Millions of people in western India are suffering their worst drought in more than four decades, with critics blaming official ineptitude and corruption for exacerbating the natural water shortage.

Central areas of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, are facing a water shortage worse than the severe drought in 1972, the state's chief minister Prithviraj Chavan told Agence France Presse.

Pakistan Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf will visit India for the first time this week for a day-long pilgrimage to a Muslim shrine, officials in both countries said Tuesday.

"Pakistan's prime minister will be in India on Saturday. This is a private visit and he will be accompanied by his family and other officials," an Indian government official said on condition of anonymity.

India's patent appeals office has rejected Bayer AG's plea to stop the production of a cheaper generic version of a patented cancer drug in a ruling that health groups say is an important precedent for getting inexpensive lifesaving medicines to the poor.

Last year, India's patent office allowed local drug manufacturer Natco Pharma Ltd. to produce a generic version of Bayer's kidney and liver cancer drug Nexavar on the grounds it would make the drug available to the public at a reasonably affordable price. It was the first use of compulsory licensing under Indian patent laws passed in 2005.

Protesters threw a home-made petrol bomb near the hotel of Indian President Pranab Mukherjee in the Bangladesh capital on Monday amid new deadly protests in the country, an Indian official said.

The foreign ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "protestors threw a crude cocktail bomb near the gate of the hotel where the Indian president is staying in Dhaka".

With virtual bodyguards, panic buttons and maps to pinpoint harassment blackspots, women in urban India are using their smartphones for protection after a notorious gang-rape in New Delhi.

Interest in safety apps and websites has surged since the fatal December attack, in which a 23-year-old student was set upon by a drunken gang on her way home from a cinema in the Indian capital.

Health watchdogs monitoring the risk of malaria in India should keep a close eye on what's happening thousands of kilometres (miles) away in the Atlantic, an unusual study published on Sunday suggests.

The temperature of the sea surface in the tropical South Atlantic is a big determinant for levels of monsoon rain, which in turn is the big factor for malarial mosquitoes, it says.

A school bus collided with a truck laden with bricks in rural northwestern India on Monday morning, killing at least eleven children, police said.

Seven died at the scene of the accident in Jaheer village in the state of Punjab, with a further four succumbing to their injuries in hospital, the Press Trust of India news agency reported, citing a local official.

Hundreds of protesters clashed with police on Friday outside a New Delhi hospital where a seven-year-old victim of sexual assault was admitted earlier in the day, a police official said.

Angry youths hurled stones at buses and police, who then used batons to break up the demonstration outside the hospital which is located in a low-income neighborhood, India's NDTV channel reported.

A 17-year-old youth who is being tried in a juvenile court over the fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi was formally charged with murder on Thursday, legal sources said.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was accused of playing a key role in the murder, rape and robbery of a 23-year-old medical student last December in the Indian capital.

A fire swept through a six-story building housing illegal shops in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata on Wednesday, killing 19 people who were unable to flee the inferno, local officials said.

Hundreds of firefighters gathered at the scene of the blaze at the Surya Sen market near the railway station in the center of the former colonial capital, where decrepit and poorly maintained buildings are vulnerable to fires.