-The Hindu Reply to RTI appeal points to massive corruption in railways food procurement Mumbai: A recent application filed as a second appeal under the Right to Information (RTI) Act by an activist has revealed that the Central Railway's catering department purchased certain food items to stock their warehouses at several times the maximum Retail price. After railway authorities failed to share information on purchase of food items sought in his RTI application,...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Doctors and public health groups have come together to suggest that the government should phase out branded drugs in a calibrated manner and ban differential pricing under different brands to promote generic drug prescriptions. This comes in the wake of PM Narendra Modi's announcement that the government was working on a legal framework to ensure that doctors mandatorily prescribed low cost generic medicines. Following the PM's...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government's price cap on coronary stents has not deterred the health-care industry from continuing to offer hospitals profit opportunities of tens of thousands of rupees on other kinds of stents, concerned doctors and health-care industry representatives said.     The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), the government's price regulator, had on February 15 imposed a cap of about Rs 30,000 on coronary stents. But hospitals can continue to...

-The Indian Express Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants doctors to prescribe generic medicines over branded ones. KAUNAIN SHERIFF M answers key questions on the pricing of drugs and beyond. * What exactly has Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on generic drugs? Speaking in Surat on April 17, the Prime Minister referred to the Pradhan Mantri Bharatiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana (PMBJP), which aims to provide cheaper medical drugs to the people. “In the coming days,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Regulatory efforts to get doctors in India to prescribe medicines only through their generic names, initiated about 15 years ago, will need to overcome legal challenges and resistance from sections of doctors and the pharmaceutical industry, experts said. Senior pharmacologists and industry analysts have also said it will be misleading to presume that prescriptions with generic names will automatically translate into lower medicine bills for patients as studies...