For the poorest 20 per cent of Indians, the expenditure on medicines alone is 85 per cent of what they spend on their health, according to the National Sample Survey.
The Kraken COVID-19 variant accounts for almost 41 per cent of all Covid infections.
An expert panel of the country's drugs regulatory authority had recommended against granting such approval to the firm at this stage just two days ago, officials said.
The president said he had discussed with Prime Minister Modi on when the US would be able to send actual vaccines to India.
'If you keep on irritating the body by allowing all kinds of pollutants to get into it, the body cells are going to get irritated and cancer will come.'
The man had attended a stag party recently in Manali in Himachal Pradesh.
'Ideally, the efficacy data of all the trials should be there in the public domain, and as soon as possible.' 'It is difficult to understand the reason behind the authorisation.'
Events proved that on every count the RBI had accurately predicted both the damage and the lack of benefit. What the RBI was hiding was the fact that Modi had ignored its concerns -- all of which turned out to be true -- and gone ahead anyway, asserts Aakar Patel.
The Congress on Monday promised that a government led by it will conduct a nationwide caste census and implement 33 per cent reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies at the earliest, including adequate representation for women belonging to the OBC community.
'The tragedy with Indian Muslims is that they do politics from the heart, not from the head.'
'Are we so ready to believe that in this country whose virtues we constantly shout from the rooftops, there is no single person -- other than Modi -- in a minimum of 272 elected MPs with the talent and ability to lead this country?' asks Prem Panicker.
'I had done 23 years of very satisfying service -- 10 years in the police and 13 years in the Enforcement Directorate.' 'I had done law enforcement and thought the next step should be towards contributing to make good laws.'
A day after Dhaka was liberated on December 16, 1971, then US President Richard Nixon was told by his strategic advisor Henry Kissinger that he had 'saved West Pakistan,' according to confidential papers since declassified by the US department of state.
Dr Ashwani Mahajan, all India co-convenor of the Swadesh Jaagran Manch and an associate professor at the Delhi University, discusses the state of the Indian economy in an interview with Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier.
Let us see the problem for what it actually is: Illegal Immigration plain and simple, confined to the northeast with a definite communal slant that poses a national security risk and one that needs to be dealt with firmly and promptly by stringent identification (and deportation), says Vivek Gumaste.
"Lockdown and containment (measures) have been successful in keeping it low and preventing rapid spread," ICMR Director General Balram Bhargava said, citing the sero-survey on COVID-19 spread.
The comments come as the country's COVID-19 caseload surpassed the one crore mark, though the number of daily cases and daily fatalities have been continuously coming down.
'At the stage where we are in today in the country, by the time mass vaccination becomes available, it would be around the middle of next year.' 'Most of those people, who got infected this year, will be next year back to level zero -- once again susceptible.'
'This was Indian land the PLA advanced on and occupied.' 'The Chinese then 'negotiated' a pullback of their troops a small distance on Indian territory even as Indian jawans draw back further into India from the forward position.' 'An apparently satisfied Indian government says this is a great move for peace! How great is that for China!'
Accelerating quantity and quality of entrepreneurship towards benchmarks from high-performing countries and Indian states can create over 30 million women-owned enterprises, of which 12 million can generate employment, a joint report by Bain & Company and Google said.
The reason is that because of the hybrid immunity after three waves of natural infection and a large proportion of adults receiving both doses of COVID-19 vaccine, the susceptible pool has come down drastically, Lahariya said.
Supreme Court judge Sanjay Kishan Kaul on Monday recommended setting up of an 'impartial truth and reconciliation commission' to probe and report on human rights violations by both state and non-state actors in Jammu and Kashmir since the 1980s, saying the 'wounds need healing'.
'India cannot allow Beijing's policy of stabilising and destabilising the border at will to perpetuate its own ends.' A riveting excerpt from Manish Tiwari's 10 Flashpoints; 20 Years National Security Situations That Impacted India.
'We seem to be in a situation where we can do little, and nothing needs to be done anyway.'
Days after a Pentagon report said Beijing built a large village in a disputed territory in the Arunachal Pradesh sector, India on Thursday said it has neither accepted any illegal occupation of its territory by China nor has it accepted unjustified Chinese claims.
Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, who is heading the five-judge constitution bench which is hearing the matter, also touched upon the notion that only the very highly educated or elitist want fewer children.
It is necessary to have a dramatic increase in the number of rapid tests for COVID-19 conducted on a large number of people and that should become the basis for estimating the morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19, not relying only on hospital reports, says Professor K Srinivasan.
'As for tricky relations with China, India needs less of summitry type event management and more anticipatory analysis and management of events,' says Ambassador Jaimini Bhagwati.
This time Modi has no emotive message to take to the stump. Muscular nationalism doesn't work against the backdrop of China's successive inroads into Indian territory. Rising prices is a sore point that cuts across class and caste barriers; unprecedented levels of unemployment has the youth in a ferment. This has reduced the BJP campaign to a laundry list of recycled grievances and thinly veiled communal appeals, neither of which are working as well as they have in the past, argues Prem Panicker.
The health minister said states have also been advised to increase the whole genome sequencing of all positive cases for timely detection of newer variants, if any.
No government can 'ignore inclusiveness in a democracy', Montek Singh Ahluwalia tells Anjuli Bhargava.
'We are already exhausted, but we can't give up.' 'The battle is still on.' 'We will see some respite by December 2021.'
US-India Business Council President Nisha Biswal believes once the economic activity and demand resumes, India could hold the potential for diversification of supply chains and manufacturing.
'The vaccine policy should be such that all people should get the vaccine free.'
Epidemiologists point out that if there is no second wave, it means that the number of infected has surpassed the uninfected, reports Ruchika Chitravanshi.
'The BJP can kill two birds with one stone by wresting back control of the message; and the steps are fairly obvious. Once the media is neutral, there is a level playing field,' argues Rajeev Srinivasan.
'We have to take all preparations because the third wave is likely to start from September-October onward'
'There will be ups and downs, and we have to plan how we live with it now.'
The winds of nationalism laden with religion will now yield to those of concern over the stalled economy, unemployment, and a general malaise and unhappiness, predicts Shekhar Gupta.
In all likelihood, the next conventional Chinese attack on India would be preceded by a massive cyber attack designed to cripple Indian networks and interfere with our disaster-relief programmes.
