-The Business Standard Drugs are unaffordable, but price control is the wrong answer There is little doubt that medicines in India are too expensive for most of the population. For the poorest 20 per cent of Indians, the expenditure on medicines alone is 85 per cent of what they spend on their health, according to the National Sample Survey. A World Bank study on the subject found that just out-of-pocket medical costs...

-The Business Standard NPPA to soon notify prices in line with new pharma pricing policy Some key cancer drugs, antibiotics and medicines to treat cardiovascular diseases and tuberculosis are set to become cheaper by up to 50 per cent within the next 45 days. The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) will soon notify prices of as many as 150 packs of essential medicines in line with the new pharma pricing policy, according...

-IPS News ROME: The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades. After all, declining food prices in the second half of the 20th century, thanks to increasing production, were not enough to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, many governments invested a...

-The Economic Times Criticism of the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) has led to the government dropping the idea of issuing an Ordinance and, instead, saying it would try to get the Bill passed in a special session of Parliament. But doubts persist over the very concept of the Bill. Is it not extravagant to subsidise food for such a large part of the population when the poor constitute only 30 per...

-The Business Standard Not so efficiently or transparently but there is progress and hope, besides showcasing likely problems with the Centre's own law Mahasamund (Chhattisgarh): The UPA government at the Centre has been mulling hard on ways to enact its Food Security Bill, even as the Chhattisgarh government has completed six months of enacting a like law, one providing 35 kg of rice a month at Rs 2 a kg to all...