THE 16th biennial conference of Natun Sahitya Parishad, a progressive literary organisation of Assam, was held from January 8 to 10 at Manikpur in Bongaigaon district. The conference upheld the view of democratic consciousness and human values with the main slogan of confronting neo-liberal economic policies and the sinister design of casteism and communalism by literary activities.

THE Central Executive Committee of SFI, in a statement issued on February 6, has expressed deep concern and anger over the continuing developments in Indian universities which leads to the suicide of students one after another.   A young scholar has ended his life leaving another dark reminder how the universities have become effectively a killing field for the students and young scholars of our country under the thriving neo-liberal saffron raj of Modi.

AS I write, roughly 10.3 million workers return home as the sun sets on 4.9 lakh worksites across the length and breadth of this vast country under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. About 23 percent are Scheduled Castes, and 17 percent are Scheduled Tribes. With a failed monsoon and drought behind them, and fall in the growth rate of real wages, this employment and wages could offer the much needed succor from the consequent misery and even check distress out-migration.

WEST Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has a penchant for using the word ‘hub’ in her speeches so as to project “industrialisation” in the state but, in reality it is turning into a hub of only criminals and anti-socials.

GLOBAL concerns about a new viral pandemic have started making headlines barely weeks after resolution of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. The virus responsible for panic buttons being pressed, with the WHO declaring a ‘public health emergency of international concern’, is the Zika virus. Threats to health at a global scale in the form of epidemics caused by viruses are now too frequent to view these threats as one-off events.