-The Telegraph Jamshedpur: Work is underway on turning former Maoist hotbed West Singhbhum’s Manoharpur block into a hub of model villages sponsored by Union rural development ministry, a separate project that will operate simultaneously with the much-hyped Saranda Action Plan (SAP). The ministry headed by Jairam Ramesh has asked the state forest department to study all the 56 villages of the block and chalk out an integrated development project under the banner...

-The Hindu In the summer of 2011, production at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar plant ground to a halt, as workers agitated to set up a union independent of the Maruti Udyog Kamdar Union that represented workers at the company’s plant at Gurgaon. The strikes and lockouts eventually dragged on till the fall, and cost the company approximately $500 million in lost production. On Wednesday, nine months after the company finally agreed to recognise...

-The Hindu The Indian Radiological and Imaging Association (IRIA) has called the recent order of the Union Health & Family Welfare Ministry restricting radiologists/sonologists from visiting more than two clinics within a district to perform ultrasound tests and making it mandatory to specify their consulting hours at each clinic as “unconstitutional, undemocratic and ill-thought”. At a Press conference here on Thursday, IRIA president Harsh Mahajan said: “This latest order will create a...

-The Hindu 8.1 million children are out of school, 42% are underweight India has slipped by 12 ranks in the global grading on the child development index, which denotes Health, education and nutrition, between 1995 and 2010. Japan is the best place in the world to be a child, while Somalia is the worst, a latest report has suggested. The Child Development Index report released by NGO Save the Children makes an aggregate...

-Live Mint Natco Pharma Ltd, which has started selling a generic version of Bayer AG’s patented cancer treatment Nexavar in India at a fraction of the price charged by the German firm, plans to use the so-called compulsory licensing route to try and win the right to copy more patented drugs, said vice-chairman and chief executive officer Rajeev Nannapaneni. The Hyderabad-based company has already identified the patented drugs for which it will...