-The Times of India The government is all set to crack the whip on India's shameful pharma-doctor nexus. The National Development Council (NDC), led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, will meet on December 27 to discuss bringing a legislation requiring drug companies to mandatorily disclose payments made to doctors for research, consulting, lectures, travel and entertainment. Doctors involved in ghost writing to promote pharma products will also be disqualified. The official NDC document...

-Huffington Post As we start 2013, many people will be thinking about plans and promises to improve their diets and health. We think a broader collection of farmers, policy-makers, and eaters need new, bigger resolutions for fixing the food system -- real changes with long-term impacts in fields, boardrooms, and on plates all over the world. These are resolutions that the world can't afford to break with nearly one billion still...

-The Economic Times There is no need to get scared about losing internet freedom, at least till January 2015. That's the view of top telecom policy watchers, who closely monitored the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that ended in uncertainty earlier this month in Dubai. Policy experts say the changes affecting internet users in India, if any, would be slow and minor with little or...

-The Hindu ICAR “shielding errant officials” by delaying the report In a damning indictment of the way some Bt cotton varieties were developed and commercialised in the country, a committee headed by Prof. S.K. Sopory, Vice-Chancellor of JNU, found that indigenous Bikaneri Nerma (BN) Bt cotton variety was contaminated by a gene patented by Monsanto. Having found lapses in the “BNLA106 event”, the committee has held as “invalid” the data obtained from bio-safety...

-The Hindu ‘Governments must protect interest of producer, consumer’ The controversy regarding India’s permission to allow foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail and growing “land grab” in Africa by multinational corporations are being closely watched globally by agriculture experts, researchers and donors. At a workshop here on ‘Supporting Policy Research to Inform Agricultural Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia’ — which a few journalists from both regions were invited to attend —...