Bill Gates faces backlash for calling India a 'laboratory'

Billionaire Bill Gates sparked a heated debate on X after his remark describing India as a ‘kind of laboratory’ to try things during a recent podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, which went viral. His recent remarks on India reignited a controversial 2009 clinical trial, funded by the Gates Foundation, which tragically claimed the lives of seven tribal schoolgirls and left several others gravely ill.

In the podcast, Gates described India tackling significant challenges in health, nutrition and education, with significant progress underway. He also expressed that the country’s stability and self-reliant revenue generation would lead to transformative improvements in people’s lives over the upcoming two decades. “India is an example of a country where there’s plenty of things that are difficult there— health, nutrition, and education is improving, and they’re stable enough, and generating their own government revenue enough that it’s very likely that 20 yrs from now, people will be dramatically better off. It’s ‘kind of a laboratory’ to try things, when you prove them out in India you can take them to other places,” the Microsoft co-founder says in the podcast.

Highlighting the collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, he mentioned that its largest office outside the US is based in India, “Our biggest non-US office for the foundation is in India, and the most number of people pilot rollout things we’re doing anywhere in the world are with partners in India. If you go there and you’ve never been, you might think, this is a chaotic place and you’re not used to seeing so many levels of income all being on the street at the same time, but you will get a sense of vibrancy.”

PATH, in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), conducted clinical trials in 2009 to test a cervical cancer vaccine on 14,000 tribal schoolgirls from Khammam district in Telangana, and Vadodara in Gujarat. During the course of trials, numerous participants experienced serious side effects, and seven deaths occurred, although the fatalities were linked to unrelated causes.

Comments came in quickly, with many expressing outrage on X. One user said that Gates uses India as a testing ground for new drugs, accusing the government of permitting Gates and his foundation to treat Indians like guinea pigs, describing the situation as both shocking and shameful. While another user added that the bigger mistake lies with the government, stating, “He wouldn't dare to do this in his country. But here he has not only gotten away with such malpractice, he is welcomed into our country.”