-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The so-called mohalla clinics, or neighbourhood health centres, are an important part of the ruling Aam Aadmi Party’s electoral campaign. AAP had promised 1,000 across Delhi, but opened just 189 till December last year, attributing the failure to start the rest to bureaucratic hurdles. TOI visited eight mohalla clinics in north, east and central Delhi to find that while patients were mostly satisfied with the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Around 40% of the essential medicines in India with lowest MRP are priced significantly higher than estimated production costs, an assessment by the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows highlighting the “exorbitant” profiteering by pharmaceutical companies and the scope for lowering prices of drugs. While innovative and newer drugs for cancer, hepatitis C and rare diseases are out of reach of many due to their unaffordable prices,...

-Newsclick.in In an interview, the ‘father’ of India’s Green Revolution, says while technology is necessary, policies on procurement and public distribution are far more important in making agriculture economically viable and sustainable in the country. No one has played a more instrumental role in India’s self-sufficiency in food production than Dr MS Swaminathan — world-renowned agricultural scientist, known as the ‘Father of Green Revolution in India’. After getting a PhD from Cambridge...

-The Hindu CDSCO sends letter to manufacturers Alerted by the Union Health Ministry’s pharmaceutical watchdog, the National Co-ordination Centre of the Pharmacovigilance Programme of India (PvPI), on adverse reactions that were being reported from some commonly-used antibiotics, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) has now asked manufacturers to ensure that this information be made available to the general public. CDSCO has written to drug manufacturers, to mention in leaflets inserted into drug...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In what is being seen as an attempt to delay launch of low priced generic medicines, multinational drug makers have asked the government to create a registry providing information about all drug applications pending manufacturing and marketing approval. The proposal, if accepted by the government, will help ‘big pharma’ pre-emptively challenge generic drug makers in court for allegedly infringing upon their patents and in turn blocking...