Ignoring widespread concern over the safety, efficacy and cost of pentavalent vaccines, India’s central health ministry has, this month, approved inclusion of the prophylactic cocktail in the universal immunisation programme in seven of its provinces. Pentavalent vaccine doses, a cocktail of five antigens in a single shot, confers immunity against five paediatric diseases - diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis B and haemophilus influenza type b (Hib), with the last one considered particularly...

-The Economic Times India will have a normal monsoon this year, says the Met office. This is good news, even though the forecast does not rule out some slack during the second half of the season. What matters finally is the distribution of rainfall across space and time rather than the aggregate percentages. However, a good monsoon is only one side of the story to have a strong farm sector. Reforms are...

The economic crisis, the ecological crisis and the food crisis are a reflection of an outmoded and fossilised economic paradigm. It is a paradigm that grew out of mobilising resources for the war by creating the category of “growth”. It is rooted in the age of oil and fossil fuels. It is fossilised because it is obsolete, a product of the age of fossil fuels. If we have to address...

-PTI The government on Tuesday said it has agreed in-principle to deregulate diesel prices, but is not considering similar proposal for the cooking gas.  "Government has, in principle, agreed to make the prices of diesel market determined," Minister of State for Finance Namo Narain Meena said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.  While petrol prices are market-linked, the government fixes the rates of LPG, kerosene and diesel, which results in a...

Drug smugglers and third-world dictators laundering ill-gotten wealth through secretive banking systems in tax havens is an anachronistic image from crime novels. Leveraging US' remarkable success in compelling tax havens to block terrorist financing, the G20/OECD have successfully persuaded tax havens to improve tax transparency and participate in an international regime of information exchange.  All tax havens have committed to OECD standards for tax transparency and are executing Tax Information Exchange...