MANIK Ghonshetwad, an agricultural worker from Ambulga village in Mukhed taluka of Nanded district, Maharashtra, is seasonally employed on farmlands during specific months of the year. He works in June and July for soybean or cotton cultivation, in August and September for weeding (manually or with herbicides), and in December and January for harvesting. However, this work is sporadic, with only a few days of employment in each of these months. The limited number of working days in agriculture in his village and neighbouring areas is insufficient to meet his family’s basic needs.

THE sense of outrage over the gruesome killings of the tourists in Pahalgam continues to surge across the country. In this age when images bring home events on the computer monitors and smartphone screens, what else would one expect with the horrific spectacle? The pain is compounded with the knowledge that these were targeted with victims profiled on religious identity.

IN a deeply important and emotionally charged ceremony held in Ho Chi Minh City on April 30, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) To Lam delivered a powerful address marking the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the South and the reunification of Vietnam. The programme, attended by top national leaders, revolutionary veterans, and international guests, celebrated one of the most significant milestones in the country’s modern history.In his speech, To Lam recalled the heroic victory of 1975 that ended decades of colonial domination and foreign intervention.

ELEMENTARY textbooks in economics invariably begin with a completely mythical concept: the concept of “perfect competition”, which is different from the concept of “free competition” that the classical economists and Marx had used. “Free competition” was characterised by the equality of wages (for equal skills) and of profit-rates across sectors; all it required for its realisation was free mobility of labour and of capital across sectors which was by no means a far-fetched assumption in the pre-monopoly era.

TWO years ago, the fragile but hopeful peace in Sudan was broken when the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) both arms of the Sudanese state – went to war against each other. The second-year anniversary of the war was commemorated on April 11, 2025 with a ghastly attack by the RSF on the Zamzam refugee camp in the province of northern Darfur. ‘The bombs were falling on the hospital’, said Hawa, a mother of three who was inside that hospital. ‘Those of us who survived left with only our children on our backs’.