-Tehelka Justice Sujata Manohar on how the Biotechnology Bill is fundamentally flawed IN THE last few years, regulatory systems across the board have been undergoing an overhaul to fit the needs of a new era. Likewise, new laws are being chalked out to meet new needs, and several are receiving flak owing to the loopholes and regressive grounds on which these have been drafted. The relatively more recent one to regulate modern...

Now, Bollywood movies won't have to run a scroll with anti-tobacco messages each time a smoking scene is shown. India has for the time-being shelved a notification that had come into effect on November 14, 2011. The notification had made it mandatory for all new movies that had scenes pertaining to smoking or tobacco use, to provide Health Warnings at the bottom of the screen all through the duration of the...

Smoking kills, but most smokers still don’t know how. One in two Indian smokers isn’t aware that tobacco addiction can lead to stroke and 38% that it can cause heart disease.   These are some of the startling findings of a World Heart Federation report that will be released at the World Congress of Cardiology (WCC) in Dubai on Saturday. India is high on tobacco addiction. It has 138 million smokers and 28%...

Nearly 138 million Indian smokers do not know that smoking tobacco causes stroke. As many as 92 million on the other hand aren't aware that tobacco causes heart disease. According to a report released on Friday by the World Heart Federation, half of all Chinese smokers and one-third of Indian and Vietnamese smokers are unaware of the risks tobacco poses to our heart. Awareness of the risk of second-hand smoke is even lower. Around...

India is coming under increasing pressure from the U.S. and the European Union for the strict patentability criteria it applies for medicines. AS was only to be expected, the two landmark decisions made by the Indian patent office in recent times concerning pharmaceutical patent cases have not gone down well with the multinational drug industry. First, there was the rejection in 2006 of the patent application by the Swiss multinational...