-Livemint.com Govt plans to?help firms revamp manufacturing units,?refurbish machinery,?ensure subsidized power in bid to produce drugs such as penicillin at competitive rates New Delhi: The Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP), during a meeting on Wednesday, urged pharma companies to strive for self-sufficiency in critical drugs like penicillin, rifampicin and insulin, in a sign of government concern over India’s dependence on Chinese imports. A large number of so-called active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), or bulk drugs,...

-The Indian Express With the scheme floundering, the Centre is now planning to shift focus to district-level schemes to yield better results in the short-term for its skilling initiative. The government’s flagship skilling scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), is struggling to achieve end-results. Data for the PMKVY scheme until the first week of July 2017 reveals that out of a total 30.67 lakh candidates who had been trained or...

-The Hindu An immediate stimulus is needed to regain the momentum to get India back to 8% growth The government’s move this past week to publish economic data for the April to June quarter of this year needs a look. The real growth of GDP, i.e. after removing the impact of inflation, was only 5.7%, much lower than expected. For the past six consecutive quarters, the growth rate has gone down steadily,...

-The Hindu Fifty years since the Green Revolution, the architect of the reform highlights the crisis facing Indian agriculture today It is 11 years since agronomist M.S. Swaminathan handed over his recommendations for improving the state of agriculture in India to the former United Progressive Alliance government, at the height of the Vidarbha farmer suicides crisis, but they are still to be implemented. To address the agrarian crisis and farmers’ unrest across...

-The Economic Times Data suggests that India's unemployed youngsters are not looking for jobs. In January 2017, there were 408.4 million employed people in the country. The number of those who were unemployed and seeking jobs was 25.9 million. Seven months later, by the end of July, the number of employed fell to 405.4 million. But the number of those looking for jobs also fell to 13.7 million, according to a report...