Their ongoing negotiations remain shrouded in secrecy, but there are already reports that India and the European Union (EU) will have a free-trade agreement ready by the end of August, and that they will be putting signatures to it before the end of 2010. Yet it is a potential development that is causing more nervous chatter than joyous jitters here in India, where drug manufacturers in particular have raised concerns over...

Mahyco-Monsanto challenges State's move on royalty fee.  “In the last one decade, the cost of seeds for several crops has gone up by more than 400 per cent.” The National Seeds Association of India (NSAI) has filed a petition in the Andhra Pradesh High Court challenging the State Government order that fixed the maximum sale price (MSP) of Bt cottonseed at last year's levels, even as several farmers' organisations and non-governmental...

India has asked the World Health Organisation to explain media reports that the A (H1N1) influenza is a false pandemic. Making an intervention at the WHO Executive Board meeting, now on in Geneva, Union Health and Family Welfare Secretary K. Sujatha Rao said such reports were adversely impacting the public health measures being taken by countries. She called for greater transparency in the terms and conditions on which international manufacturers were...

Educating disadvantaged and vulnerable groups is key  In the face of imports posing a competition to domestic manufacturing, the government has decided to come up with a National Consumer Policy to ensure uniform national and international standards in the various arms of the Central and State governments, the regulatory bodies and on consumer fora, and to lay down the guiding principles of complaint resolution. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)will...

Drug companies in India will be prohibited from handing out cash or gifts or stand-alone entertainment to doctors under a code of ethics proposed by industry associations to govern the marketing of medicines. But the code has run into rough weather even before it has been adopted, with at least two industry associations disassociating themselves from the document, tabled at a meeting called today by the government’s department of pharmaceuticals. The two...