Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

India may seek the setting up of a special panel within the World Trade Organization to resolve the dispute with the European Union (EU) over the seizure of generic drug exports. The commerce ministry is ready to push for this at the WTO in the next week after months-long consultations with the concerned authorities, said a ministry official familiar with the development. Commerce secretary Rahul Khullar said both sides are still talking...

GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Novartis have taken the top three spots again on the Access to Medicine Index, which ranks pharmaceutical companies on how readily they make their products available to the world's poor. It was the second time the rankings, which were created in 2008, have been issued. This time, 95 per cent of the brand-name companies approached by the Dutch foundation that started the index agreed to provide information;...

By spending just Rs 6,000 crore, the government can make a huge dent in the treatment of all sick people across the whole country — currently, people are spending as much as Rs 25,000 crore on buying essential medicines. This was the strong message sent out from a National Consultation organized by several civil society groups at New Delhi on Tuesday. Officials of the health ministry and the Planning Commission...

The Supreme Court today dismissed a petition by an NGO seeking to bar the over-the-counter sale of i-pill, an emergency contraceptive tablet, saying it was the same as abortion at home. The i-pill prevents pregnancy if a woman has it within 72 hours of sexual intercourse. While dismissing the plea by Krupa Prolifers as “not scientific”, the three-judge bench said admitting the plea may “scare people and send a wrong...