-The Economic Times The fear of drought in India has abated with late precipitation of the monsoon in September this year. However, the country continues to suffer from a drought of formalised tabulated data of agro items on a real-time or monthly basis, though many estimates continue to fatigue the print and electronic media.  Red or green prices flashing on computer screens are taken for 'granted', but the discovery of future or...

-Outlook Could scientists have got the impacts of climate change on food supply wildly wrong? I believe we might have made a mistake: a mistake whose consequences, if I am right, would be hard to overstate. I think the forecasts for world food production could be entirely wrong. Food prices are rising again, partly because of the damage done to crops in the northern hemisphere by ferocious weather. In the US, Russia...

-The Times of India India will, for the first time, put a cap on the maximum price at which essential drugs, like some commonly used anti-AIDS and anti-cancer drugs, besides a horde of painkillers, anti-TB drugs, sedatives, lipid lowering agents and steroids, can be sold in the country. In a landmark decision, a group of ministers (GoM) headed by agriculture minister Sharad Pawar on Thursday cleared the proposal to bring all 348...

-The Hindu A 2012 WHO study ranks India third — behind Myanmar and Bangladesh — among countries that fail to provide health cover to people. A 2011 study reported in The Lancet on ‘Healthcare and equity’ confirms this: every year, at least 39 million people here fall into poverty due to private out-of-pocket health expenditure. A vast majority of Indians do not have access to healthcare or essential drugs. By the...

-Frontline Health activists say the health chapter of the Twelfth Plan document exaggerates the role of the private sector in providing health care. The draft chapter on health for the Twelfth Five Year Plan document not only is grossly inadequate in its approach but exaggerates to unrealistic levels the role of the private sector in providing health care. It invokes the concept of universal health care (UHC), but, critics say, it...