Feature Article

A new scheme by the district administration of Agra has increased people's participation in monitoring of govt schools. The results are encouraging.

This paper reviews theoretical and empirical literature that originated predominantly during and after TRIPS, focusing on the influence of changes in patent protection on developing countries. Previous studies identify two channels of gain for developing countries, from strong patent rights. Firstly, the promotion channel whereby, patent rights affect innovativeness of the South and concomitantly its economic growth. Theoretical studies do not give unambiguous hypotheses concerning the influence of patent protection on domestic innovation leaving it for empirical investigation.

In recent years, patenting has been considered one of the major drivers for enhancing national competitiveness and most of the advanced countries have been more actively enforcing patent protection. However, the indicators proposed in previous studies have not been able to deal adequately with the various dimensions of patenting, rather focusing on patent application counts. Therefore, in this research, a comprehensive patent performance indicator is proposed to provide a yardstick by which government policymakers can evaluate the whole process of converting patents into economic assets.

This study proposes a comprehensive noise abatement programme following the best practicable and economical option (BPEO) for implementation in metro city like Delhi for reducing annoyance and ill effects of traffic noise. It reviews potential applications of noise control barriers and vegetation for reducing road traffic noise and presents a design morphology and decision matrix using TOPSIS (Technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) approach for selection of appropriate sound barriers.

This study presents biogas production from fruit wastes at ambient temperature using anaerobic batch digester (500 ml). Co-digestion of fruit wastes were carried out with rice bran and cow dung. Biogas production from different samples was as follows: Sample A (fruit waste), 363; sample B (fruit waste, 75% + cow dung, 25%), 405; sample C (fruit waste, 75% + rice bran, 25%), 315; and sample D (fruit waste, 50% + rice bran, 25% + cow dung, 25%), 381 ml. From chromatographic studies, sample B has maximum methane content (80%) and sample C has maximum carbon-di-oxide content (50%).

Replacement of caloric beverages with noncaloric beverages may be a simple strategy for promoting modest weight reduction; however, the effectiveness of this strategy is not known. The authors compared the replacement of caloric beverages with water or diet beverages (DBs) as a method of weight loss over 6 mo in adults and attention controls (ACs).

Noncommunicable diseases pose an increasingly high burden of disease that threatens economic and social development, yet cost-effective health interventions exist. World leaders recognized the compelling case for action with the declaration at the United Nations high level meeting on noncommunicable diseases in September 2011. Since that meeting, the World Health Organization

In recent years, there has been much work done due to increasing recognition that children need better medicines. The United States of America and the European Union have adopted regulations to encourage research and development of medicines for children; the World Health Organization (WHO) has been promoting “Make medicines child size”; and researchers and academics are starting to respond to the many unanswered questions about medicines for children, through research and international collaboration.

The objective of the study was to determine how data on water source quality affect assessments of progress towards the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target on access to safe drinking-water.

The objective of the study was to develop two practical methods for measuring the affordability of medicines in developing countries.