Has Vijay Shekhar Sharma given up on the bank? For now, he seems to be on a save-OCL mission. The bank will face its logical end, observes Tamal Bandopadhyay.
Till such time that a new governance framework comes into being, the progress of reforms in health, education, land, labour, electricity and agriculture could remain fraught with problems, agitations and delays, observes A K Bhattacharya.
Sitharaman said the Bill has proposed giving a legal framework for fixed-term employment through which contract workers serving a fixed-tenure will get equal statutory social security benefits as regular workers in the same unit.
However, the government has enacted an important change to the fixed-term employment framework that may help companies in handing out contractual jobs to its existing permanent workforce.
The Centre's retreat from the farm laws is likely to have a significant bearing on the fate of laws that the Centre has made, for instance, in labour and electricity, predicts A K Bhattacharya.
"Lady candidates need not apply." So read the postscript in a job notice from Telco (now Tata Motors) on a notice board in the corridors of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (now Bengaluru), in 1974. Irked, Sudha Murty, who was then pursuing her masters in computer science at the institute, wrote a postcard to JRD Tata, expressing her surprise at this gender discrimination, especially since the Tata Group were pioneers on many fronts. Shortly, Murty became the first woman on the firm's shop floor.
The Survey noted that while women account for almost half of India's population, their participation in labour market is almost one-third and has been declining.
After a spell of relative calm, Jammu and Kashmir witnessed a spate of killings of innocent civilians last month, triggering apprehensions of an intense cycle of violence and turmoil in the region.
The Centre is looking to improve disclosures made by public sector undertakings (PSUs), and has asked such companies to share monthly progress made on capital expenditure targets and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives undertaken by them. New details such as gender-wise reporting of contractual workers, unused land, and profit share in joint venture companies have also been added in the list of disclosures. The Department of Public Enterprises (DPE), which publishes the Public Enterprises Survey and collects information for Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) signed with PSUs, is looking to integrate data collected from government-owned companies.
Stepping up his attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party government, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has alleged that the structures of Indian democracy are under 'brutal attack' and there is a full-scale assault on the institutions of the country.
Sharma was the president of the conference, the first since the Paris Agreement of COP21 that expected parties to make enhanced commitments towards mitigating climate change.
In a two-pronged strategy to secure migrant workers, the Uttar Pradesh government has decided to set up a migration commission for the employment of such labourers in the state and made it clear that any state that wants them from UP has to seek its permission.
The proposed amendment to the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act puts the livelihooNewd of millions of women in jeopardy, according to a study. The new insertion (Section 10A(3)) makes it mandatory for persons to obtain licences, permissions and registrations for manufacturing, selling and distributing any tobacco product, it said. "This insertion if implemented will be an extremely harsh measure for small vendors who do not have the competency or financial means to obtain such licence," said the study by human rights lawyer Vibha Vasuki and senior professor of anthropology Siva Prasad Rambhatla.
Given the many policy areas where the Centre and the states have not been seeing eye to eye in the last few years, it is time the Modi government convenes a meeting of the Inter-State Council, recommends A K Bhattacharya.
Fairwork focuses on five principles of fair gig work: Fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management, and fair representation.
'Returns can be very variable in equity markets.' 'That is why I tell small investors don't put 100 per cent of your money in equities, even if you are young.'
Critics of Hindi cinema are a disparate, colourful, bunch that evoke much derision and tut-tut among its own tribe, but Chup's distant understanding of their influence and idiosyncrasies fails to give the loathing any real impact, notes Rediff.com Principal Movie Critic Sukanya Verma.
Instead of mechanically consolidating all labour laws into one, provisions of all labour laws should be relooked in terms of their substance. The irrelevant and archaic provisions have to be fixed, says Aparajita Gupta.
Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya, Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and other ministers took charge of their respective offices on Thursday, a day after taking oath at a ceremony held in the Darbar Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
In the draft rules, among 681 listed professions, armed security guards, supervisors, surveyors, and carpenters (class I) are proposed to be treated as highly skilled professionals; electricians, tailors and drivers are skilled; cooks and cobblers as semi-skilled and dairy coolies, office peons and sweepers as unskilled.
The Code on Social Security, 2020 gives a lot of comfort to gig firms which recognise cab drivers or food delivery executives as 'independent contractors' who directly do business with customers with the help of their digitised platforms.
'Three external members of the first MPC are respected researchers with excellent academic background, but there is no harm in considering academicians with diverse backgrounds such as finance and labour along with economists for this body,' recommends Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Isak-Muivah on Wednesday said no peace talks were possible 'under the shadow' of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and termed Union home minister Amit Shah's statement in Parliament on the botched counter-insurgency operation as 'irresponsible.'
"There are problems with regard to the inadequacy of testing facilities and without more aggressive facilities of testing, we are not going to conquer this menace," Manmohan Singh said.
According to the law, the contribution "should not be more than 5 per cent of the amount paid to gig workers. The government is likely to start seeking contribution from gig companies towards the fund from April 1, 2021.
Giving a relief to exporters community, the government on Thursday said it will release Rs 56,027 crore to exporters against pending tax refunds under different incentive schemes for outbound shipments. The amount will be disbursed to more than 45,000 exporters. Briefing the media about the decision, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said that the Rs 56,027 crore, which is being released under various export promotion schemes, is over and above duty remission of Rs 12,454 crore for the Remission of Duties and Taxes on Export Products (RoDTEP) Scheme and Rs 6,946 crore for Rebate of State and Central Levies and Taxes (RoSCTL) Scheme already announced.
Trade unions have called for a nation-wide strike on September 2.
'The spirit of cooperation between the Centre and states has been diluted in many ways.' 'The level of consultation which used to be there earlier has reduced significantly.'
Most brokerages have maintained their Sensex and Nifty targets as they believe there is little room for further re-rating in the backdrop of weak earnings.
A course on 'land acquisition, rehabilitation and environmental clearance of projects' is also being offered by IIT-Kharagpur.
'The government is sincerely working on employment generation. Unfortunately, they are depending on these people from Harvard. Their wrong policies are killing jobs. The government has to come out of the Western framework on which they depend upon a lot.'
Some of the violations that will lead to community service include failure to pay social security contribution of workers, maintain records, furnish information to inspectors, pay gratuity to workers, provide crche facility and medical pay, and retrenching women workers during maternity leave.
It's a middle path for labour reforms.
The industry's operating margins will narrow by 0.30- 0.80 per cent largely on an increase in local hires which the industry has been forced into due to the policy framework in its markets.
Majority of foreign companies plan expansions and perceive 'opportunities' for higher investment provided bottlenecks in infrastructure, legal and labour laws are removed, a survey by Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry said.
Nearly 490 million people of working age are outside the bounds of India's unemployment assessments. A decrease in the unemployment rate could signal economic growth, but could just as well mean that people have given up looking for work. A revealing excerpt from Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran and Tata Chief Economist Roopa Purushothaman's Bridgital Nation: Solving Technology's People Problem.
The flexi staff workforce at present in the country has increased to 2.1 million from 1.7 million in 2015.
New norms issued as per the Motor Vehicle Aggregator Guidelines 2020 have mandated a cap on surge price, preventing aggregators from charging more than 1.5 times of the base fare.
'The new government will have to contend with slowing economic growth, weak private investment, anaemic exports and vulnerable external imbalances, a stressed financial system, mounting fiscal pressures (including high government debt-to-GDP ratios) and an exceptionally bad employment situation,' says Shankar Acharya, former chief economic adviser to the Government of India.
Similarities between NDA and UPA on some key policy issues are now becoming too stark to be ignored, says A K Bhattacharya.
