The Centre’s draft rules governing animal experimentation have triggered concerns among animal rights groups, which say the changes could weaken independent oversight and make it easier for laboratories to conduct experiments on animals. However, officials maintain the changes seek to simplify approvals for research institutions, pharmaceutical and biomedical industries.
Community dogs, someone’s lost pet, birds from illegal markets, all of it can find its way into a laboratory. Because if the experiment is classified as mild or moderate, the institution’s own committee approves it and it never goes to the central regulator, that decision matters enormously,. It means the animal loses the one independent pair of eyes that was looking at its fate. Under the draft, the people who want to do the experiment, their colleagues and their department heads will be the ones approving it. And it is the institution itself, through its own veterinarian, that decides whether the experiment is mild or moderate in the first place. No institution has ever turned down its own funding. So yes, it will make it easier, and it will make it faster, and that means more animals. Mild and moderate are also the bulk of experiments, so we are effectively handing over most of animal experimentation in India to self regulation. It isn’t grey, it is completely black. Under this draft, the institution that wants to do the experiment is also the one that decides which category it falls into. Only severe and non-recovery experiments on larger animals go outside. So the same people who want the experiment approved are deciding whether anyone independent will ever examine it. That is a clear conflict of interest, and it will push experiments towards the lower categories. Starving a rat for a day is called mild. Keeping a social animal alone in a cage is mild. Starving it for two days, or putting it through distress it cannot escape, is moderate. This is not a scientific list. It is the most common commercial work. The biggest risk is that nobody will know where an animal came from. The whole point of registered breeders was traceability. Once you allow open markets and unregistered sources for cattle, goats, birds and fish, you create a demand, and in this country demand is met very quickly by people who will pick up anything. These exceptions should be removed completely. If a lab cannot get an animal from a registered source, it should not be doing that experiment. I don’t think this draft can be fixed. There is hardly a provision in it that doesn’t need changing, and when everything needs to change, it is better to start again. So the draft should be put aside and written afresh, this time with independent scientists, animal welfare organisations and legal experts at the table. The new rules must take India forward, not backwards. Animals already have certain protections under the law which cannot be taken away. New should be building on them.
So is testing herbal products, testing established drugs, and anything described as having “known and reversible effects,” which could mean almost anything. Strays and wild animals can be used if a “competent authority” permits it, and the draft never says who that is. Today, experiments on animals larger than a rat go to the central regulator, and there is at least someone outside the building asking whether this experiment is necessary at all.
