Rais Akhtar
National Fellow, ICSSR, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, JNU
Rais Akhtar holds up two maps drawn on transparent plastic sheets. He looks at the regions that reported the highest number of malaria cases in 1994. One of the areas with the highest mortality was unusual — western Rajasthan. He turns to the rainfall map and finds that same area shows excess amount of rain that same year.
Akhtar’s specialisation is unusual too — medical geography — he studies why a disease strikes at a particular place and why it doesn’t strike at another. His work has shown that temperature and rainfall patterns are the two biggest factors determining the spread of disease. He was first nominated as Lead Author for the Third Assessment Report in 1999. Following this, a lot of countries did health impact studies. The result is that science is a lot clearer in the Fourth Assessment. For example, empirical research has further quantified the health effects of heat waves. There has been research on a wider range of health issues. Studies show some diseases like plague, that had been eradicated, are re-emerging. Diseases like malaria are climbing up—places with higher altitudes and latitudes are now vulnerable to these because of warming. This time, the vulnerability of low-income countries to the ill effects can be seen more clearly. ‘‘All this has tremendous implication for policy-makers,’’ he says. ‘‘This haphazard development leads to new disease ecology,’’ he adds.
A National Fellow of the Indian Council for Social Science Research, he works at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. A former dean of the faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Kashmir, Akhtar got his PhD from the Aligarh Muslim University. ‘‘Even before the Nobel, the developed nations had begun to take note of climate change. It was the heat waves of 2003 and Hurricane Katrina in the US in 2005 that changed public perception,’’ he says.
Now Akhtar has turned his attention to heat wave mortality in India. “It is still not very well understood why heat kills people more in a particular region in the country,” he says. ‘‘Only when environmental conditions of health problems are understood, can there be proper distribution of health care facility,’’ he says.
—Sonu Jain

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