This is not a national requirement however. I bet you could find a PhD granting institution in the US that doesn't require publication.
Moreover, there's spillover effects from requiring this; I'm told in China that medical journals are facing a dire problem of research fraud, due to research publications being tied to promotions in the medical community (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...). It seems reasonable to assume incentivizing publications will reduce the quality of publications, whether the incentive is a promotion or a degree.
The question I have though, is what harm there is in reverting to a socially enforced standard. It's pretty easy to screen out PhD applicants without a publication, and I don't know of anyone who's too busy churning through PhDs to give their scholarly output at least a brief glance. If the screening device is available cheaply, who is harmed by this legislation?
It puts some students at a severe disadvantage for hiring because they get screened out because they chose a field that publishes 50 page papers instead of 2 page papers.
So if person from neuro discipline A and neuro discipline B are applying for the same job in data science, discipline A could get screened out because they spent years training a monkey to do a brain machine interface task while person B published five fMRI papers in three years. Neither candidate is going to use their specific neuro expertise, but rather their general data science skill set. One will be at a huge disadvantage unless she is hired directly by people who know her field.
You could find UNC Chapel Hill's School of Public Health, one of the best in the country. They require a paper to be submitted.
Publications are not a universal Ph.D. requirement at US universities.
Usually the main Ph.D. requirements are: course of study, qualifying process (e.g. exams and/or dissertation proposal/approval), written dissertation, oral defense, and possible residency (i.e. tuition) and teaching requirements.
MIT doesn't mandate publications: https://oge.mit.edu/gpp/degrees/doctoral/
Neither does Stanford: https://gap.stanford.edu/handbooks/gap-handbook/chapter-4/su...
Neither does Yale: http://catalog.yale.edu/gsas/policies-regulations/#degreereq...
You don't get your PhD in US/Canadian/European universities without publications. Not in physics, math, cs, psychology, neuroscience, etc. Publications don't just show you can do things, but they hold your advisers to account to make sure they're also pushing out new ideas, they hold entire departments to account. If a department can't produce enough new ideas and research to get 1 paper per PhD student out, then they are failing and should be dealt with by the university administration. Failing to graduate PhDs is a critical metric in finding such problems and dealing with them.
What this does is just entrench India's failure in the research world. Lazy senior researchers will get lazier. Young researchers will have far less incentive to keep moving. Departments won't be held to account anymore. And low-quality PhDs will keep being minted.
I'm not a fan of publish or perish, and it's damned stressful sometimes. But 1 paper per PhD student is not a burden. It's a bare minimum and advisers should be ashamed if this is all that they can publish with a student through their PhD.
India is pumping out huge amounts of junk research, mediocre PhDs, and is just stagnant overall in research. This is short sighted, lazy, and will hurt everyone there.