-Scroll.in Terms of agreement give private players 30-year lease over parts of government district hospitals. Niti Aayog and the Union ministry for health and family welfare have proposed a model contract to increase the role of private hospitals in treating non-communicable diseases in urban India. The agreement, which has been been shared with states for their comments, allows private hospitals to bid for 30-year leases over parts of district hospital buildings...

-The Indian Express For a country that aims to be a regional power, the data on child nutrition confirms that the situation is abysmal. Save for Bihar, six of the seven states with the highest incidence of stunting, for example, are ruled by the BJP or the BJP and its allies – Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Bihar. After an agonising wait of over ten years, the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: An industry body and medical experts have decried a government proposal to replace gelatin with cellulose to encapsulate drugs, calling it an impractical idea that needlessly injects the vegetarian-non-vegetarian debate into medicines. The Punjab Haryana Delhi (PHD) Chamber of Commerce and Industry today said gelatin had been used for over a century and made up 95 per cent of capsule formulations worldwide, and cautioned that the proposal to...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: For every 100 hospitalised pediatric patients across India who may need a common antibiotic called ampicillin to fight infections, chances are it won't help 95 of them. In 75% of hospitalised children, especially those younger than one month old, another common antibiotic, gentamycin, may not work. The reason, according a recent study by pediatricians of Apollo Hospital in Navi Mumbai, is that antibiotic resistance has risen to...

-Livemint.com All our solutions in agriculture, besides management issues, are going to come from science and technology, says Deepak Pental, innovator of GM mustard Last week, the environment ministry’s regulator, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), cleared the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) mustard, leaving it to the government to take a final call. If approved, it will be India’s first food crop developed using transgenic technology, 15 years after Bt...