THOUSANDS of Anganwadi workers affiliated to the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) have been on strike in Karnataka since January 23, 2023. Their primary demand is to be classified as ‘teachers’. They have been sleeping in the open air at Freedom Park in Bengaluru since January 23and are determined to stay the course until their demands are met.Anganwadi centres were set up by the government in 1975 to combat child hunger and malnutrition. They are run by grassroots level workers who are responsible for feeding children as well as pregnant women.

AMONG the issues like price-hike, loss of livelihood, unemployment, absence of any services in healthcare, education, supply of safe drinking water, electricity and housing etc, most of which are very much acutely prevalent in the state, one core issue has emerged as a crying demand of all sections of people: whether voters of the state would have the opportunity to cast vote by themselves. The Election Commission of India has declared the election schedule to the legislative assemblies of Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland on January 18, 2023.

ECONOMIC theory makes much of “rent goods”. A “rent good” is one whose supply cannot be augmented at will, simply through investing more on its production; its supply is subject to constraints imposed by nature, because of which there is a certain maximum rate of long-run growth which is exogenously given and cannot be altered at will. If this good is used as an essential input for the production of other goods, then the long-run growth of other goods too gets tethered to this exogenously given maximum rate of growth of the rent good.

NATIONAL College Grounds in Bangalore was painted red on January 22 with the public rally concluding the 17th All India Conference of Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). Workers wearing CITU red caps and holding red flags thronged the venue from the afternoon.Tapan Sen, general secretary of CITU addressing the rally of over 20,000 workers, declared that the year 2023 would be a year of struggles.

PEOPLE here on our humble planet, termed “the pale blue dot” due to the way the Earth looks when seen from space, usually get excited at human space flights time when they involve landings on the Moon or, potentially in preparation for a Mars landing sometime in the near future. Even moon landings, however,  soon ceased to electrify live audiences in the US and elsewhere when, just a couple of lunar landings after Neil Armstrong’s historic maiden landing on the Apollo 11 mission, they began to be viewed as rather routine, with even TV networks not relaying live telecasts!