IN an unprecedented display of workers unity and spread of movement, as the biggest industry wise action during Covid-19 lockdown, about 1.5 lakh coal workers, irrespective of their trade unions affiliation, were in the field actively participating in the all India protest day on June 10 in all 535 collieries in eight coal-bearing states and offices of all the subsidiaries of public sector Coal India Limited (CIL) and centre-state joint sector Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) in Telangana.

INDIVIDUAL stories of suffering and of heroism often reflect a wider social reality. There have been many such in this period of lockdown.Jyoti Kumari, a 15 year old dalit girl cycled 1200 km from Gurgaon to Darbhanga with her ailing father riding pillion to take him home. In an interview she said that her mother had mortgaged whatever little jewellery she had to buy them the cycle as there was no other way they could get home.

THE Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) is a burning issue of the banking Industry. The central government has been claiming that IBC would be an effective law to recover the NPA of the large borrowers.  But the present experience seems to prove otherwise and due to that, the additional NPA in the current financial year is feared to increase astronomically. The issue of bad loan has been in existence from the time the financial institutions started lending.

THE Supreme Court has finally passed the desired judgement, though too late, on the travel of migrant workers back to their homes. The SC has ordered that the centre and the state governments must ensure that within 15 days the migrant workers reach their destination. So far so good.The period since the lockdown began, there have been gory stories of migrant workers; their tales of unprecedented agony, trauma and deaths of many while travelling back to their home states and villages; this in itself speaks volumes of the government’s failure.

IT is estimated that more than 6000 NRIs had come to attend the ‘Namaste Trump’ event. Nobody has gauged. Only on March 5, the screening at the airport started.  The large number of private health facilities was refusing to cooperate with the government. While the state health secretary informed the media that there is no epidemic and the Epidemic Act has only been invoked for legally empowering the administration, this was not invoked to address this problem. The testing was low; the frontline health workers were denied PPE and other necessary gear to insulate them from infection.