-The New Indian Express These scheduled medicines constitute about 18 per cent of the total domestic pharma retail market, valued around Rs 1.5 trillion. NEW DELHI: Prices of over 800 drugs under the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM), including paracetamol, common antibiotics like azithromycin, doxycycline and medications for hypertension, diabetes and COVID-19 will increase by 10.7 per cent starting Friday. Activists slammed the move saying that it would hit the pockets of...

-The Tribune Poor workers cannot be punished by stopping the money, she says Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Thursday urged the BJP-led Centre to ensure proper allocation of the Budget for MGNREGA and payment of wages within 15 days of work, saying “poor workers cannot be punished by stopping the money”. Speaking in the Lok Sabha during Zero Hour, Gandhi said, "The payment of wages should be ensured for labourers within 15 days...

-Down to Earth Tough new conditions emerge in the compromise deal to ease WTO intellectual property barriers to production of COVID-19 medical tools We are back to square one. Back to the beginning after 18 months of a wearying, tortuous series of negotiations that carried on while millions of lives hung in the balance — and still do. The waiver of intellectual property (IP) rights on medicines, vaccines and diagnostics to fight the...

Online teaching was perhaps the most preferred mode (of the policymakers) for imparting education to school children in the last two years when schools faced closures thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was promoted by both the Central and State Governments when mobility almost came to a standstill (or got restricted in comparison to normal times) during the last two years. However, various studies (a list of those studies is...

-The Hindu There are many indices of proof that seriously contradict the tall claims of employment generation in India Reports on and the visuals of the recent agitations by railway job applicants reveal a widespread problem of massive job insecurity among India’s youth. Alarming figures of unemployment have been recurrent even before the huge dislocation unleashed by lockdowns imposed in 2020-21 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much before the pandemic,...