-The Indian Express Innovation in vaccine production can have an impact only if it is accessible to all. Patents and access to life-saving drugs has always been an emotive and contentious issue. The right to healthy life is a moral minimum, and to find a rational basis to deny it is deeply offensive to the idea of life itself. At the same time, pharma corporations and institutions claim patents are a just...

-PTI India will need to front load its investments substantially to almost double the number of people on ARV treatment in less than five years, Minister for Health and Family Welfare, J P Nadda said at UNGA. United Nations: With over 80 per cent of the affordable and quality anti-retroviral drugs used globally to treat AIDS supplied by Indian pharmaceutical industry, India has sought flexibilities in IPR under a global trade...

-The Asian Age The much-quoted sentence, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics", was attributed to the 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli by American author Mark Twain. Although researchers could never find such a statement in any written work of Disraeli, the sentence gained universal popularity to signify how economists and other number-crunchers use the "persuasive power" of figures to make a political point or...

-Deccan Chronicle Prime Minister Narendra Modi may be patting himself on the back because President Barack Obama has agreed to India's position on food stockholding norms in World Trade Organisation (WTO). However, New Delhi seems to be bending over backwards to accommodate the American government and giant multinational corporations (MNCs) in the pharmaceutical industry, which will work to the detriment of our country's interests. In less than six months, the Modi government...

-The Times of India The man who has been appointed the chief economic advisor to the government of India, Arvind Subramanian, was until recently urging the US to initiate disputes against India before the World Trade Organisation and also seeking changes in provisions within Indian patent law aimed at preventing frivolous patenting and preventing pharma companies from getting extensions on patents by tweaking existing drugs and passing them off as innovations. Subramanian...