OVER one million rubber growers in Kerala are the worst losers. According to them, the union budget has neglected the sector which constitutes 12 lakh farmers nationally. The rubber plantation owners and small growers in the state were expecting at least Rs 500 crores from the centre to help the sector. Kerala has been looking forward to a rubber price stabilisation fund of Rs1000 crore and steep hike in the import duty. This has not happened. Making matters worse, the fund allocation to Rubber Board in 2016-17 is lower by Rs 29 crore compared to last year.

BEHIND the smokescreen of the pseudo-nationalist rhetoric of the Sangh Parivar and the Modi government, is a sinister design to malign and change the character of central universities. Starting from IIT Madras, University of Hyderabad, JNU and now AMU, the attack of the right wing forces on institutions of higher learning is spreading like an “infection which is turning into gangrene”. A surgical intervention is needed to restore the credibility and the sanctity of the constitution on the one hand and save higher education from this mindless destructive onslaught on the other hand.

UNEMPLOYMENT has become so persistent a phenomenon in contemporary times that there is a common feeling that it is a “natural” state of affairs, that nothing can ever be done about it, and that the only way to have greater employment opportunities coming your way is either to oppose the system of job “reservations” for the deprived segments of the population altogether, or to demand that your own “caste” or “community” be included in the category of those eligible for such “reservations”.But this view that unemployment is a “natural” state of affairs is based either on ignorance or on loss

THE Trade Unions Joint Action Committee (TUJAC) has given a call for state wide protest actions in Maharashtra against the anti-labour policies of state and central governments. This call was given in a convention organised by trade unions on February 24 in Gopal Shetty Hall at Lower Parel in Mumbai. Representatives from major central trade union organisations and federations took part in the convention. A resolution passed in the convention has registered strong protest against the decision of the Maharashtra and central governments to make retrograde amendments in the labour laws.

HUNDREDS of sericulture farmers from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh assembled in Delhi at Jantar Mantar on February 29 and had a day-long dharna. Sericulture farmers are in an acute crisis due to the BJP government decision to cut import duty of raw silk drastically to just 10 percent. Earlier UPA government had reduced import duty from 33 percent to 5 percent and then due to protests increased to 15 percent. This was reduced to 10 percent. This has led to dumping of cheap silk from China and also illegally through Nepal and other neighbouring countries.