THE Andaman & Nicobar State Conference of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) was held on November 21-22 in Port Blair. The two-day conference gave a call to intensify movements on various long-pending and genuine demands of the employees and workers in the islands.The conference began with an open session at Tiranga Park, Aberdeen Bazar in Port Blair at 5 p.m. Before the open session, a huge procession of workers marched through the main areas of Port Blair.

THE Hindutva brigade have been continuously proclaiming that the Greeks learnt Pythagoras from India. This is what Harsh Vardhan, the BJP science and technology minister, claimed in the Indian Science Congress last year; that “we” discovered the Pythagoras theorem and gave it “magnanimously” to the Greeks. There have also been claims of vedic mathematics, which is sought to be introduced in the schools as advanced mathematics of the vedas.

THE Assam State Kishan Sabha organised a massive dharna in Guwahati on November 19 against the state and central governments over growing peasant suicides in the state. "Not suicides and self-annihilations, but united mighty struggle against the anti-peasant and anti-people policies of the BJP government at the Centre and Congress government in the state is the only way to lift the peasantry out of the present crisis" was the central slogan that reverberated in the massive dharna at Lakhidhar Bora Khetra in the heart of the city.

CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP and CITU general secretary Tapan Sen has written a letter to Union Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, seeking her urgent intervention in the matter of rapidly deteriorating situation in tea estates in West Bengal. In the letter, dated November 24, Sen said that although profit of the tea garden owners are on the rise, the condition of plantation workers have been fast deteriorating. And the worst hit are the workers of tea estates "where either the gardens are closed down or abandoned by the owners".

IN a press statement issued on November 23, the All India Democratic Women’s Association has strongly condemned the brutal rape and murder of an adolescent girl of tenth class in Kakdwip, South 24 Parganas on November 22. This is an incident trailing after Park Street, Kamduni, Katwa and innumerable such in West Bengal under the regime of a woman chief minister. The earlier cases are yet to see justice. AIDWA strongly feels that West Bengal has become a state of rape and violence against women.