-The Hindu Business Line From maker of versions of drugs, India's pharmaceutical industry has turned a top innovator Twenty years ago, Ranbaxy was a home-spun drug-maker. The Indian Patents Act allowed companies to make chemically-similar versions of innovative drugs. Visionaries in the pharmaceutical sector, like Parvinder Singh (Ranbaxy's key architect and member of its promoter family) and Anji Reddy (founder of Dr Reddy's Laboratories), were alive. And the pharmaceutical industry did not have...

-The Indian Express West Bengal is not new to chit fund scams. What is unique to the Saradha Group scandal is how it targeted the poorest and the most marginalised, leaving them on the verge of devastation. From 17-year-old agents who raised money from depositors to 50-year-old widows who invested money, the Saradha Group didn't discriminate in roping them in. Since the house of cards started collapsing, two agents and two...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Supreme Court judgment on the Novartis-Glivec case is remarkable because it has gone beyond the specific technical and legal issues surrounding patents and has put the matter in a much larger political and economic perspective. The deeper implication of the judgment is that it is not only justified to deny patents when incremental innovation is trivial as in the Glivec case. The judgment has linked the...

-The Hindu     Well-known feminist Kamla Bhasin says that Indian men will have to change, not to support women but to save themselves from being brutalised by centuries of exposure to patriarchy. "Mian, aap mein kuch kami hai" (Gentleman, there is something wrong with you)." Some months ago, when Kamla Bhasin, well-known feminist from Delhi, came up with this retort to Aamir Khan on his headline-grabbing tele-show Satyameva Jayate on saying that he...

-Frontline   The Supreme Court's ruling against Novartis' patent claim for the cancer drug Glivec paves the way for generic drug companies to keep crucial, life-saving drugs affordable to the common people. By V. VENKATESAN IN their 112-page judgment delivered on April 1, Justice Aftab Alam and Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai of the Supreme Court began with a simple proposition: in order to understand what the law really is, it is essential to...