India is taking proactive measures and ready to make concessions to ensure a successful conclusion of the Doha round of multilateral trade talks, an official said here Tuesday. Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma is scheduled to meet World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director-General Pascal Lamy, chairs of the sub-groups on agriculture, industrial products and services and ambassadors of various informal groupings at the WTO headquarters in Geneva Wednesday to push for...

India may seek the setting up of a special panel within the World Trade Organization to resolve the dispute with the European Union (EU) over the seizure of generic drug exports. The commerce ministry is ready to push for this at the WTO in the next week after months-long consultations with the concerned authorities, said a ministry official familiar with the development. Commerce secretary Rahul Khullar said both sides are still talking...

India has been ranked 67, way below neighbouring countries like China and Pakistan, in a new global hunger index by the International Food Policy Research Institute. The index, released on Monday, rated 84 countries on the basis of three leading indicators -- prevalence of child malnutrition, rate of child mortality, and the proportion of people who are calorie deficient. China is rated much ahead of India at the ninth place. The 2010 Global...

Even as India and the European Union (EU) inch closer to threshing out a free-trade agreement, the unresolved issue of seizures by EU member countries of Indian generic drugs on their way to other destinations continues to sour relations between the two. Over a score of such incidents of unlawful confiscation of Indian drug shipments by European customs authorities have occurred in the past three years. Ironically, most of such...

Activist and academic Raj Patel’s profile proudly notes that he has worked for the World Bank and the WTO, and protested against them both around the world. A visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Centre for African Studies, Patel’s latest offering to the literary world—The Value of Nothing—is a New York Times bestseller. In an interview with Ashish Kumar Sen, Patel says beating the drum of India...