-The Economic Times Over the last decade the UPA government has tried to reduce poverty by legislating a regime of rights accompanied by the national rural employment guarantee (NREG) programme -spending Rs 1,70,000 crore on this strategy. This strategy would have been fine if the transformation of India from a strong currency, high growth and low inflation economy to aweak currency, low growth and high inflation economy had been accompanied by a...

-The New York Times CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - MODERN India is, in many ways, a success. Its claim to be the world's largest democracy is not hollow. Its media is vibrant and free; Indians buy more newspapers every day than any other nation. Since independence in 1947, life expectancy at birth has more than doubled, to 66 years from 32, and per-capita income (adjusted for inflation) has grown fivefold. In recent decades,...

-The Business Standard Drugs are unaffordable, but price control is the wrong answer There is little doubt that medicines in India are too expensive for most of the population. For the poorest 20 per cent of Indians, the expenditure on medicines alone is 85 per cent of what they spend on their health, according to the National Sample Survey. A World Bank study on the subject found that just out-of-pocket medical costs...

-Newsclick.in A few weeks back Fortune magazine and CNN carried a long online blog titled ‘Dirty Medicine' by Dinesh Thakur, a former employ of Ranbaxy, where he recounts how he came across several procedural and other lapses in the company's manufacturing facilities. Since then the Fortune blog has become one of the most widely circulated and commented upon business stories in the world. The story received attention as it came in the...

-Outlook As the Manmohan Singh government makes evident its unfriendliness to villages, the nation hurtles towards disaster. It's a danger no one wants to face. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been trying for years to make us believe that agriculture is a vast marshland in which a huge population is stuck ankle- to neck-deep and it is his duty to rescue them. "Our salvation lies in moving people out of agriculture," he...