-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's poorest and socially underprivileged people seem to have benefited the least from a set of government programmes launched over the past decade to reduce personal expenses on health care, research suggests. A team of health economists has found that the financial burden of health care on India's poorest 20 per cent, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Muslims has outpaced that on the richest 20 per cent and...

-The Business Standard Start thinking of new development indicators The annual Human Development Report, or HDR, has recorded with depressing regularity India's mediocre performance in seeking to improve the overall well-being of its people. The latest one, for 2014, is no exception. In the last five years (2008-13), India's performance on improving its Human Development Index (HDI) has been poorer than most of its peers in South Asia, and among Brazil, Russia,...

-The Hindu India also has the worst gender inequality in the region In the two decades since the early 1990s when India liberalised its economy, countries like Nepal and Bangladesh have improved their human development indicators at a faster clip than India. Though India ranks marginally higher than many of its South Asian neighbours in the 2014 UNDP Human Development Report released on Thursday, the country has fallen behind most of its immediate...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: In a move that has surprised and shaken the industry, prices of widely-used expensive anti-diabetic and cardiac medicines will reduce by as much as 35% over the next few weeks, with the drug pricing regulator, National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), deciding to bring them under price control. In a rare invocation of a lesser-used provision in the Drug Price Control Order (DPCO), NPPA has fixed the prices...

-The Hindu   That over 27 per cent of tobacco consumers in India fall in the 15-24 year age bracket amply demonstrates how successful the tobacco companies have been in continually enticing the vulnerable sections of the population into the suicidal practice. The addition of new customers every year even as thousands of patrons die annually ensures that the tobacco companies' customer base remains wide and tall. If the global tobacco-related mortality...