THE union budget 2016-17 is a serious rightward shift to further fortify the domination of monopoly trade and agri-business interests over agro-processing and marketing sector, intensifying the neo-liberal reforms which are the root cause of the current acute crisis in agriculture. The proposals of 100 percent FDI through the FIPB- Foreign Investment Promotion Board route on food products and processing and to start e-platform by amending APMC Act for marketing of agro produce are two obvious examples in support of big capital and MNCs.The farmers are reeling under acute agrarian crisis ma
GOONS of BJP, RSS and other rightwing forces launched attack on protests and demonstrations, organised by Left and democratic forces in several parts of the country, over the Jawaharlal Nehru University issue and the suicide by dalit scholar Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University.
JUST weeks after the terror strike in Pathankot, Pakistan was hit by an even more deadly attack. Before that, in the same fortnight, there were major terror attacks in Istanbul, Jakarta and Ouagadougou. Terrorists, belonging to a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, attacked the Bacha Khan University campus in Charsadda near the city of Peshawar in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. The university is named after Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi.
THE Budget Session of Parliament began on February 23 with President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to a joint session of both the Houses. After the President's address, Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha met and made obituary references. Both the Houses were adjourned after laying the President's address on the table of the respective House.
A two member delegation of the CPI(M) consisting of general secretary Sitaram Yechury and central secretariat member Nilotpal Basu met the chief election commissioner on March 2, to draw attention of the commission to some serious concerns with regard to the forthcoming elections to the West Bengal legislative assembly.
CPI(M) leader in Rajya Sabha Sitaram Yechury initiated the discussion on the situation arising in central institutions of higher education with specific reference to Jawaharlal Nehru University and University of Hyderabad. Below we publish the edited excerpts of his speech in the upper house of parliament on February 25.I AM initiating this discussion with a deep sense of anguish, anger and anxiety of what is going to happen to our country.
Rich in Rhetoric; Poor in Substance, says CITU Union Budget 2016–17 presented by the union finance minister Arun Jaitley is nothing but a grand exercise in rhetoric, totally devoid of anything substantial that provides relief to the common people and workers. The finance minister sought to camouflage his government’s drive to provide further benefits to the corporate sector by resorting to high sounding words.
NARENDRA Modi was nominated by Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS Supremo, as prime ministerial candidate for the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 and Modi launched his election campaign on the political platform of his Gujarat model of Development and during every election meeting, he promised his audience that vote for BJP under the leadership of Modi will lead to economic growth for entire India.
THE Left parties, CPI(M) and CPI, have jointly embarked on a 14 day-long ‘Rayalaseema Bus Yatra’ to focus on the issues of backward region and with a demand that a comprehensive package of Rs1,000 crore be announced for the development of Rayalaseema districts.The ‘Rayalaseema Bus Yatra’ was formally flagged off from Tirupati on February 20 by Prakash Karat, Polit Bureau member of the CPI(M) and CPI National Secretariat member K Narayana .The yatra continues up to March 5, during which period the Left party leaders plan to visit the nook and corner of the region.Addressing a public meeting
LAST month, the Indian Patents Office released the revised Guidelines for Computer Related Invention (CRI Guidelines), which has finally aligned the Patents Office fully with the Indian Patents Act. This is the third time that software patents have been beaten back in India: the first with the Amendments to the Patents Act in 2005, the next, smuggling it in through the Patents Manual issued by the Patents Office, and this time, through the original CRI Guideline issued in August last year.