Electricity Amendment Bill 2022 Last Nail on the Public Electricity Sector in India

ON August 8, 2022, the government of India witnessed the anger and rage of more than one million electricity employees against its autocratic deceiving move to introduce the Electricity Amendment Bill 2022 in the parliament.

134th Birth Anniversary of Kakababu: New Present Has to Be Built in the Light of Past Traditions

SINCE 1963, we have been observing the birth anniversary of Comrade Muzaffar Ahmad, popularly known to one and all as ‘Kakababu’. We observe his birthday not merely for the sake of remembrance. Our aim is to learn from his efforts in building a movement and forging a struggle, from his giant endeavour to build an organisation from scratch under adverse circumstances with the goals and objectives to build the Communist Party in this country.

70th Anniversary of India’s Independence: Powerful Struggles Alone Can Build Alternative Narrative

AS India marks its 70th anniversary of independence, it is necessary to recollect that the current political and social battles that are going on in our country emerge from a continuous ideological battle between three distinct visions of what should be the character of the political and social structure of post-independent India that arose during the course of our epic freedom struggle, particularly in the decade of the 1920s. The mainstream Congress vision had articulated that independent India should be a secular democratic Republic.

BSNL’s Revival Package: Tall Claims and Bitter Truths

THE government has once again tom-tommed that it would be spending Rs 1.64 lakh crore to revive BSNL. This second revival package was announced on July 27, 2022. The government had already announced a similar revival package for BSNL and MTNL on October 23, 2019, in which the government had promised to spend Rs 70,000 crore for the revival of both the public sector telecom companies. A loud message is being sent to the general public of this country that the government is squandering a huge amount of tax payers’ money, for the so called revival of BSNL.

GST Rate Hikes and the Tweets Of Union Finance Minister

REFERRING to a list of 12 grains and their flours, union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that “GST on these goods shall apply when supplied in ‘pre-packaged and labelled’ commodities attracting the provisions of Legal Metrology Act. For example, items like pulses, cereals like rice, wheat, and flour, etc, earlier attracted GST at the rate of 5 per cent when branded and packed in unit container. From July 18, 2022, these items would attract GST when “pre-packaged and labelled”.BRANDED AND UNBRANDEDLet us clarify this rigmarole.

Imploding the PSUs from Within

THE hoarding raised just outside the police headquarters in Delhi, by the RSS’s mouthpiece, Panchjanya is a pointer to the fact that the public sector is doomed to be ruined. Panchjanya, which is a weekly newspaper of the RSS held a conference on sustainability in Hotel Le Meridien, Delhi. Something which was not even imagined a few years back, the paper has spent lavish money to hold such a conference. This hoarding still hangs on the walls despite the fact that the event was held a month ago.

The Invisibilisation of Dalits in UP

REPORTS of attacks on minorities, especially Muslims, in Uttar Pradesh have become commonplace. Justifications of these attacks are a regular feature on high-decibel, provocative tv ‘debates’. Hindi newspapers are also full of these reports and justifications. This has become a tested way of deepening religious polarization which has paid rich political dividends for the ruling party. Attacks on dalit men, women and children occurring with greater frequency and intensity after 2017 are, however, absent from the mainstream electronic media and hard to find in the newspapers where they fi

Puducherry: Cholera Outbreak in Karaikal Signs of Malaise in the Public Health System

WITHIN three months of having been declared “best state”, (during a much publicised visit by the home minister) the union territory of Puducherry found itself battling a sudden, serious outbreak of cholera, in its small enclave of Karaikal. It took the administration almost two months to wake up to the fact that this notifiable disease, one that has been largely eliminated, was actually spreading fast in the Karaikal region.Apparently, early reports of more than 30 people getting infected with cholera a couple of months back did not come to the attention of the administration.

Field Survey in Manufacturing Hubs Reveals Startling Precariousness of Employment

A WIDE-RANGING field study was conducted by the CITU Centre covering manufacturing hubs in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in collaboration with the CITU state committees. The survey team covered around five manufacturing industrial clusters of Bengaluru and Chennai and had interactive sessions with many groups of workers covering 23 manufacturing industries to capture a deeper understanding of the dynamics of rapidly changing employment relations as well as to mark the composition of workers recruited under different nomenclatures and categories in the same shop floor.

On the Supreme Court Comments in the Nupur Sharma Case

IT is a sign of the times, that a justice of the Supreme Court finds it necessary to defend the court against what he termed personal comments against judges attributing motives to them. This is in the context of the comments made by a two-member bench in the open court. The kind of pressure on judges if they make comments not liked by those in power has been clearly seen in the Nupur Sharma case.

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