-Hindustan Times It’s a paradoxical fact. Families become smaller as better nutrition, vaccination and healthcare ensure couples lose fewer children to malnutrition and infections, such as diarrhoea, pneumonia, sepsis and tuberculosis India’s most comprehensive report card on health released earlier this year shows India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped from an average of 2.7 children per women in 2006 to 2.2 a decade later. Around two in three states that are...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: An industry body and medical experts have decried a government proposal to replace gelatin with cellulose to encapsulate drugs, calling it an impractical idea that needlessly injects the vegetarian-non-vegetarian debate into medicines. The Punjab Haryana Delhi (PHD) Chamber of Commerce and Industry today said gelatin had been used for over a century and made up 95 per cent of capsule formulations worldwide, and cautioned that the proposal to...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's drug pricing rules allow companies to inflate the maximum retail prices of medicines, including life-saving drugs, costing patients thousands of additional rupees while offering slices of the profits to stockists, chemists, and hospitals. Quotations received by hospitals from drug companies' representatives offering discounts on maximum retail prices (MRPs) of medicines provide what some doctors and patients' rights advocates say is fresh evidence for excessive profiteering in India's...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: With just a day to go before the roll out of goods and services tax (GST) in India from July 1, the country's drug industry fears that there may be a temporary shortage of medicines as many traders and chemists are yet to comply with the norms. Though the All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists, which represents over 8 lakh chemists, has assured the government...

-The New Indian Express THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Goods and Services Tax (GST), which is said to benefit Kerala in terms of life saving allopathic drugs, is set to spell doom for ayurvedic medicines and products with the proposed 12 per cent tax slab. With the high tax incidence, ayurvedic products and medicines will be out of reach of the common man. The doctors say most of the drugs used for degenerative diseases, allergy...