Go looking for the institution in Mahmoodpur Nagaria, a village in Etah district of Uttar Pradesh, and this is what the Supreme Court was told you would find: an old building of two or three rooms standing alone in a field, nothing else visible around it, not properly maintained. On paper it was producing pharmacists, nurses, auxiliary nurse midwives, lab technicians and Ayurveda physicians. Its chairman was Bhagwan Das Singh Baghel, described in the order as an illiterate tea seller. Asked what went on at the college, he said he did not know. He did admit one thing: whenever the man said to be actually running the place put documents in front of him, he signed them, and he did it regularly.

Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah and Justice N.V. Anjaria picked the story out of a newspaper report while hearing a far larger case about how colleges and universities in India function. What came out of it is an advisory, and the way that advisory is addressed decides who carries the checking from here.

A first-year postgraduate was found dead inside the hostel bathroom at Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital in Sion at about 7:30 on Saturday evening. He had come from Karnataka to train. His room had stayed shut for hours, which is how it came to light. Police have registered an accidental death report, a procedural first step and not a finding, and the investigation is open.

By Sunday the BMC wing of the Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors had put out a statement, built on three numbers that were already published. The National Medical Commission’s own task force on the mental health of medical students found that 31.2% of postgraduate residents reported suicidal ideation, roughly one in three of the doctors you work beside. A peer-reviewed study MARD cited counted 105 suicide deaths among resident doctors in India between 2010 and 2019, about one every five weeks for ten years. And MARD says some rosters still run past 36 hours of continuous duty, longer than a day and a half without going home.

Its four demands are the ones it has made before. Duty hours that are regulated instead of settled ward by ward. Staffing that matches the workload. Rest periods written into the roster. Mental health support a resident can actually reach. Every one of those is a rostering decision with somebody’s signature under it, and none of it waits on a new law.

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If you need support: Tele-MANAS, the Government of India’s national mental health helpline, runs 24 hours a day on 14416 or 1-800-891-4416. Free, and in multiple languages.

She was attacked in Bhajanpura and taken to GTB, where both eyes were found damaged. Two days later she sought discharge and went to Sir Ganga Ram, waited close to three hours for an emergency bed, and beyond first-aid dressings the application in her case says she received no substantive treatment. The next day her family was told to prepare for discharge and find a hospital that could do what she needed; the reason given was that there is no dedicated burn ward. Another private hospital said much the same. An acid attack survivor who runs a rehabilitation foundation then took it to the Chief Justice’s bench as an urgent mention, and on 9 October five directions came back. One of them takes cost off the table completely. The statute underneath makes no exception for a hospital that lacks the specialised ward.

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That is the Drugs Controller General of India, speaking at a GMP workshop last week. Roughly five corrective action letters a week have gone out to manufacturers since 2022, each one telling a factory to fix what inspectors found. So a clock is going on them. Companies will get a fixed window to reply, and missing it suspends the manufacturing licence. Focused audits of cough syrup plants start this month, timed ahead of winter, run jointly by central and state drug authorities, with cancellation available at the end of them. Nine in ten of those plants have already been inspected once. What changed is how the regulator now reads what it keeps finding, and there is one list a prescriber can check before writing the next syrup.

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Vivax malaria has a half you cannot see. Chloroquine clears the parasites from the blood, the fever breaks in a day or two and the patient walks out feeling cured, while dormant parasites sit asleep in the liver and wake weeks or months later. Primaquine is the only drug that reaches them, and the Indian schedule asks for 14 days of tablets from somebody who already feels completely well. ICMR’s National Institute of Malaria Research screened 6,000 people with fever across Kolkata and Ahmedabad to randomise 400 who had confirmed vivax, a safe haemoglobin and a normal G6PD enzyme level. Half got a week at double the daily strength, half got the fortnight, identical total dose. Relapses at six months came to two in each arm. The gap that opened was in how many people finished the course at all.

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