-Down to Earth Death and injury prevention get little attention To address the problem of road safety, the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has published a draft Road Transport and Safety Bill for public comments and suggestions. If passed by Parliament, it would replace the existing Motor Vehicles Act of 1988. While the bill should be aiming for zero mortality, it has set a target to save 200,000 lives in...

-Deccan Chronicle Hyderabad: Temperatures will go up and the productivity of farmlands will come down in future. This could Lead to a food crisis, warned the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fifth assessment report. With increasing temperatures IPCC has also cautioned that in the rice bowls of South India heat stress on the rice crop is already approaching critical levels. The report warned that the winter yield of some crops...

-Livemint The petition challenged NPPA's decision of withdrawing its internal guideline to set prices of non-essential drugs New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday refused to entertain a petition challenging a decision by the country's drug price regulator to withdraw its internal guideline to set prices of non-essential drugs. Earlier this year, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) issued a guideline empowering itself to cap the prices of 108 non-essential drugs, attracting...

-TheGoan.net As had been anticipated, on October 18, the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to decontrol the prices of diesel, the most widely-used petroleum product in the country. Riding on an unexpected fall in world prices of crude oil, the government was able to simultaneously announce a sharp fall in consumer prices of diesel by Rs 3.37 per litre (in Delhi). But the decision...

-The Business Standard   NC Saxena, a former member of the National Advisory Council believes that the regulatory regime in the states continues to be oppressive. In an e-mailed interview with Aditi Phadnis, Saxena says that the fundamental problem in India is the low tax-GDP ratio and neither the last government nor the current one seems interested in increasing revenues. Edited excerpts: * The new government appears to be watering down a lot...