New Delhi [India]: Ambassador Eric Garcetti has said that the US and India are putting together a different vision of technology that connects us, protects us, detects for us some of the biggest challenges, and addresses them.
Speaking at the “TechSurge: India’s Deep Tech Transformation” conference, organised by Celesta Capital and US-India Business Council, Garcetti cited an example of how the US is funding a company in India through its USAID agency. The company, Garcetti said, is developing an application that can detect tuberculosis (TB).
“…as an Indian, you can cough into the phone and send a recording of that cough – and, with 85 per cent (and growing) accuracy, detect whether you have TB – from any of village, any town, anywhere in India,” he said.
“Something that will help us reach the goal of the Prime Minister here to get rid of TB by 2025. And something that’s in America’s interest, selfishly, as well, because 25 per cent of the world’s TB cases are here in India. And if we don’t work with India to eradicate tuberculosis here, we will never have an America without tuberculosis as well,” Ambassador Garcetti said.
He cited another collaboration between the two countries in the healthcare sector.
“Recently I was at an Indian company. A technological breakthrough in healthcare: we were able to develop a vaccine for dengue fever, all four strains! In the past, we could get a vaccine for one strain, but it doesn’t protect you from the other three; very difficult to commercialize. We had the innovation, but we knew that the America probably couldn’t do the delivery.
And so, given the three different Indian companies, one which is now about to start its third-phase clinical trials within a year or two – maybe three – we can have a vaccine that deals with all four strains of dengue fever. Imagine a future without that disease, hospitalizing and taking the lives of people around the world,” Garcetti said.
Later in his address, Garcetti equated the relationship between the two countries as multiplicative, and not additive or arithmetic.
“An exponential relationship. It’s not U.S. plus India, it’s U.S. times India. And when it comes to technology, I really do believe in my heart that, as we showed during the G20, with India’s leadership and empowering the voice of the Global South, and America’s leadership among our allies and the developed world that, when we speak each other’s languages, we can actually translate to the world our ambitions, our ambitions for peace, prosperity, for our planet and our people,” he said.
