-The Hindustan Times Bollywood star Aamir Khan had two simple prescriptions for a Parliamentary committee to reduce high health costs for citizens. First, make doctors prescribe generic medicines rather than brands. Second, set up a regulator to ensure big pharmaceutical don’t take over smaller ones and monopolise the medicine market. Khan and his team were invited on Thursday by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce headed by BJP MP Shanta Kumar, which...

Several studies in India have shown that more than 40 per cent of foodgrain meant for the poor is pilfered on the way. In order to ensure that food reaches the needy and the hungry across the country, the government has launched a series of steps to streamline the public distribution system (PDS). Among several initiatives being planned, especially in the light of the National Food Security Act under preparation, a...

-PTI Faced with acute shortage of storage capacity, the Centre today asked states to lift PDS foodgrains needed for at least six months and build intermediate godowns to ease pressure on Food Corporation of India godowns. "We have requested state governments to offtake at least six months of foodgrains needed for PDS. Our storage capacity of FCI is 64 million tonnes and our present stock is about 82-83 million tonnes," Minister of...

-The Hindu It lacks facility to store 20 million tonnes of grains, says Minister Crippled by the lack of storage facility for about 20 million tonnes of food grains, the Centre has asked States to lift PDS food grains necessary for at least the next six months. After participating in a seminar on ‘Food security – role of standards’, organised by the Bureau of Indian Standards here on Wednesday, Minister of State for...

-Live Mint Latest houselisting data demonstrates a visible growth in the material well-being of the two groups Indians, all of them, across class and caste, traded up over the past decade, a period of rapid and record economic growth—that’s the counter-intuitive message in the latest update to Census 2011. According to the so-called houselisting data released by the census, scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) have, like the rest of the country,...