-Live Mint Apex court expresses concerns about drug trials being permitted on humans without comprehensive rules to regulate the approval process New Delhi: The apex court on Monday directed the health ministry to justify its approval for 162 global clinical trials in India, increasing the uncertainty faced by the nation's $500 million clinical research industry. The Supreme Court expressed its concerns about drug trials being permitted on humans without comprehensive rules to...

-The Indian Express Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has more than one reason to cheer the Raghuram Rajan committee report's ranking of states on composite development. Apart from being put close to the bottom of the ladder in the new index of underdevelopment, Bihar also scores near the top in "performance", that is, the reduction of underdevelopment - a most sensible parameter introduced in the report - far ahead of Narendra...

-The Hindu India's record of reducing hunger not good, admits NAC member Saxena About 842 million people, or roughly one in eight, suffered from chronic hunger in 2011-13, down from 868 million people reported for the 2010-12 period, according to the new State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2013 report released on Tuesday by United Nations food agencies. Interestingly, the agencies observed that while a vast majority of hungry people lived in...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday forced the Centre to stop clinical trials of 162 new drugs or chemical entities which had been cleared by the expert committee for testing on human beings in India. A bench of Justices R M Lodha and Shiva Kirti Singh was about to pass an order restraining the Centre from going ahead with these clinical trials when additional solicitor general Sidharth...

-The Hindu Launched in 2006 by the JD(U)-BJP government at the time, the scheme provided money to all girls who enrolled in Class IX through their schools to buy themselves a cycle. The first independent, scientific evaluation of the impact of Bihar's cycles-for-girls programme has shown that the scheme significantly improved female school enrolment and substantially reduced the gender gap in secondary school enrolment. The study, by Karthik Muralidharan, an economist at...