-The Economic Times The genesis: The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) was set up to implement the 1995 Drug Price Control Order (DPCO) and monitor overcharging of drugs and medical devices When: August 29, 1997 Total number of chairmen: 11 What the chairman has to deliver: * Implement and enforce the provisions of the DPCO * Render advice to the central government on drug pricing Highlights of the chairmen's tenures * Between 2001 and 2004, five chairmen were...

-TheWire.in At a time when food has provided so much grist for the identitarian and nativist mill, it is important to infuse into public discourse a modicum of reason through facts. For long, India has been mythologised as a vegetarian, and particularly beef-eschewing, society. Such a representation has further been ideologically explained (and justified) by a wide range of scholars, politicians and popular discourse by constructing India as a society primarily shaped...

-The Hindu Doctors say there ought to be an audit of C-section deliveries in private and Public health facilities In its new guidelines, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for the elimination of the so-called ‘one-centimetre-per-hour’ benchmark — a rule of thumb that obstetricians use to determine whether a delivery requires surgical intervention. This is to counter what the body calls a “surge” in interventions such as caesarean sections that could...

-The Times of India The transfer of the chairman of the National Pharmceutical Pricing Authority, Bhupendra Singh, who had capped the price of stents and knee implants and exposed the huge margins being charged by corporate hospitals has evoked howls of protest from Public health activists. RSS-affiliate Swadeshi Jagran Manch too has taken exception to the move, tweeting sarcastically about the “reward” given to a bureaucrat for doing a good job. The All...

-Livemint.com To stabilize crop prices and make them remunerative, the Swaminathan Commission proposed significant improvements in the implementation of MSPs Across the country, farmers are furious—and rightfully so. Four years ago, they helped bring the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power, believing Narendra Modi’s claims that they would no longer suffer official neglect. But since then, conditions in agriculture have got worse. Earlier problems have worsened as farm incomes have been squeezed...