Covid 2.0 Rampages India As Top Echelon Policy Makers Ignore Science

‘India is in the endgame of COVID,’ announced the union health minister of India, just in the last month – March 08, 2021. Although, it was then clearly known to medical fraternity that today’s Covid vaccines won’t be magic bullets against rapidly … Continue reading

India Being World’s Third largest Covid Vaccine Maker: Will All Indians Benefit?

Apprehensions on the time of availability notwithstanding, equitable access to Covid vaccines for all, remain the best hope to leash the deadly virus, as the pandemic overwhelms the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) ‘Coronavirus Update 37’ of October 06, … Continue reading

NHPS: “One Nation, One Scheme is Enticing”, But Will It Work?

Yet another slogan: “One nation – One Universal Health Coverage (UHC)” would indeed be enticing for many, including India. Nevertheless, that’s just a hope. Let’s now try to get a message out of what has been recently happening around this … Continue reading

Mental Health Problem: A Growing Concern In The Healthcare Space Of India

A thud! Something fell from high above! In no time, a bright young life of just a 32-year-old highly accomplished professional – a widely admired soul, vanished in the thin year, for good, mostly unnoticed in the quiet neighborhood, initially. … Continue reading

Restructure, reposition and empower the DoP to deliver more to the nation: Break the Silos

A news item on July 25, 2011 reported, “DoP (Department of Pharmaceuticals) moots National Authority for Drugs & Therapeutics (NADT) with Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) under it”. If I recall, some years ago, a Government of India (GoI) … Continue reading

Why does the Government divert focus on to fringe issues to address critical healthcare concerns of the nation?

The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry of the Government of India has recently initiated a public debate through a ‘Discussion Paper on Compulsory Licensing (CL) of Patented Pharmaceutical Products’. The key … Continue reading

To prevent ‘counterfeit medicines’ from reaching the patients is the nation’s public health responsibility: Are we still in a denial mode to even accept the existence of this public health menace?

In November 7, 2009, Financial Express reported with a headline,”Generic drug companies see a bitter pill in counterfeit“, because some believe that it has an in-built intellectual property right connotation. The dictionary definition: The word ‘counterfeit’ may be defined as … Continue reading

Healthcare reform process and policy measures to reduce socio-economic inequalities should be implemented in tandem for optimal economic progress of a nation.

Important research studies indicate that health of an individual is as much an integral function of the related socio-economic factors as it is influenced by the person’s life style and genomic configurations.It has now been well established that socio-economic disparities … Continue reading