-The Indian Express Farm incomes may not revive despite good monsoon. There are new challenges for policymakers. India’s per capita calorie demand has been falling for at least the last 30 years. Most people do a double-take when they hear that. One can’t debate the fact much: National Sample Surveys every five to seven years have documented this. What we can debate are the reasons behind this: In their 2009 paper Angus...

-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the Poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...

-The Times of India Mumbai: In an audit of 11 leading private charitable hospitals in the city, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India has found that seven were wrongly billing Poor patients and charging hefty deposits during admission. Most hospitals reserved less than the stipulated number of beds for the Poor, thereby depriving many of quality healthcare. The charity commissioner too has been pulled up for bad implementation of...

-The Hindu Jaipur: Calling upon BRICS countries to strengthen “cooperative mechanisms”, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan on Saturday said a united front would help in the successful implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Much of India’s development agenda was mirrored in the SDGs, Ms. Mahajan said. Inaugurating the first meeting of the BRICS Women Parliamentarians’ Forum at the Rajasthan Assembly here, Ms. Mahajan said while India had chosen the path of...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's regulatory body for medical education, beleaguered by allegations of corruption and performance failures, today announced plans to create a digital register of doctors across the country and track ghost, or fake, faculty in medical colleges. The Medical Council of India (MCI) will update its national register of medical practitioners within six months and use a computer network to monitor in real time the daily attendance patterns of...