 countries. By this time, Malvinder Singh, Parvinder’s elder son, was president of the company and virtually running it.

However, as a stunning book of investigative reporting, Bottle of Lies by Katherine Eban, reveals, Ranbaxy’s “success” was based on deceit. “In its race for profit, Ranbaxy had lied to regulators, falsified data and endangered patient safety in every country where it sold drugs,” writes the author. “It was an outright fraud that could mean the difference between life and death.”

Frauds, like Satyam and what Nirav Modi and the PMC Bank did, only concerned defrauding of money, however much, not the well-being and lives of people, as did the Ranbaxy fraud.

After Dinesh Thakur uncovered the false edifice on which the company stood, he informed his incredulous boss. After the boss was convinced, he made a presentation to the high-powered board, pleading that the company put matters right. The presentation was not recorded and the computer on which it was made destroyed. It was a clear signal that he should resign, which he did. Thakur followed soon afterwards, when he discovered that a porn site had been surreptitiously planted on his computer, to incriminate him, clearly a part of dirty tricks.

He went straight to the American Federal Drug Agency (FDA), with his findings, the Bhagvadagita’s teaching in mind, ‘Do your duty, no matter the consequences’. The FDA, realising it had earlier been duped by Ranbaxy with fake data, moved against the company.

Meanwhile, Malvinder, desperate to extract himself from the situation, negotiated with a Japanese firm, Daiichi Sankyo, to buy his and his brother’s stake in Ranbaxy. Incredibly, he succeeded, pulling the wool over Daiichi’s eyes and sold it $2 billion (roughly Rs14,000 crore) worth of stock, thereby relinquishing control over Ranbaxy. When the FDA started closing in on Ranbaxy, Daiichi belatedly discovered it had been taken for a very costly ride. It went to an arbitration court in Singapore, which awarded it $550 million. Malvinder appealed to the Indian Supreme Court, which turned it down. Both brothers are presently in judicial custody, having been denied bail, charged with criminal breach of trust and fraud.

One important question: when the company’s high-powered board was informed at a meeting, in great detail, of the massive fraud Ranbaxy had been perpetrating, why did it not take any remedial action? By my reckoning, they are just as culpable. After all, independent board members of a company are meant to be its ‘conscience keepers’.

Fortunately, there is one Indian pharma company that has valiantly kept the Indian flag flying high: Cipla, and its head, Cambridge University-educated Dr Yusuf (‘Yuku’ to his friends) Hamied.

In the early 1980s, the world discovered a new deadly ailment. It would later be called HIV-AIDS. Some 5,000 Africans were dying from it every day.

Three multinational companies had found a cocktail of drugs which arrested the disease. But its cost, $12,000 to $15,000 a year per patient, was prohibitive. Enter Dr Hamied. He promised to provide the same cocktail to ‘Doctors Without Borders’, a humanitarian NGO, for just $1 a day. The offer captured the world’s imagination, including that of Nelson Mandela, leader of a country most affected by the AIDS epidemic. But ‘big pharma’ was not happy and tried to block Dr Hamied. Thanks to massive public support, he prevailed, thereby saving the lives of millions of the world’s poorest. His name should be written in letters of gold. Indeed, why not a Nobel for Dr Yusuf Hamied?

— The writer is a veteran journalist

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