-The Hindu Business Line From maker of versions of drugs, India's pharmaceutical industry has turned a top innovator Twenty years ago, Ranbaxy was a home-spun drug-maker. The Indian Patents Act allowed companies to make chemically-similar versions of innovative drugs. Visionaries in the pharmaceutical sector, like Parvinder Singh (Ranbaxy's key architect and member of its promoter family) and Anji Reddy (founder of Dr Reddy's Laboratories), were alive. And the pharmaceutical industry did not have...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Supreme Court judgment on the Novartis-Glivec case is remarkable because it has gone beyond the specific technical and legal issues surrounding patents and has put the matter in a much larger political and economic perspective. The deeper implication of the judgment is that it is not only justified to deny patents when incremental Innovation is trivial as in the Glivec case. The judgment has linked the...

-Economic and Political Weekly While the Supreme Court decision in the recent Novartis case has cleared the way for production of generic drugs in India, doctors have to prescribe cheaper alternatives to costly brands if patients with limited means are to benefit. What is being hailed as a victory in the struggle for affordable medicines in the country will actually be one only when there is a pro-patient slant to the...

-India Times An Indian has developed a unique smart-phone that can aid the blind and help them perform functions other than answering calls. Technology has definitely been a blessing to humans and smartphones have become the need of the day. With having everything from the daily wake-up call (read alarm) to good-night reads (ebooks) on your phone, it has become an essential, almost a basic need. However, there is a segment of population...

KEY TRENDS   • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8   • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...