ALL the unions of workers and officers of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) have decided to launch a joint agitation to save the ICDS and the workers’ interests.

NOW that the 16th Lok Sabha election results are out and the country is in the high political mode about the formation of the next government, one may well cast a look back on the forecasts of the exit polls and compare them with the real outcome.

THE recently concluded general elections, apart from spelling out the winner, also threw many interesting, but important sub-texts. Here are a few:
No party has ever before won more than half the seats with a vote share of just 31 percent, the previous lowest vote share for a single-party majority was in 1967, when the Congress won 283 out of 520 seats with 40.8 percent of the total valid votes polled.
The Congress secured 19.3 percent votes, winning 44 seats, while in 2009, the BJP secured 18.5 percent votes but won 116 seats.

THE president of India has appointed Narendra Modi as the country’s 14th prime minister on the strength of his election as the leader of the BJP parliamentary group following the BJP’s electoral victory. The acceptance of the people’s verdict always comes with the expectations that the government that follows will pursue a set of policies and programmes that will provide the people with a better quality of life.

THE Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) expresses its deep grief at the passing away of Comrade R Umanath, veteran leader of the party, at Tiruchirapalli. He was aged 92 years.
R Umanath was a member of the Central Committee of the party from 1978 to 2012. He was elected a member of the Polit Bureau in 1991 and served in that capacity till 2008. He served as a member of the Tamilnadu state committee and secretariat of the party for several decades.