ETHICS ON TRIAL

Five per cent of the clinical trials conducted across the world will be in India by 2012. While doctors and organisations conducting trials make big bucks, the rights and safety of the subjects are often overlooked

- ANKUR PALIWAL & APARNA PALLAVI

NINE-YEAR-old Rani is N unhappy. She has to stay away from her mother Janki Patel, who is taking part in a clinical trial at a centre 10 kilometres from her house at Bapu Nagar in Ahmedabad. "I do not like these trials. They take my parents away," says Rani.

In their late thirties, Janki and her husband Amar Patel attend trials so that they can pay Rani's school fee and earn two square meals a day. They are subjects of non-therapeutic trials conducted on healthy individuals to confirm efficacy of drugs launched abroad on Indians. One trial fetches them between Rs 5,000 and Rs 6,000. The money kept the Patels going after they lost their jobs as diamond cutters three years ago when the market crashed.