The country is clearly shaping its legislation to promote access to medicines by fostering generic production. INDIA'S approach to the revision of its Patents Act in 2005 is a clear example of a country shaping its legislation to promote access to medicines by fostering generic production. Although World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules made it mandatory for India to put in place a patent regime for medicines by 2005, nothing obliges...

Amit Kumar, an Indian journalist based in the eastern state of Bihar, received a tip in 2009 from a village called Manan Bigha just two kilometers away from his home. There was a man there dying from starvation, he was told. The situation was urgent. Mr. Kumar rushed off to visit the man, Kangresh Manjhi, and exhaustively documented his story. He learned how Mr. Manjhi, a lower-caste, landless laborer, was forced...

The arrest of Syed Mohammad Ahmad Kazmi in connection with the bomb attack on an Israeli embassy car raises many questions. AN uneasy silence fills the streets of B.K. Dutt Colony near the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Named after the revolutionary freedom fighter Batukeshwar Dutt, who, along with Bhagat Singh, threw bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly on April 8, 1929, the nondescript colony has been...

A bidi-smoking petty contractor who suddenly bought two Boleros and a former newspaper hawker who zipped about Chhattisgarh’s jungles in a Toyota may hold the key to a question bugging the custodians of national security. What the police want to know is: are business houses paying off the Maoists to be able to operate deep inside central India’s mineral-rich guerrilla zones? Chhattisgarh police say that when contractor B.K. Lala’s bank account suddenly...

-The Hindustan Times A day after a first-year MBBS student was found hanging in his hostel room at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), undergraduate students boycotting classes and other training programmes and sat outside the director’s office all day. A 2010 batch student, Anil Kumar Meena  failed to pass all three subjects in the first year. His attendance was also short, because of which the administration asked him...