-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing funeral pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...

-The Hindu The lesson from the Supreme Court ruling on Gleevec is that pharmaceutical multinational corporations need to focus research on genuine innovations rather than on ways to evergreen their patents The much awaited Supreme Court judgment on Gleevec has been delivered. Novartis has failed in reversing the rejection of its patent. And, predictably - like a scratched record - there have been suggestions that pharma investments in India will dry...

-The Times of India PATNA: The Bihar government, which keeps crying for more central assistance, could not spend Rs 1472.61 crore in 2012 and surrendered 100 per cent funds in 192 schemes, depriving the beneficiaries of the benefits, according to the CAG report for 2011-12 presented in state assembly on Tuesday. Central funds for several schemes also remained unutilized, it said. The CAG also regretted the lack of objective planning in utilization...

-The Economic Times Should drug companies make clinical trials data public? All over the world, drug regulators are increasingly in favour of doing so, much to the discomfort of pharmaceutical companies, and the London-based European Medicines Agency (EMA) is the first mover in this regard. As the journal Nature reports, EMA is likely to do so by next year, at least for some clinical trials data. On April 19, all the...

-The Hindu The Justice Verma Committee report acts as a blueprint for the radical transformation of gender relations within the framework of constitutional guarantees and gender equality. However, the adoption of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 2013 by Parliament on March 19, 2013, does not go beyond legal change. Prof. Hasan argues that if political parties are serious about the rights of women, the Women's Representation Bill must be passed...