-The Hindustan Times New Delhi: A new study says that high particulate matter (PM) pollution reduces life expectancy by 3.2 years for 660 million Indians in polluted urban conglomerates, including Delhi, which means a loss of 2.1 billion life years. "The loss of more than two billion life years is a substantial price to pay for air pollution," says the study done by researchers at Chicago University, Yale University and Harvard University."This...

-PTI   In an alarming news about the quality of air in Delhi, a survey has found the deadly PM2.5 levels in the national capital was 10 times higher than the safety limit prescribed by the World Health Organisation. Air quality monitoring survey conducted by Greenpeace inside five prominent schools in the city also found that the PM2.5 levels were four times more against the prescribed Indian safety limits. "The real-time monitoring data from...

-The Indian Express "If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one." So said Fritz Machlup, a wise American economist several decades ago. His words remain as true now as they were then. For, the patent system is one of the most faulty legal regimes that one could possibly have conceived. It purports...

-PTI Cooperative society employing French technology to cater 2,000 litres of Sulabh Jal to over 300 families a day Gaighata (West Bengal): Once forced to drink arsenic-contaminated ground water, residents of a remote hamlet in West Bengal near the India-Bangladesh border are now purifying water from ponds and selling packaged safe drinking water to neighbouring villages. Using a new innovative technology from France, village co-operative society Madhusudankati Samabay Krishi Unnayan Samity has constructed...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: International health activists have joined their Indian counterparts in decrying what they say are Barack Obama's dual policy on big drug companies, pledging to break their stranglehold in the US but promoting their interests in India. The activists claimed yesterday that the India-US joint statement, issued during Obama's visit to India, contains signals that the Indian government could be preparing to weaken its intellectual property regulations on medicines,...