-The Hindu The move may save the government around Rs. 5,000 crore   The Union Cabinet, on Wednesday, gave its go-ahead for slashing the subsidy on phosphatic and potassic (P&K) fertilisers for this fiscal. The move is expected to save the government around Rs. 5,000 crore. The decision to cut subsidy has been taken in view of falling Global Prices. Despite the reduction in subsidy, the government is hopeful that the maximum retail price (MRP) of...

-The Hindu Business Line   The general tendency among Indian policy makers currently is to blame international price movements for the rise in prices of essential food items in India. The extent to which this claim is valid is assessed by examining the specific case of wheat. It is no secret that Indian food prices are increasingly affected by international prices. Ever since 2002, when all quantitative restrictions on Indian imports of agricultural...

-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 Indian Express West Bengal is not new to chit fund scams. What is unique to the Saradha Group scandal is how it targeted the poorest and the most marginalised, leaving them on the verge of devastation. From 17-year-old agents who raised money from depositors to 50-year-old widows who invested money, the Saradha Group didn't discriminate in roping them in. Since the house of cards started collapsing, two agents and two...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Supreme Court judgment on the Novartis-Glivec case is remarkable because it has gone beyond the specific technical and legal issues surrounding patents and has put the matter in a much larger political and economic perspective. The deeper implication of the judgment is that it is not only justified to deny patents when incremental innovation is trivial as in the Glivec case. The judgment has linked the...