-The Business Standard Petrol decontrol has become a farce It will soon be two years since petrol was decontrolled, but few will happily celebrate this second birthday. The government-controlled oil companies that dominate the fuel market continue to sell petrol way below the market-determined price, exactly as was the case in the pre-decontrol era. The promise made then to decontrol diesel prices and allow periodic adjustment in prices of kerosene and liquefied...

-The Economic Times The government has allowed a local drugmaker to make and sell a patented cancer drug at a fraction of the price charged by Germany's Bayer AG, setting a precedent for more such efforts by Indian firms and heightening the global pharmaceutical industry's anxiety over the use of the controversial compulsory licensing provision.  The outgoing patent controller of India, PH Kurian, on Monday granted the country's first compulsory licence to...

-Reuters India's move to strip German drugmaker Bayer of its exclusive rights to a cancer drug has set a precedent that could extend to other treatments, including modern HIV/AIDS drugs, in a major blow to global pharmaceutical firms, experts say.  On Monday, the Indian Patent Office effectively ended Bayer's monopoly for its Nexavar drug and issued its first-ever compulsory license allowing local generic maker Natco Pharma to make and sell the drug...

-The Financial Express   Bhim can't understand what he's done wrong.   Before dawn every day he joins hundreds of wholesale traders at Delhi's Azadpur Mandi, a sprawling, chaotic market where trucks blare Bollywood music, porters haul huge brown sacks of fruit and vegetables and hawkers ply tea and cigarettes. His own trade is in rosy red apples, laced with calcium carbide. Bhim says he's been adding chemicals to his apples for years to artificially ripen...

Last month, the turmeric farmers of Maharashtra's Sangli district found themselves in a desperate situation. Oversupply had resulted in prices crashing in the local turmeric market, Asia's biggest, threatening their livelihood. And with several thousands growing the commodity across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, any meaningful strategy to halt the price crash meant involving a sizeable number of farmers.  That's when local farmer Atul Salunkhe, 31, had a brainwave. How...