THE failure of the BJP government does not demand big data to reveal the truth. The recent video of a BSNL employee crying for not being paid salary for 3 consecutive months has gone viral. It is not an isolate incident rather speaks volumes of how a public sector is stifled under the Modi rule. The BSNL has not paid salary to its 1.68 lakh workers and officers for the month of February 2019. The management has stated that owing to extreme resource crunch, such a situation has arisen.
COMRADE EMS Namboodiripad was one of the foremost leaders of the Communist movement in India and one of the founding leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).In his nearly seven decades of public life and revolutionary activities, EMS Namboodiripad left an indelible imprint on the progressive and working class movement of the country. As a young man, he became active in the social reform movement against caste. He left college in 1931 to join the freedom struggle and was jailed in the satyagraha movement.
TRIBUTES NEWS of the death of the great thinker and revolutionary, Karl Marx, on March 14, 1883, rapidly spread throughout the world and was reported not only by proletarian but also by bourgeois periodicals in many countries of Europe and America. Friends and enemies alike paid tribute to his intellectual powers.
ECONOMIC statistics are a public good. They are a vital necessity for policy-making and informed public discourse in democracies where citizens seek accountability from its government. The use of scientific methods for collection, and estimation and their timely dissemination, therefore, form vital public services.
AT a largely attended public meeting in Jind on March 17, the general secretaries of CPI(M) and CPI – Sitaram Yechury and S Sudhakar Reddy – launched the joint election campaign of the two communist parties in Haryana.Sitaram Yechury introduced Sukhbir Singh, CPI(M) candidate from Hissar and Arun Kumar, CPI candidate from Ambala Lok Sabha constituency to the gathering.
THE Modi government’s disastrous economic policies have pushed India into a furnace of joblessness. Latest CMIE data shows that the unemployment rate in India was 8.6 per cent in the first week of February 2019. This is the highest level since September 2016, that is, in 127 weeks. In February, a report prepared by the NSSO was leaked by a newspaper which showed that the unemployment rate in 2017-18 had hit a 45-year high of 6.1 per cent.
HISTORY is repeating itself with the United States dictating whom India should buy oil from. The US had forced India to drastically reduce buying oil from Iran after it imposed unilateral sanctions on Iranian oil trade last year. Now, the US is back to the business of coercing India to stop buying oil from Venezuela on whom it has imposed illegal sanctions. The Modi government, after having bound itself into the strategic ties with the imperialist superpower, is unable to act in the national interests.
THE minutes of the board meeting of the Reserve Bank of India just prior to the announcement that currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 denomination were being demonetised are now available in the public domain, thanks to an RTI query. And what they reveal is the abysmal state of decision-making on economic policy that prevails under the Modi government.To be sure, economic decision-making has always been informed by class bias; but that is not what I am referring to here.
THE second crash of a Boeing 737 Max8 aircraft on March 17 killing all 158 passengers and crew, this time operated by Ethiopian Airlines en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, six months after an earlier Lion Air crash in Indonesia, has since led to a worldwide grounding of all 737 Max8 aircraft.
THE country has entered into the electoral battle for the 17th general elections. This is not an ordinary election where the ruling party of the day is judged on the basis of its delivery of its promises made at the time of the last general elections alone. The balance sheet of its betrayals is often the main issue of electoral discourse. These elections, however, are the most crucial one in the history of independent India. Why is it so?