THE Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI), in its office bearers meeting held on December 17, 2017 at Chennai decided to launch a series of struggle programmes to defeat the draconian anti-people FRDI bill and to protect the interests of the depositors.

BEFI has called upon all its state units to collect crores of signatures from the public as part of the campaign launched by the United Forum of Bank Unions to be submitted to the speaker of the Lok Sabha in the budget session of the parliament.

CITU general secretary and parliamentarian Tapan Sen has written to Union Labour and Employment Minister Santosh Gangwar, seeking his intervention to stop the proposed reorganisation of the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) through merger of sub-regional offices in different states.

 In a letter on November 30, Sen said that such a move would lead to “immense and unmanageable difficulties for insured persons to have their lawful benefit denied by lower-level offices/establishments”.

THE finance minister held Pre-budget 2018 discussion with the representatives of central trade unions on December 5, 2017. Representatives of all the central trade unions attended the meeting. CITU was represented by its president, Hemalata.

THE recent ordinance passed by the Rajasthan Government amending Criminal Procedure Code to protect corrupt officials/ public servants, serving and former magistrates and judges from being investigated for their misdemeanor and corruption on duty without Government s

ON October 10, during his weeklong trip to the USA to attend the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley accused the opposition parties in India, mainly the Left, of being ill-informed and opportunist and adopting double standard on the Goods and Services Tax (GST). This requires a firm rebuttal.