There is no recruitment for the government posts at the state and central government levels. Why is the CPI(M) and Left not taking up this issue in a big way?
Shyamlal Panda, Raigada

THE central government and most of the state governments are not filling up the vacancies in government posts. In fact there is a official ban on recruitment to these posts. According to the Seventh Pay Commission, in the central government departments there are 7.47 lakh vacancies. Lakhs more are there lying vacant at the state governments’ level.

THE Modi government has announced another set of sweeping liberalised norms for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in various sectors. In the last two years of the Modi government, there has been successive liberalisation of FDI norms across the board. The current relaxations include 100 per cent FDI in the defence sector, retail food trade, civil aviation, cable networks, DTH and other telecom services. Apart from this, 74 percent FDI through the automatic route will be allowed to facilitate takeover of existing Indian pharmaceutical companies.

FOR pushing through the Goods and Services Tax (GST), the NDA government is resorting to an enormous amount of untruth. The most blatant of these is the utterly bogus claim that the GST would increase India’s GDP growth rate by 2 percent per year. If the GST had such a miraculous effect, then the world capitalist crisis would have vanished long ago, since the US, which does not have a GST, would simply have moved to a GST regime, adding to its GDP growth rate and that of the world economy as a whole.

The following is the statement issued by SAHMAT on June 9, 2016.
RAM Bahadur Rai, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s thinker who described BR Ambedkar’s role in framing the constitution “a myth” also has another achievement to his credit. Just two months after being appointed chairman of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, he has turned the government-funded culture institution into a centre for RSS activities in Delhi.

THE World Health Organisation (WHO) identifies India as one of the 57 countries with a critically low level of human resources available for healthcare. This would not come as a surprise given the evidence in the country of widespread shortages of skilled health workers of all kind including doctors, nurses and other health workers – in most parts of the country. The shortage of health workers and the attendant poor quality of skills in a large proportion of them is one of the biggest obstacles to the availability of quality healthcare services in India.