-Hindustan Times WHO will be updating the list of priority pathogens—agents that can cause outbreaks or pandemics—to guide global investment, research and development, especially in vaccines, tests and treatments, the UN health body announced. India is working on a plan to effectively combat public health emergencies and disease outbreaks in future, according to people familiar with the matter, even as WHO on Monday announced it will be identifying pathogens that could cause...

-The Hindu While Supreme Court has voiced concerns over their increasing use to prove a case, women’s rights activists deem the technology an empowering tool Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA tests occupy a grey area in the quest for justice, vacillating between the dangers of slipping into self-incrimination and encroachment of individual privacy and the ‘eminent need’ to unearth the truth, be in the form of evidence in a criminal case, a claim...

-ThePrint.in Study by Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee & other scholars from US, UK and Canada found that fresh produce vendors charge high mark-ups but fail to adopt competitive market practices. New Delhi: Anyone who has haggled with a thelewala or streetside vendor in India knows that they often apply big mark-ups on prices and make good margins. Yet, selling fruits and vegetables in India is generally associated with “peanuts” when it comes...

Are public sector banks (PSBs) important for the economy? Have the PSBs served the purpose for which they were created? Could the PSBs compete efficiently against the private sector banks (PVBs)? These are some of the questions, which have been answered by a chapter in the RBI Bulletin's August edition. Efficiency of PSBs Co-authored by Snehal S Herwadkar, Sonali Goel, and Rishuka Bansal (2022) of the Banking Research Division, Reserve Bank of...

-Newsclick.in The relatively new and fragile start-up ecosystem is not a solution to the larger problem of pauperisation of the working population of the country. In May 2022, a report in the magazine, The Economist, claimed that “a novel confluence of forces stands to transform India’s economy over the next decade, improving the lives of 1.4 billion people and changing the balance of power in Asia. Technological leaps, the energy transition, and...