-Business Today "I want it back," says Sharada Begum. The 67-year-old woman is a member of one of the 100 households of Raghubir Nagar, a resettlement colony in west Delhi, chosen to participate in a pilot scheme that aimed to turn the public distribution system (PDS) on its head. Through all of 2011, these households had Rs 1,000 transferred every month to a woman member's bank account in lieu of rice, wheat,...

-PTI The Supreme Court on Monday expressed concern over alleged illegal clinical trial of drugs in the country, saying its "unfortunate" that humans were being treated as "guinea pigs". A bench headed by Justice R M Lodha pulled up the Centre and the Madhya Pradesh government for not filing their response on PILs alleging large-scale illegal drug trials in the state and other parts of the country. The bench said, "There has to...

-The Indian Express   Pinki Pramanik’s ordeal must force us to rethink the notion that gender is rigidly bipolar The story of Pinki Pramanik and her partner can be pieced together like any other story of intimacy gone bad. After all, human beings invariably encounter pain and betrayal in intimate relationships, just as they encounter joy and desire. No relationship is free of power, whether produced by individual personalities or by social structures...

Tuberculosis re-emerges as a major threat as new drug-resistant strains develop because of mismanagement of the disease. At the beginning of the year, doctors at Mumbai’s P.D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre reported that they had 12 patients infected with TDR-TB, or totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, a condition in which the TB bacilli is resistant to all first- and second-line drugs used in the conventional treatment of the disease. Panic...

-The Indian Express India may not be a testing hub for Big Pharma. But informed consent must be non-negotiable Figures released by the World Health Organisation, which show that 10 Indian subjects of clinical field trials die every week, have rekindled concerns that this country has become a testing hub for Big Pharma. Ironically, the same figures deflate this persistent fear, revealing that only 1.5 per cent of global trials have been...