Hindustan Unilever, the Indian subsidiary of the consumer goods company, has denied wrongdoing.
Enter the fireworks city of Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu and you can smell a familiar mix of sulphur, potassium nitrate, aluminium and carbon - familiar because if you've ever burst crackers, say on Diwali or Onam, chances are they were made here. Almost every household used to contribute to India's festive joy by contributing almost 90 per cent of the fireworks made in the country. Before the pandemic, around 300,000 people worked in the industry directly and another 500,000 indirectly. Located 540 kilometres from Chennai, Sivakasi is famous for its fireworks and crackers, along with printing and matches, but is almost a ghost town these days.
T N C Rajagopalan on the new year and new worries.
'You cannot start an MSME again.' 'It is not like a Yes Bank that someone comes and saves the bank.' Once the shutter is down for an MSME, nobody will come to its rescue.'
'In states where all shops are allowed to function and pedestrians are allowed to move around, there is no reason to presume that vendors are not allowed to operate. But ambiguity surrounding the operation of street vendors de jure has led the police to harass them de facto,' say Bhuvana Anand, Jayana Bedi and Prashant Narang.
Partial lockdown measures may impact movement of labour & goods, they say.
Small Factories Act, Industrial Relations Code likely to be redrafted under pressure from Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh
Employers' refusal to recognise TUs has caused industrial tiffs.
Almost all recent labour strikes were declared illegal by the labour department of Gujarat.
Around 800 workers at Hyundai Motor India's Sriperumbudur factory, who were on hunger strike, were arrested on Wednesday.
Factories need freedom from absurdities like seeking permission for working on Sundays and keeping detailed records of when the premises were whitewashed.
The state has allowed industrial units in special economic zones (SEZs) to lay off workers without government's sanction, regardless of the number of workers
Maharashtra Police found over 300 migrant workers holed up inside two container trucks meant for carrying essential commodities from Telangana to Rajasthan.
If India wants to become a globally competitive manufacturing hub, it will have to rethink the notion that the traditional SMEs will form the manufacturing backbone, argues Prosenjit Datta.
A factory in Kolkata turns scrap leather into nitrogenous fertiliser.
The company took advantage of the slowdown in the auto industry.
The Special Investigation Team on Saturday arrested the contractor of the blanket factory that collapsed in Jalandhar on Sunday, even as rescue workers scrambled to extricate people trapped from the site where 21 bodies have been recovered so far. The contractor identified as Sarvan Singh, who had constructed the factory building, has been arrested. He has been charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, SIT chief Navjot Singh Mahal said.
'It has caused our cook no little mirth that the sahib next door -- who heads a factory with several hundred, or thousand, workers -- can be spotted doing jharoo-pocha,' observes Kishore Singh.
Sheela Bhatt reports from Firozabad, the country's centre for glass bangles, on what life is like for its workers in the wake of the national lockdown.
A clutch of automakers including Maruti Suzuki, Hero MotoCorp, Mercedes Benz India, Eicher Motors, TVS Motor, and Isuzu Motors India announced they had got the clearance from the governments of the states they operate in to resume operations.
The earliest ones included whistles shaped like birds, toy monkeys that could slide down a string and small carts made from materials found in nature such as sticks, clay and rocks. While there might be no disputing India's rich toy-making tradition, the industry is languishing for lack of investment and technology, and also owing to competition from cheap imports. And though it has been listed among 24 key sectors under the government's Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan, the question remains: will this push help place it in the global game? Currently, 80-odd per cent of the toys sold in India are imported - nearly 60 per cent of them from China.
Ahead of talks with the Telangana government over his investment plans, chairman of the Kitex group Sabu Jacob, who has backed out from a Rs 3,500 crore project in Kerala, on Friday said he was not leaving his home state on his own, but was being "hounded out".
The ministry of home affairs on Wednesday issued a fresh set of guidelines to let migrant workers, students, tourists and pilgrims stranded in different parts of the country to get back home.
Both have made factory jobs the centre of their economic agendas. Kanika Datta explains the practical limits to their ambitions.
According to the local Brass Handicrafts Manufacturers Association (BHMA), some 800,000 people are directly employed in Moradabad's massive brass handicrafts and utensils manufacturing industry, which has some 30,000 small and micro-scale units and a total annual turnover of Rs 10,000 crore. The manufacturers are heavily dependent on export markets such as the US, Canada, Australia and the European Union. And exports account for nearly 70 per cent of their revenues. According to industry insiders, since this year's lockdowns, manufacturing has been at 65 per cent of normal levels.
'He has attacked our enemies in their own backyard.'
These people don't know that time has changed and they should not treat people as fools, Modi said.
'Are they assuming that by the end of May or the 15th of June, we will see the end of the pandemic?'
The colour has been rendered to activities that would have astonished Swami Vivekananda, says Sunanda K Datta Ray.
To young professionals I would say, work hard, play hard and not be constrained by fads like WLB, says Sudhir Bisht.
Officials of the Transport Department, bus drivers and conductors were contacted on Friday night to help the people who were stranded in Noida, Ghaziabad, Bulandshahar and Aligarh, among other places, he said.
The workers at Hero's Gurgaon unit were agitating since December last year for higher wages
As the Centre faces multiple hurdles, BJP-governed states such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat have swiftly moved in to usher in radical reforms as they aim to take a larger share of the FDI pie.
Ten central trade unions on Friday gave a call for a nationwide strike on May 22 to protest against the suspension of labour laws by some states during the lockdown period, and also decided to take the matter to International Labour Organization (ILO). "The joint platform of Central Trade Unions (CTUs) in their meeting held on May 14 , 2020 took note of the critical situation for the working people in the country during the lockdown period and decided to enhance united actions to meet the challenge," a joint statement by 10 CTUs said.
GM cites global pandemic as reason for the step. Firm had stopped selling cars in India in 2017 and stopped production completely on December 24, 2020.
Poor contract workers often have little or no access to safety equipment or health benefits in factories.
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The chief executive officer of a jute mill was beaten to death allegedly by workers on the factory premises after he refused to agree to their demand on wages at Bhadreswar in Hooghly district on Sunday.
Proactive measures adopted by BMC reduced COVID-19 growth rate to 4.3 per cent in May 2020 & further to 1.02 per cent in June. These measures also ensured an improved case doubling time to 43 days in May 2020 and 78 days in June 2020.
Pawan Ruia has finally done it, a beaming Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, then West Bengal chief minister, had said at the reopening of the 70-year-old Sahagunj factory owned by Dunlop in 2005. But with the Calcutta high court passing a winding-up order in 2013 and the Trinamool Congress-led state government passing a Bill to take over the company in 2016, the once-upon-a-time undisputed leader in the Indian tyre industry looks vastly undone. But that can hardly be a deterrent for Ruia, who has a penchant for making headlines one way or the other.
On reforms in pipeline, she said the government is for universal right to minimum wages and wants to remove regional disparity through a national floor wage.
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