-Economic and Political Weekly The compulsory licence for Nexavar is only the beginning of a new battle over drug prices. The grant of a compulsory licence (CL) to Natco Pharma, a relatively small Indian pharmaceutical company, to manufacture and sell the cancer drug sorafenib (Nexavar) has been rightly hailed as a major step forward for public health and the wider availability of life saving medicines.   The German pharmaceutical company Bayer holds the patent...

The state government has proposed to spend more than Rs7,300 crore on the ailing agriculture sector — in desperate need of assistance after registering negative growth in the previous financial year — and on irrigation. However, this may not translate into direct assistance to farMers. Moreover, this year’s state budget continued to neglect dry land farming – which is of serious concern in view of erratic weather conditions – and has...

Ashish Bose is a veteran demographer whose expertise in analysing population data persuaded the forMer Prime Minister, the late Rajiv Gandhi to make him an advisor on issues ranging from urbanisation to poverty alleviation. He is best known for coining the term Bimaru (shorthand for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) for states with the worst socio-economic indicators. An author of 24 books, he is now working on a...

-The Economic Times Any estimate of poverty, more correctly of the poverty line that determines how many Indians live in poverty, is bound to be contentious. It is naive to believe that any estimate, whatever its methodology, will find unanimous acceptance.  Hence the decision to appoint yet another technical committee to estimate the poverty line will not achieve anything. It will Merely buy the government time and deflect some of the criticism...

The ongoing debate over the incidence of poverty in India, often assuming surreal proportions, shows that there is indeed a ‘philosophy of poverty’ guiding current economic reforms. The loot of our country’s resources that is taking place both through these reforms, which continue to widen gross inequalities, and through the open plunder of our resources for private gain — as reflected in the series of mega scams — require the legitimacy...