-The Hindu Ranbaxy, one of India's largest pharmaceutical companies, has agreed to pay $500 million fines levied by U.S. authorities for selling adulterated drugs and lying to federal regulators in a case that is part of an ongoing crackdown on the quality of generic drugs flowing into the U.S. The deal struck on Monday, said to be the largest financial penalty against a generic drug company for violations of FDA standards, came...

-The Times of India The new office will give real time analysis of the government's social programmes, says Jairam Ramesh At a time when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is facing flak for a series of alleged corruption scams, the ministry of rural development that has an annual budget of approximately ` 800 billion has decided to go ahead and create an office of concurrent evaluation. The proposal for a...

-The Hindu   Investment in a scheme that guarantees rural employment with minimum wages should be seen as complementary and not alternative to development activities A recent paper by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has argued that the "push" factors of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) are not as Important as the economic growth "pull" factors, for increasing agricultural wages. The paper has received wide media...

-The Hindu Business Line   In much of the discussion on the turnaround after the Great Recession, attention has been focused on financial consolidation and the halting return to growth. Far less attention has been paid to the persistence of high and even rising unemployment and its sources. In the desperate search for evidence that the global recession has bottomed out and the recovery has arrived, the story told by the long-term trend...

-The Times of India A study on the causes of severe diarrhoea in young children, conducted at seven sites in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asian countries including India, has found that rotavirus is responsible for most such cases. The Global Enteric Multicenter Study (GEMS), published in the latest issue of Lancet, shows diarrhoeal disease, which is responsible for one in every ten child deaths during the first five years of life worldwide,...