The anti-corruption movement has enabled the Indian middle class to feel smug about itself. Its members have gone through a vast range of emotions during the last two decades, from self-hatred to self-righteousness. Liberalisation of the economy has created for this class an excitement of many kinds. It has meant the freedom to pursue the quest for wealth without guilt and, at the same time, it has meant feeling set...

There are fears that curative health care will be left to the private sector, while the public system will handle preventive and low-quality care. AN issue of The Lancet earlier this year highlighted some of the problems with public health in India, acknowledging that “it is in crisis”. The robust economic growth over the past 20 years has not translated into better health indices; indeed the decline of infant and child...

Degraded soils, depleting groundwater, and chemical pesticides are playing havoc, placing agriculture in terrible distress. I haven’t forgotten that night. Sitting with a group of farmers in a village in Ludhiana district in Punjab, at the height of the Green Revolution, a farmer showed me a bag of fertiliser that he brought from the market. “Why are you showing me this bag”, I asked. “Wait”, he said, and began to open the...

Last month, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a scathing reassessment of a 12-year-old research study of Neurontin, a seizure drug made byPfizer. The study, which had included more than 2,700 subjects and was carried out by Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer), was notable for how poorly it was conducted. The investigators were inexperienced and untrained, and the design of the study was so flawed it generated few if any...

The Mamata Banerjee government has initiated an ambitious project to bring specialised health care to rural Bengal, asking private hospitals to set up “super-speciality” units alongside state-run hospitals in the districts. As a start, the chief minister has taken up with cardiologist and Asia Heart Foundation chairman Devi Shetty a plan to set up six such hospitals that would provide the sort of critical care that is now missing in most...