-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's drug pricing rules allow companies to inflate the maximum retail prices of medicines, including life-saving drugs, costing patients thousands of additional rupees while offering slices of the profits to stockists, chemists, and hospitals. Quotations received by hospitals from drug companies' representatives offering discounts on maximum retail prices (MRPs) of medicines provide what some doctors and patients' rights advocates say is fresh evidence for excessive profiteering in India's...

-Livemint.com A CSDS survey shows that the public perception about job growth is worse than what it was during the second term of the UPA government Negative perception about jobs could become the Achilles heel of the Narendra Modi-led Union government, a recent survey conducted by research group Lokniti at the New Delhi-based Centre for Developing Societies (CSDS) seems to suggest. The “Mood of the Nation” survey of more than 11,000 respondents across...

-PTI New Delhi: The government has decided not to hike the prices of foodgrains sold under the food law via ration shops for one more year. Under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), which was passed in 2013 during the previous UPA regime, there is a provision for revision of the issue prices of foodgrains every three years. At present, the government supplies highly subsidised foodgrains at Rs. 1-3/kg to over 81 crore...

-Newsclick.in Forget 50 percent profit over the cost of production, the farmers were forced to sell their produce at well below the minimum support price and the cost of production, pushing them deeper into debt. Farming turning increasingly unviable across vast swathes of India, and the Narendra Modi-led government not delivering on the BJP’s election promise to “make agriculture rewarding” lie behind the massive protests that have rocked several BJP-ruled states in...

-Livemint.com Madhya Pradesh farmers are unhappy that outsiders are misled by claims made by chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan Indore, Harda, Mandsaur (MP): Ghanshyam Singh Pipawat, 45, a farmer from the Ujjain district of Madhya Pradesh, has a question for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “When Modi declared notebandi, he said this would be the last time people will have to stand in line. Then why am I standing in a 2-km-long line to...