-The Hindu Business Line From maker of versions of drugs, India's pharmaceutical industry has turned a top innovator Twenty years ago, Ranbaxy was a home-spun drug-maker. The Indian Patents Act allowed companies to make chemically-similar versions of innovative drugs. Visionaries in the pharmaceutical sector, like Parvinder Singh (Ranbaxy's key architect and member of its promoter family) and Anji Reddy (founder of Dr Reddy's Laboratories), were alive. And the pharmaceutical industry did not have...

-The Hindu   We'll have to make ‘some compromises,' to pass the Bills: govt. sources The UPA government had hoped to push its Social Welfare agenda through in Parliament by legislating on food security and land acquisition. Instead, just five days into the second half of the ongoing budget session, it is engaged in damage control, trying to put out three fires simultaneously - the coal blocks' allocation issue, the 2G JPC imbroglio...

-The Hindu     Imprecise estimates of slums in the 2011 census could affect welfare programmes for least privileged groups The recently published census 2011 report on housing stock, amenities and assets in slums, the first of its kind in the country, reassuringly announced that the number of urban slums has declined and the percentage of households in slums has dropped from 23.5 (2001) to 17.4. On the face of it, this reduction appears...

-The Hindu Latehar: Last week, two 14-year-old adivasi girls, who had migrated from Khunti district to work in Delhi as domestic help, were found dead in mysterious circumstances, both within two days of each other. On April 19, Jyoti Mariyam Hora died soon after she was brought to the Madan Mohan Malviya Hospital in Delhi's Malviya Nagar. Two days later, Dayamani Guriya, who had studied with Jyoti till class VI and had...

-The Telegraph A jump in the Centre's annual Social Welfare spending from Rs 7,500 crore in 1991 to Rs 3 lakh crore now has failed to make much difference on the ground because panchayati raj institutions are being kept away from implementation of the schemes, a committee has found. The committee headed by senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, in its report released on the eve of National Panchayat Day, pitched for...