-The Times of India MUMBAI: The government on Thursday issued the long-pending drug price control order, paving the way for the implementation of national pharmaceutical pricing policy, which will lead to a reduction in prices of medicines on an average by 20-25%, and in some life-saving ones, by up to 80%. Prices of 652 formulations under 27 therapeutic areas like anti-allergic (cetrizine), cardiac (aten), gastro-intestinal medicines (ocid), pain-killers ( paracetamol) and anti-diabetic...

-The Hindu It cannot get any worse than this. Over three lakh newborns in India die on the very first day of their birth. With this the country ranks as number one in terms of first day of birth mortality; its share in global first-day deaths stands at 29 per cent. The appalling state of Indian health care to which this speaks is further highlighted by the fact that the...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Supreme Court judgment on the Novartis-Glivec case is remarkable because it has gone beyond the specific technical and legal issues surrounding patents and has put the matter in a much larger political and economic perspective. The deeper implication of the judgment is that it is not only justified to deny patents when incremental innovation is trivial as in the Glivec case. The judgment has linked the...

-Frontline   The Supreme Court's ruling against Novartis' patent claim for the cancer drug Glivec paves the way for generic drug companies to keep crucial, life-saving drugs affordable to the common people. By V. VENKATESAN IN their 112-page judgment delivered on April 1, Justice Aftab Alam and Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai of the Supreme Court began with a simple proposition: in order to understand what the law really is, it is essential to...

The recent Supreme Court judgment dismissing pharma giant Novartis’ claim for patent protections in India for its award-winning and prohibitively priced anti-leukemia drug Glivec has renewed the focus on accessibly-priced drugs – in particular the failure of the Indian public healthcare system and health policy to ensure affordable drugs for all. Studies show that as much as 70% of health spending in India comes from out-of-pocket payments, with 50-80% of...