That this is the first time a compulsory licence has been granted in India is in itself important. INDIA'S long struggle to ensure access to affordable medicines for its people recently took a positive and interesting turn. In early March, just before he demitted office, Controller General of Patents P.H. Kurian passed an order on an application filed by Natco Pharma, headquartered in Hyderabad, requesting a licence to produce an anti-cancer...

PROFESSOR Shamnad Basheer joined the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata, in November 2008 as the first Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor in Intellectual Property Law. Before this, he was Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University law school and a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre (OIPRC).  He is the founder of several initiatives, including...

-The Times of India The Maharashtra government is under the scanner for lack of transparency in facilitating planned hill city of Lavasa in state's Pune district. The CAG report has slammed the state "for failing to adhere to regulations, amending existing laws for the project, disturbing the already ecologically fragile environment and violating green norms''. "The project seems to be driven by private interest and not by public interest," the report said. The...

Mamata Banerjee skipped today’s meeting on internal security but sought to extract her pound even in absentia. The Bengal chief minister asked the UPA government to bear the entire cost of deploying central forces for anti-Maoist operations in the states, arguing that Left-wing extremism (LWE) had “implications” for national security. “The LWE problem is not an ordinary law-and-order problem affecting a particular state. It has serious implications on national security. It would,...

Amit Kumar, an Indian journalist based in the eastern state of Bihar, received a tip in 2009 from a village called Manan Bigha just two kilometers away from his home. There was a man there dying from starvation, he was told. The situation was urgent. Mr. Kumar rushed off to visit the man, Kangresh Manjhi, and exhaustively documented his story. He learned how Mr. Manjhi, a lower-caste, landless laborer, was forced...