-PTI New Delhi: Just a couple of hours before the Goods and Services Tax (GST) roll out, the all-powerful GST Council tonight reduced the tax rate on fertiliser to 5 per cent from previously decided 12 per cent. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who heads the GST Council comprising representatives of states, said the decision to reduce the tax rate on fertiliser was taken because of apprehensions that price of the crop nutrient...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's drug pricing rules allow companies to inflate the maximum retail prices of medicines, including life-saving drugs, costing patients thousands of additional rupees while offering slices of the profits to stockists, chemists, and hospitals. Quotations received by hospitals from drug companies' representatives offering discounts on maximum retail prices (MRPs) of medicines provide what some doctors and patients' rights advocates say is fresh evidence for excessive profiteering in India's...

-DNA Most of Europe avoided the fate of India, because of a very strict feudal law — that of following primogeniture, a system of inheritance by the firstborn (usually the first born son). Karnataka — preceded by UP, Punjab and Maharashtra — is the fourth state to have waived off loans taken by farmers. However, this is not going to be the end of the matter. You are likely to...

MG Road is seldom considered as a safe place for working women who travel for work to either Gurgaon or Delhi. Almost everyday untoward incidents related to molestation, sexual harassment, kidnapping or rape that occur here are reported in various NCR-based newspapers. Clearly, safety of women office-goers and female workers is one of the major determinants of their (low) labour force participation, even in urban locations like Gurgaon or Delhi....

-The Indian Express The Niti Aayog's report, submitted before the United Nations, acknowledges that anti-poverty programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) helped weaker sections of the society. Vindicating the UPA government’s stand on pulling people out of poverty, India’s Voluntary National Review Report on the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals to the United Nations has said that sustained growth of 8.3 per cent from 2004-05 to 2011-12,...