-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 Indian Express The study compared pre-monsoon water level data for 1,487 wells selected from across Maharashtra with the decadal mean between 2006-2015. This study indicated a decline in ground water levels in 70 per cent of the wells monitored. Mumbai: The low intensity of rains across the state, especially in cities like Mumbai, may have led to consternation but Maharashtra faces a larger problem in the long run due to a...

-The Indian Express Punjab’s unique cattle breeding-cum-milk sale dairying model is under threat from gau rakshak activism and the Centre’s new animal trading rules. Randhawa and Gill are amongst Punjab’s many dairy farmers who have made the state into a major supplier of not just milk, but also milch animals. Gurdaspur (Punjab): “When there’s no land in our name, how would we now buy or sell cattle? Are they saying we...

-Hindustan Times First came demonetisation. Then, as banknotes slowly returned to circulation, a crackdown on illegal slaughterhouses in the state wrecked the local market for cattle. In Ilyas Khan’s eyes shine the pride of a grand past that give way to the clouds of an uncertain future. Two decades ago, the Thursday cattle market he runs in western Uttar Pradesh’s Banat saw traders troop in from faraway Delhi and Bihar. Today, the...

-The Hindu Business Line Automating the systems seems to be the biggest challenge New Delhi: With less than a week to go for the new indirect tax regime to kick in, small businesses are trying to understand the modalities of the goods and services tax (GST) as the compliance burden for them is set to significantly rise. Making a relaxation for small businesses, rules allow those with an annual turnover between Rs. 20...