-The Hindu Recent years have been a watershed in the public health programme in India. We have managed to eradicate diseases such as polio and tetanus, reduced maternal and child mortality rates significantly, halved the prevalence of tuberculosis and malaria and increased the life expectancy for both adults and children. These achievements reflect the unflinching efforts of the Indian government and all stakeholders in the past two decades to ensure health...

-The Hindu MSF Secretary General Jerome Oberreit on the increasing threat to affordable health care worldwide. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors without Borders, the international humanitarian medical aid organisation that is active in 69 countries, serves populations affected by epidemics, armed conflicts, natural calamities and manmade disasters. MSF has relied heavily on generic drugs, much of which has been sourced from India, to deliver health care to some of the most...

-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...

-The Hindu Business Line The draft laws do not take a holistic view of surface and groundwater management. Nor are institutional issues spelt out The draft National Water Framework Bill 2016 was placed in the public domain for comments in end-May by the ministry of water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation. Around the same time, the ministry also placed the Model Bill for the Conservation, Protection, Regulation and Management of Groundwater 2016...