Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Today’s story is one of patience.

Nine years ago, at the launch of UN Women’s HeForShe campaign in Delhi, I met a researcher. He was working in a team led by a certain professor—someone he described as a “maverick”—and they were having a particularly tough time of it. The researcher vented for hours to me about the variety of hurdles his team was facing while trying to do “something good and right”. 

Well, the professor he was talking about is Sujoy Guha, professor emeritus at IIT-Kharagpur, who has now spent 40 years trying to get out a long-term but reversible male contraceptive called Risug.

In 2016, The Wire interviewed Guha, who gave a breakdown of the challenges his project has faced.

Risug eventually went for large-scale clinical trials in 2019. And the result of the trials are yet to be published. This story is special because it is the story of an original drug molecule devised by an individual in India. Each of those aspects is uncommon enough on its own; combined, it makes for an extremely rare tale. Usually, it is generic versions of patented drug molecules that are developed by India’s large pharmaceutical companies.

Guha, meanwhile, has found his journey a particularly strenuous one not just because of vested business interests, but because of the broader inertia surrounding male contraceptive development around the world. The focus of pharmaceutical companies and governments, until recently, has been on increasing the basket of choice for women. There have been no new male birth control methods coming to the market since the ‘80s. 

But that’s changing. 

Just this week, scientists hailed a breakthrough in male contraception as a potential “gamechanger”—a contraceptive pill for men that blocks a fertility protein for 24 hours.