The government may levy duty on two important drug ingredients imported from China and Mexico to protect local suppliers. The move could increase prices of popular antibiotics for consumers besides threatening business of about two dozen small drugmakers. The commerce ministry has recommended anti-dumping duty on Penicillin G Potassium and 6 APA, after Indian suppliers complained Chinese and Mexican firms are shipping it at a low price to kill competition from...

With surplus onion in markets across the country, there is finally some relief for the consumers as prices of the bulb fell by about Rs1,000-Rs1,500 per quintal on Monday. However, it irked farmers so much that they shut down the wholesale market at Lasalgaon in Nashik in the afternoon and demanded lifting of the ongoing export ban. The Lasalgaon Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC) wholesale market opened on Monday with onions...

Fast-growing emerging nations are taking increasingly aggressive actions to beat back rising food prices as they grow more worried of threats to stability if prices don't start to retreat. Developing-market governments have unveiled a laundry list of measures—including price caps, export bans and rules to counter commodity speculation—to keep food costs from disrupting their economies as price spikes that some had hoped were temporary have stretched into the new year. Some...

Everyone agrees that there is a food crisis. As ordinary members of the public we know there’s one every time we go out shopping for vegetables. My mother knows there’s a crisis because, after recently sacking her cook, she discovered the lady had left with all the onions in the house. The media agrees there’s one, and sends more TV crews to talk to onion farmers, even though the TV reporters...

Even though the Central Government agreed to link the wages paid under MG-NREGA to the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labourers (CPIAL), it shied away from paying statutory minimum wages in various states of India. Their logic for this: Lack of clarity on who will bear the extra financial burden—the Centre or the states? A letter from the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to UPA and NAC Chairperson Sonia Gandhi dated 31...