-The Hindu The Supreme Court judgment on Glivec is a blow for a patent regime with a higher threshold of inventiveness On April 1, 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the Intellectual Property Appellate Board's decision to deny patent protection to Novartis's application covering a beta crystalline form of IMAtinib -the medicine Novartis brands as Glivec, and which is very effective against the form of cancer known as chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). The...

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...

The ongoing droughts and water crises in Maharashtra and Gujarat point to the multiple conflicts the beleaguered and scarce resource of water is likely to spark in the coming years. India is today the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, but it is clear that how we extract, harvest, distribute and manage our most precious resource cannot proceed along usual lines. The unsustainable over-extraction is heralding a fall in the water-table and...

-The Hindu The dark cloud of 1984 still hangs low over senior Congress leader Jagdish Tytler, but despite a judicial inquiry's findings against him in 2005, no credible prosecution of the former minister has been launched to date for his alleged role in instigating the anti-Sikh massacres that took the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent persons in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The Central Bureau of Investigation...

-The Times of India   CHITALIYA (RAJKOT): In the villages of Jasdan taluka in drought-hit Saurashtra, dalit women prefer to remain silent. That's for the fear of the upper castes in a state whose chief minister Narendra Modi is busy trying to conjure up an eclectic IMAge to subserve his perceived prime ministerial ambitions for 2014 polls. "Those people (upper castes) will abuse us again if we speak," mumbled one of the women,...