We need reforms. But reform does not mean to sell out everything - Mamata Banerjee

Yes, we need reforms. But reform does not mean to sell out everything to satisfy some sections of individuals. In a democratic set up, reforms must reach upto the poor and common people and the beauty of democracy lies on realizing its responsibility towards the common people.

Developed countries have many social sec...urity schemes. In our country, we do not have elaborate social security schemes or safety valve mechanism for protection of the interest of the common people.

A series of unilateral and anti-people decisions might help in raising Sensex points only for the time being. I agree that Sensex must be stable, but at the same time, policy and planning should not be used to impose back-breaking burden on the common people. If black money is unearthed in the country, and brought back home from abroad and are used for development purposes, then Sensex will grow in an unparalleled manner.

I do not support any decision to sell out everything. This might suit one section of the government. We are determined to fight for the cause of the common people and we can sacrifice our lives but cannot compromise on it.

Can India Inc. face the truth about the Manesar violence?

 It would be sad if the ghastly violence at Maruti Suzuki’s (MSIL) Manesar plant on July 18, 2012, in which a HR manager died, were to be understood simply as a ‘murderous workers’ vs ‘rational management’ kind of an incident. There is a history and a context to this violence, and how that is understood, and acknowledged, by India Inc. will indicate how serious we are about preventing such incidents in the future.

First of all, let’s begin with a game of call-a-spade-a-spade. When your profits go up by 2,200% over nine years (MSIL’s from 2001-02 to 2010-11), when your CEO’s pay goes up by 419% over four years (MSIL CEO’s from 2007-08 to 2010-11), when you get a 400% increase in productivity with just a 65% increase in your workforce (from 1992-2000), when your workers’ real wages increase by just 5.5% when the consumer price index rose by 50% (2007-11) (figures as reported by the researchers Prasenjit Bose and Sourindra Ghosh in The Hindu), when a worker can lose nearly half his salary for taking a couple of days leave in a month – you have a situation that free market economists are programmed not to register: extreme exploitation.

As per media reports, about 65% of MSIL’s workers in its Manesar campus are non-permanent – contract labour, apprentices, trainees, what have you. While the permanent worker gets a maximum of Rs17000 per month, the contract worker gets a maximum of Rs7000. The CEO gets a little more, about Rs.2.45 crore per annum (and this is a 2010-11 figure). And unlike the worker, who gets only two 7.5 minute tea/toilet breaks during an eight-hour shift, and has to run 150 metres to pick up his tea and snack, run another 400 metres to the toilet, drink tea and piss at the same time, holding his cup in one hand and you-know-what in the other, and run back to the assembly line before the seven minutes are up (as otherwise he could end up losing half a day’s pay), the top management does not, I think, get penalised if they spend more than 7.5 minutes at a time flooding the toilet.

The backstory

Apart from the physical and economic exploitation, what the workers were reacting to on July 18 was the sustained assault on their dignity. In 2011, there had been at least three confrontations – in June, September and October — between the workers and the management. All were totally non-violent. The workers had been agitating for an independent union in place of the ineffective ‘company union’ – the Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU). After a lot of struggle, they registered the Maruti Suzuki Employees’ Union (MSEU) in October last year. But in the same month, the management reportedly got rid of the troublesome leadership of this union by offering them a VRS-type settlement.

The workers then formed a new union, the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU) with a new set of committee members. It was this union which had been negotiating with the management through 2012 – for wage increases, for transportation facilities, slowing down the robotic pace of work, and regularisation of leave benefits.

But with the MSWU apparently making little headway in the negotiations, discontent was simmering among the workers. And on July 18, when a floor supervisor allegedly misbehaved with a Dalit worker (Jiyalal), and instead of the supervisor getting pulled up, the worker got suspended, the new union was expected to deliver – to get Jiyalal reinstated. And when it began to look like they wouldn’t be able to, violence broke out.

The management has said that the workers unleashed the violence. The workers say that the management instigated it by getting hundreds of bouncers to attack the workers, who responded to that attack. But nobody seems to know what exactly happened. The truth might be closer to what a labour activist describes as a combination of karna, karwana and hone dena.

The permanently temporary worker

At the heart of this whole mess is India Inc.’s love for contract labour. My research tells me that manufacturing cars is not a seasonal enterprise – it happens round the year; nor is assembling a car in a factory incidental to the making of a car – it is not like gardening or mopping the factory floor; nor is it something that can be done with a few dozen workers. According to the law of the land – the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, and Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Central Rules, 1971, it is illegal to employ contract labour where “work is perennial and must go on from day to day”, “where the work is necessary for the work of the factory”, and “where the work is sufficient to employ considerable number of whole time workmen.”

It is the employer’s responsibility to follow the law, and the government’s responsibility to ensure that it is not violated. Not even the MSIL management can deny that they have been using temporary workers for permanent, core, production work. And this is not something that happens in this one plant of Maruti Suzuki. In the entire NCR region – in Manesar, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Noida – where there are thousands of factories of all sizes that carry out manufacturing work round the year, the average percentage of permanent workers in the total workforce is 15%. About 85% of the workforce is made up of non-permanent labour. And non-permanent labour includes contract workers, apprentices, trainees, etc. —- add all of them and the percentage of temporary workers becomes as high as 95% in many factories. And these workers remain ‘temporary’ for years and years. I guess you could say that corporate India’s favourite worker is the permanently temporary one.

It wasn’t always this bad. The percentage of contract labour as a proportion of the total workforce doing core manufacturing work has been steadily rising since 1991, the year liberalisation began, and today, the informalisation and fragmentation of what used to be formal or organised labour has reached absurd levels. What this means, in human terms, for the workers, is exploitation of a kind that is not much different from slave labour.

To take a simple example, many factories have what is called the ‘night shift’ and the ‘full night shift’. The ‘night shift’ is from 9am to 1am and the ‘full night shift’ is from 9am to 5 am, resuming again at 9am. Yes, 16-hour and 20-hour shifts are pretty common in the NCR, about as common as the rampant violation of labour laws. And yet, we never hear about the appalling condition of India’s working class, or about how India Inc. routinely breaks the nation’s labour laws with impunity and gets away with it. Or is it possible that this is how we want most of our fellow Indians to live? We seem to care more about one Indian winning an Olympic gold than 700 million Indians living like insects in a drain. All we hear, instead, is how ‘labour law reforms’ are necessary to improve the ‘investment climate’.

Before and after Manesar

Such extreme exploitation is bound to trigger unrest at some point, and the Manesar violence is only the latest in a long series of worker conflagrations that we have seen in the past decade – in Honda Motors, Rico Auto, Orient Craft, EIRO, Pricol and many others. And they are not exclusive to NCR – similar unrest has been seen in other parts of the country as well, and they are only set to spread even more. There are four simple take-aways from all of this:

One: the growing irrelevance of the union. The workers’ unions can only represent the permanent workers. The vast majority of the workers are temporary ones, and the union means little to them, as it does not represent them. The union has traditionally been a management tool to control the workers. But in this scenario, where the union has little leverage, the management either has to play it straight (pay fair wages, give decent working conditions and benefits) or call bouncers and goons to control the workers.

Two: there is a clear nexus between the state and the corporate managements. The two have come together to maximize the exploitation of the worker. Haryana, where Manesar is located, has not even bothered to constitute the legally mandated board that is supposed to oversee the enforcement of the Contract Labour Act. The labour department is conveniently understaffed, and the cops, like cops everywhere, protect the exploiter from the exploited.

According to the workers, not just cops, but also bouncers, local goons, private security agencies, intelligence agencies (take a wild guess who put out the story about the ‘Naxal hand’ in the incident), and even the local village headmen (many of whom are huge beneficiaries of the recent industrialisation of the area – having made money from selling part of their land holdings, from renting out accommodation to workers, from getting into the transportation business, ferrying goods and material to and from the factories, as labour contractors, and other kinds of ‘middleman’ services) have been enlisted to ‘fix’ the ‘troublesome’ workers.

Three: the average factory worker in the NCR today, particularly in Manesar, is a new breed. Corporate India is very clear what it wants: absolute control over the Indian worker. But factory workers of today are not like those workers of 20-30 years ago. They are mostly ITI-trained diploma holders, young, in their twenties, mobile-savvy, net-savvy, and don’t have the time for good old ‘Down with Capitalism’ kind of sloganeering. They don’t care for the ‘communist’ stuff any more than your standard issue MBA. Though they have been hired as contract labour, unlike, say, construction workers, they are not from dirt poor backgrounds. Many are from lower-middle or middle-middle class families; they are exposed to the mall-bound luxuries of Shining India, and they want their rightful share of the GDP they busted their ass to produce. And: they care about their dignity more than they care about their jobs, and that’s easy, because they don’t really have a job anyway – they are temporary workers hired by a contractor, see?

And when such a worker is pushed to breaking point – not just worked to the bone, but taunted and humiliated, he is liable to lash out blindly. And when that happens, you get what happened at MSIL’s Manesar plant last week. It is not a rational or premeditated action – they gained nothing from it. Such violence serves no purpose. In fact, most of them are now busy hiding from the cops. But that is the nature of a rebellion – it is not calculated, it is not rational. And that is how we must understand the Manesar eruption: as a workers’ revolt.

Four: Capitalism is not sustainable without an independent union. If you look at the so-called golden period of capitalism in the 20th century, the US after the New Deal, up to the time Reagan and Thatcher came on the scene, it was a period marked by strong independent unions that managed to get the workers a decent standard of living, and Capital was forced to keep its ‘social contract’, as it were, with Labour. But then, this period, from the 1940s to the early 1980s, was also the period when communism had to be kept at bay; it was the period when capitalists had to show the world that capitalism is a better system for everyone (and not just capitalists) than any other system.

But today, of course, there is no alternative to capitalism, or so the masters of the universe want us to believe. And they also want us to believe there is no need for an independent union because they have a right to squeeze the worker as much as they want, and can. But history – and countless management studies – has shown time and again that a union which enjoys the confidence of the workers is the best tool that management can ever have to ‘control’ the workers. Hire temporary workers, take the union out of the picture – well, you’ll rake in super-profits for a while, but you’re going to have to pay a heavy price later in terms of worker unrest, and the kind of incident we saw at Manesar last week.

Yes, it is true that India’s labour legislation right now is a total mess. We have about 55 central labour laws and more than a 100 state laws, and they are all mostly observed in the breach. It is also argued that these laws make it unreasonably difficult to lay off a worker, and this is cited as the reason why employers want to keep their permanent workers to the bare minimum. The legislation in question here is the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which requires companies employing more than 100 workers to seek government approval before firing anybody or closing down.

While this provision should be debated, with equal participation from all the stakeholders, India Inc. needs to look at it less as an unpleasant provision to be eliminated or circumvented, and more as a necessary reminder that a business enterprise always has a social dimension that is as important as profit, and which it ignores at its own peril. Trample on workers’ livelihood and dignity, and your profit is basically blood money – it won’t say so in the balance sheet or the P&L statement, but it will show up somewhere, later, if not sooner. It could be the money you pay to bouncers and private security agencies; or the money you spend on surveillance equipment; it could be an expensive lockout; or it could be the brain tumour caused by all the curses of your downsized workforce; or it could even be the death of one of your managers.

Instead of shedding crocodile tears about the worsening ‘investment climate’, the oligarchs who make up Indian Inc. and their MBA underlings would do well to engage in some soul-searching. For a change, they can ask themselves: Should I continue to treat the Indian worker simply as a cost factor that has to be reduced to zero, or can I treat them with a little more respect, so that they too can live, and work, with dignity?

Can India Inc. face the truth about the Manesar violence?

 It would be sad if the ghastly violence at Maruti Suzuki’s (MSIL) Manesar plant on July 18, 2012, in which a HR manager died, were to be understood simply as a ‘murderous workers’ vs ‘rational management’ kind of an incident. There is a history and a context to this violence, and how that is understood, and acknowledged, by India Inc. will indicate how serious we are about preventing such incidents in the future.

First of all, let’s begin with a game of call-a-spade-a-spade. When your profits go up by 2,200% over nine years (MSIL’s from 2001-02 to 2010-11), when your CEO’s pay goes up by 419% over four years (MSIL CEO’s from 2007-08 to 2010-11), when you get a 400% increase in productivity with just a 65% increase in your workforce (from 1992-2000), when your workers’ real wages increase by just 5.5% when the consumer price index rose by 50% (2007-11) (figures as reported by the researchers Prasenjit Bose and Sourindra Ghosh in The Hindu), when a worker can lose nearly half his salary for taking a couple of days leave in a month – you have a situation that free market economists are programmed not to register: extreme exploitation.

As per media reports, about 65% of MSIL’s workers in its Manesar campus are non-permanent – contract labour, apprentices, trainees, what have you. While the permanent worker gets a maximum of Rs17000 per month, the contract worker gets a maximum of Rs7000. The CEO gets a little more, about Rs.2.45 crore per annum (and this is a 2010-11 figure). And unlike the worker, who gets only two 7.5 minute tea/toilet breaks during an eight-hour shift, and has to run 150 metres to pick up his tea and snack, run another 400 metres to the toilet, drink tea and piss at the same time, holding his cup in one hand and you-know-what in the other, and run back to the assembly line before the seven minutes are up (as otherwise he could end up losing half a day’s pay), the top management does not, I think, get penalised if they spend more than 7.5 minutes at a time flooding the toilet.

The backstory

Apart from the physical and economic exploitation, what the workers were reacting to on July 18 was the sustained assault on their dignity. In 2011, there had been at least three confrontations – in June, September and October — between the workers and the management. All were totally non-violent. The workers had been agitating for an independent union in place of the ineffective ‘company union’ – the Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU). After a lot of struggle, they registered the Maruti Suzuki Employees’ Union (MSEU) in October last year. But in the same month, the management reportedly got rid of the troublesome leadership of this union by offering them a VRS-type settlement.

The workers then formed a new union, the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU) with a new set of committee members. It was this union which had been negotiating with the management through 2012 – for wage increases, for transportation facilities, slowing down the robotic pace of work, and regularisation of leave benefits.

But with the MSWU apparently making little headway in the negotiations, discontent was simmering among the workers. And on July 18, when a floor supervisor allegedly misbehaved with a Dalit worker (Jiyalal), and instead of the supervisor getting pulled up, the worker got suspended, the new union was expected to deliver – to get Jiyalal reinstated. And when it began to look like they wouldn’t be able to, violence broke out.

The management has said that the workers unleashed the violence. The workers say that the management instigated it by getting hundreds of bouncers to attack the workers, who responded to that attack. But nobody seems to know what exactly happened. The truth might be closer to what a labour activist describes as a combination of karna, karwana and hone dena.

The permanently temporary worker

At the heart of this whole mess is India Inc.’s love for contract labour. My research tells me that manufacturing cars is not a seasonal enterprise – it happens round the year; nor is assembling a car in a factory incidental to the making of a car – it is not like gardening or mopping the factory floor; nor is it something that can be done with a few dozen workers. According to the law of the land – the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, and Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Central Rules, 1971, it is illegal to employ contract labour where “work is perennial and must go on from day to day”, “where the work is necessary for the work of the factory”, and “where the work is sufficient to employ considerable number of whole time workmen.”

It is the employer’s responsibility to follow the law, and the government’s responsibility to ensure that it is not violated. Not even the MSIL management can deny that they have been using temporary workers for permanent, core, production work. And this is not something that happens in this one plant of Maruti Suzuki. In the entire NCR region – in Manesar, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Noida – where there are thousands of factories of all sizes that carry out manufacturing work round the year, the average percentage of permanent workers in the total workforce is 15%. About 85% of the workforce is made up of non-permanent labour. And non-permanent labour includes contract workers, apprentices, trainees, etc. —- add all of them and the percentage of temporary workers becomes as high as 95% in many factories. And these workers remain ‘temporary’ for years and years. I guess you could say that corporate India’s favourite worker is the permanently temporary one.

It wasn’t always this bad. The percentage of contract labour as a proportion of the total workforce doing core manufacturing work has been steadily rising since 1991, the year liberalisation began, and today, the informalisation and fragmentation of what used to be formal or organised labour has reached absurd levels. What this means, in human terms, for the workers, is exploitation of a kind that is not much different from slave labour.

To take a simple example, many factories have what is called the ‘night shift’ and the ‘full night shift’. The ‘night shift’ is from 9am to 1am and the ‘full night shift’ is from 9am to 5 am, resuming again at 9am. Yes, 16-hour and 20-hour shifts are pretty common in the NCR, about as common as the rampant violation of labour laws. And yet, we never hear about the appalling condition of India’s working class, or about how India Inc. routinely breaks the nation’s labour laws with impunity and gets away with it. Or is it possible that this is how we want most of our fellow Indians to live? We seem to care more about one Indian winning an Olympic gold than 700 million Indians living like insects in a drain. All we hear, instead, is how ‘labour law reforms’ are necessary to improve the ‘investment climate’.

Before and after Manesar

Such extreme exploitation is bound to trigger unrest at some point, and the Manesar violence is only the latest in a long series of worker conflagrations that we have seen in the past decade – in Honda Motors, Rico Auto, Orient Craft, EIRO, Pricol and many others. And they are not exclusive to NCR – similar unrest has been seen in other parts of the country as well, and they are only set to spread even more. There are four simple take-aways from all of this:

One: the growing irrelevance of the union. The workers’ unions can only represent the permanent workers. The vast majority of the workers are temporary ones, and the union means little to them, as it does not represent them. The union has traditionally been a management tool to control the workers. But in this scenario, where the union has little leverage, the management either has to play it straight (pay fair wages, give decent working conditions and benefits) or call bouncers and goons to control the workers.

Two: there is a clear nexus between the state and the corporate managements. The two have come together to maximize the exploitation of the worker. Haryana, where Manesar is located, has not even bothered to constitute the legally mandated board that is supposed to oversee the enforcement of the Contract Labour Act. The labour department is conveniently understaffed, and the cops, like cops everywhere, protect the exploiter from the exploited.

According to the workers, not just cops, but also bouncers, local goons, private security agencies, intelligence agencies (take a wild guess who put out the story about the ‘Naxal hand’ in the incident), and even the local village headmen (many of whom are huge beneficiaries of the recent industrialisation of the area – having made money from selling part of their land holdings, from renting out accommodation to workers, from getting into the transportation business, ferrying goods and material to and from the factories, as labour contractors, and other kinds of ‘middleman’ services) have been enlisted to ‘fix’ the ‘troublesome’ workers.

Three: the average factory worker in the NCR today, particularly in Manesar, is a new breed. Corporate India is very clear what it wants: absolute control over the Indian worker. But factory workers of today are not like those workers of 20-30 years ago. They are mostly ITI-trained diploma holders, young, in their twenties, mobile-savvy, net-savvy, and don’t have the time for good old ‘Down with Capitalism’ kind of sloganeering. They don’t care for the ‘communist’ stuff any more than your standard issue MBA. Though they have been hired as contract labour, unlike, say, construction workers, they are not from dirt poor backgrounds. Many are from lower-middle or middle-middle class families; they are exposed to the mall-bound luxuries of Shining India, and they want their rightful share of the GDP they busted their ass to produce. And: they care about their dignity more than they care about their jobs, and that’s easy, because they don’t really have a job anyway – they are temporary workers hired by a contractor, see?

And when such a worker is pushed to breaking point – not just worked to the bone, but taunted and humiliated, he is liable to lash out blindly. And when that happens, you get what happened at MSIL’s Manesar plant last week. It is not a rational or premeditated action – they gained nothing from it. Such violence serves no purpose. In fact, most of them are now busy hiding from the cops. But that is the nature of a rebellion – it is not calculated, it is not rational. And that is how we must understand the Manesar eruption: as a workers’ revolt.

Four: Capitalism is not sustainable without an independent union. If you look at the so-called golden period of capitalism in the 20th century, the US after the New Deal, up to the time Reagan and Thatcher came on the scene, it was a period marked by strong independent unions that managed to get the workers a decent standard of living, and Capital was forced to keep its ‘social contract’, as it were, with Labour. But then, this period, from the 1940s to the early 1980s, was also the period when communism had to be kept at bay; it was the period when capitalists had to show the world that capitalism is a better system for everyone (and not just capitalists) than any other system.

But today, of course, there is no alternative to capitalism, or so the masters of the universe want us to believe. And they also want us to believe there is no need for an independent union because they have a right to squeeze the worker as much as they want, and can. But history – and countless management studies – has shown time and again that a union which enjoys the confidence of the workers is the best tool that management can ever have to ‘control’ the workers. Hire temporary workers, take the union out of the picture – well, you’ll rake in super-profits for a while, but you’re going to have to pay a heavy price later in terms of worker unrest, and the kind of incident we saw at Manesar last week.

Yes, it is true that India’s labour legislation right now is a total mess. We have about 55 central labour laws and more than a 100 state laws, and they are all mostly observed in the breach. It is also argued that these laws make it unreasonably difficult to lay off a worker, and this is cited as the reason why employers want to keep their permanent workers to the bare minimum. The legislation in question here is the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which requires companies employing more than 100 workers to seek government approval before firing anybody or closing down.

While this provision should be debated, with equal participation from all the stakeholders, India Inc. needs to look at it less as an unpleasant provision to be eliminated or circumvented, and more as a necessary reminder that a business enterprise always has a social dimension that is as important as profit, and which it ignores at its own peril. Trample on workers’ livelihood and dignity, and your profit is basically blood money – it won’t say so in the balance sheet or the P&L statement, but it will show up somewhere, later, if not sooner. It could be the money you pay to bouncers and private security agencies; or the money you spend on surveillance equipment; it could be an expensive lockout; or it could be the brain tumour caused by all the curses of your downsized workforce; or it could even be the death of one of your managers.

Instead of shedding crocodile tears about the worsening ‘investment climate’, the oligarchs who make up Indian Inc. and their MBA underlings would do well to engage in some soul-searching. For a change, they can ask themselves: Should I continue to treat the Indian worker simply as a cost factor that has to be reduced to zero, or can I treat them with a little more respect, so that they too can live, and work, with dignity?

In volte face, Centre to accept minimum wages for NREGA

The Centre is set to accept ‘minimum wages’ under the job guarantee scheme, apprehensive that taking such action later, on the possible directives of the Supreme Court, would show it as reluctant to give higher wages to the poor. Rural development ministry will soon seek Cabinet approval to make wages of MGNREGA at par with Minimum Wages Act prevailing in states. It marks a government volte face after it moved the apex court against a Karnataka High Court ruling that wages under the job scheme could not be less than minimum wage rate fixed under MW Act. At the core of the dispute is a provision in MGNREG Act (clause 6-1) which empowers the Centre to notify wages, irrespective of the MW Act. The provision, in essence, states that the job scheme was not bound by the “floor remuneration” to be paid to workers, a fact disputed by social activists. While a harried government feared the Karnataka HC order would increase the cost of the central scheme manifold, many including RD minister Jairam Ramesh felt that challenging the HC order would be seen as denying higher wages to the poor. It would be politically counter productive. The initial reaction, not encouraging, in the apex court seems to have nudged the Centre to be proactive in bringing the MGNREGA in sync with MW Act. It is feared that a negative verdict could leave the Centre stranded, having to bear higher costs of the job scheme without the credit of giving increased wages. However, the Centre may be playing a little game to guard against arbitrary hikes in minimum wages by states to extract more money from Delhi. It has proposed to amend clause 6-1 to read that while Centre would notify the wages, it would ensure that “the first time” these wages are not less than MW Act. At the same time, it wants to tweak the clause about funding pattern. Instead of committing the Centre to “meet the cost of amount required for payment of wages”, the RD ministry wants it to read that Centre would meet the cost of wages as determined by the Centre (under 6-1) It means that after ensuring that wages fixed are not less than MW Act, the Centre would be at liberty to not hike the wages even if states revised their minimum wages. It would deter the states from assuming that hike in MW Act would automatically fetch them total reimbursement of wage outgo under MGNREGA.

One of the world’s oldest surviving communist governments has crashed out in India

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been ruling West Bengal for 34 years but last night fell to what the Indian media is calling a “tsunami” – 56-year-old Mamata Banerjee who leads the Trinamool Congress.
Nicknamed Didi or sister by her followers, she’s known as a firebrand orator.
''We will establish democracy, not party-curacy,'' she told supporters outside her simple home in one of the oldest districts of Kolkata.
''This is like the second freedom of Bengal.''
In a colorful account marking the history of the occasion, the Times of India referred to the gathering at CPM headquarters in Alimuddin Street in the state capital formally known as Calcutta.
''The roar ripped into the CPIM party office, which had fallen into a funereal silence,'' the newspaper said.
''The Alimuddin Street apparatchik, far removed from reality, sat in isolated ones and twos, unable to comprehend Force Mamata. All their giants had toppled….''
It said CPIM’s chairman Biman Bose responded in a way which showed why his party deserved to lose.
''His manner was arrogant, his replies curt, even dismissive, and his entire take on the historic defeat was that the Left Front's ‘assessment had been wrong’.''
Added the Times: ''It nailed the end of 34 years of communist rule, and heralded a change from the stifling status quo.''

A MATTER OF CONCERN FOR CPI (M) AND LEFT FRONT

By Ambar Roy

Today being a Bengali I feel myself very much uncomfortable, when I here in the media about the use of dirty slang adjectives with respect to a women from Mr. Anil a CPI- M candidate. I have also seen few clipping of Buddha babu and others and felt really disgusted about CPI - M So I have a few Questions to ask today to CPI – M party and its executives –in –charge

I will start with Buddha babu, who is a Gold Medalist in MA – Bengali from Calcutta University and BA – Hons. in Bengali from Presidency college was a bosom friend of my sister Mrs. Parvati Ganguly ( Nee name Roy) is also a Gold Medalist in BA – Hons. in Bengali from Presidency College and also a Gold Medalist in MA – Bengali from Calcutta University. I know, Madame Aparna Sen, Purnedu Majumder are also from same Presidency College and Calcutta University Students along with Buddha Babu and my sister. Inspite hailing from a Congress Family, we the Roy’s of Behala also have spend a lot of Money, Time, and Knowledge with the communist movement right from the beginning in 1950 onwards directly and indirectly.

But then what is this? Earlier, Communist used to say Kana Atullya and so on Buddha Babu along with Biman Basu, that guy Gautam and Anil all are using slang for nothing. Is it really required to disgrace the ladies of Calcutta, the women of Calcutta, the Mother of Calcutta, the Sister of Calcutta, the Daughters of Calcutta? Please answer this simple question Mr. Buddha, Mrs. Aparna, Mr. Biman, Mr. Gautam, and that guy Anil how he dare use slang against a lady like this. If Mr. Gautam can all the time say in front of TV that people should know he is a Minister, why not all the women of Calcutta filed a defamation suite against this and claim considerable damage made by that guy Anil Bose, a candidate of assembly election on behalf of CPI – M? Why not all communist mind people of Calcutta similarly filed a defamation suite against this and claim considerable damage made by that guy Anil Bose, a candidate of assembly election on behalf of CPI – M?

What CPI – M said through his nominated candidate and a so called VIP executive of CPI –M is shocking, disgraceful, harming, humiliating, uncivilized, traumatic in nature, damaging, defaming to all women of Calcutta irrespective of age.
Can Mr. Buddha, Mrs. Aparna, Mr. Biman, Mr. Gautam, and that guy Anil deny that it is only a woman who have given you all birth and shown this beautiful world? Then how can one say so. Forget about election campaign right now. You people must give my answer. I request all the people of Calcutta, specially the women folk and all like minded communist to save communism from the hands of these people with immediate effect by not giving any vote to CPI – M , so that, we the people of Bengal teach this CPI – M a lesson at-least to behave properly with women.
In the Bam Front Ministry, my brother’s son’s college mate is a present Minister. He is a very learned person and a very young man. What he will explain to his daughter, wife and mother – Buddha Babu, Aparna di, tell me.

I ask Buddha Babu, what you will tell to your daughter and your wife, if they raise a question to you in this regard. I ask Aparnadi, you might have forgotten me, my sis name is Parvati Ganguly (nee name Roy) from Behala Roy Family, an Ex Presidency and your year mate in college, Please tell me Aparnadi, do you have an answer. We all don’t have an answer to what disgraceful act that guy Anil – a CPI – M candidate did against all Bengal Women.

After all Mamata is a Nation’s leader, Hon Rly Minister, Govt. of India. How can one utter such nasty words against her, our national leader? I request all women of India to protest against CPI – M and bring justice to Women of the Nation, our National Leader and our lady of Calcutta.

It is astonishing to here from educated people like Buddha Babu , MA in Bengali and a Presidency College student, that, Anil’s speech is a sound that was heard from his left ears and people do not heard yet the sound that was heard by his right ear. Buddha Babu, I again repeat, you are my sister’s college mate in Presidency, and you are only 6 years senior to me. Moreover, with respect to educational qualification I did 2 Engr. Degree from IIT, one in Ceramics and another in Mechanical, besides, I did Quality Management from Juran Institute Management, Detroit, USA. Please try to become a Quality Man, a Quality CM and also make a Quality Political Party.

CPI –M is a political party that is ruined by people like you, and others whose names I feel bad to take. No women, girl, mother, sister, wife daughter will like that attitude expressed by you and your party member. Even the supporters, cadres and members of Bam Panthi will now leave the party of its own.

You know what CPI - M did for Bengal... No body is disrespecting CPI, Forward Block, and RSP like this. Then Why CPI – M? You and others have to tell the people.Use of Filthy language in a mass meeting in front of Bengal and Nations Women, little girls of Bengal and Nation, Mothers of Bengal and Nation, Sisters of Bengal and Nation, Daughters of Bengal and Nation will never leave you Buddha Babu and your arrogant party CPI – M.

I shall continue this till CPI –M is killed in the soil of India. This is the slogan of today in Bengal and the Nation. Buddha Babu and CPI – M Political Party cannot abuse in front of Bengal Nations Women, little girls of Bengal and Nation, Mothers of Bengal and Nation, Sisters of Bengal and Nation, Daughters of Bengal and Nation will never leave you Buddha Babu and your arrogant party CPI – M. I request all women, sister, daughter, mother and wives of Bengal people and Nations people to take necessary action in the right forum of law, the law of Land, the law of India and punish CPI – M and its leaders, members and CPI – M Political Party.

We cannot entertain such arrogance for a single time, so question of sorry does not come to picture.

Eligibility criterion of becoming a CPI – M member is as under:
He should be unsatisfied in life.

1.He should know to utter slang words in front of young girls, women, sisters, daughters, wives and mothers.
2.He should know how to black mail people by sugar coated words.
3.He should know dallally (brokerage) and how to take bribe
4.He should learn few words of communism by heart and need not understand the meaning of communism.

In Last 35 what Bengal expected from the Government hold and ruled by CPI – M.

1.The people of West Bengal thought that United Front Government and then the Left Front Govt. will provide the common people general food like Dal, Roti and Chawal at moderate rate. Answer is a “BIG NO”. Instead, the cost of common food grown up costlier than other electronic items and cars, which were owned by Left Front Members, Cadre and supporters. Naturally to survive living common people sold their land and opt for the same.

2.The people of West Bengal thought that United Front Government will provide the common people preference to small and cottage industrial atmosphere in the state. Answer is a “BIG NO”. Instead the Big Industries were shut down and then the pinch came to small and cottage industries owned by skilled persons, technical and other entrepreneurs. They removed their establishment in other neighboring states as the Big Industries did.

3.The people of West Bengal thought that United Front Government will provide the common people health care, hospital, and education. Answer is a “BIG NO”. Govt. Hospital were looted and closed down by Left Front Cadre and Nursing Home, Polytechnics were open by Left front Govt. Cadre. School teaching Quality was disturbed and a galaxy of Private Schools were made by Left Front supporter, Cadre and Members. Those students came out from these schools were admitted in Medical college, Calcutta University and then recruited in Govt. Hospital, Govt. Schools, made Judges, Magistrate and Police Officers and all Govt. Licensing Dept., administration etc.

This is how Left Front made a Game Plan in 1970’s and ruled the State with their “pettoa” people with guns, law and authority. Mamata Madame of TMC and Congress Party understood the same and OPENED THE PANTS OF LEFT FRONT in front of the people. May be so they are so ferocious and desperate today uttering anything in front of mass people in open meeting with filthiest words as per the law of land of CPI - M. However, I am sure it won’t work this way.

Every Political Party has its own way of thinking, so do Left Front. I am not questioning about the same. But, then, Left front should also consider the Base Points, the Fundamentals of Communism too some extend. And if any institution, individuals do not consider the base fundamental then it starts getting deviated from the primary issues and priority becomes the focus on secondary issues. That is exactly what happed to Left front.

I also mention herewith that improvement / development is directly proportional to Science, Arts, Technology, Engineering, Finance and Law. Left Front Government did not consider these fundamental base points and only considered its secondary points, like, schemes of housing, education, health, food, Employment, Law, etc. But, then who will do these jobs, Quality Teachers, Quality Writers, Quality Scientist, Quality Engineers, Quality Technologist, Quality Doctors, Quality Lawyers, Quality MBA and so on. Left Fronts Leaders did not accept their suggestion repeatedly in the last 35 years, Left Front Leader did not support and given a free hand to them.
So whatever so called development / growth Left Front achieved through its Ministers, Members and Cadres by the torturing , abusing , humiliating the common people (mass people) were meager, which did not happen in neighbor states of West Bengal and in overall all states of India in the last 35 years. Sensible People of West Bengal went for his education, career, earning to other states and achieved many things. Those who could not go out did suffer in the hand of Left Front.
Now majority people of West Bengal realized this and revolted against Left Front especially against CPI – M. I am sure still they have faith with other Left Parties, like Forward Block, RSP, and CPI and so on.

Total Assets of Political Parties

Total Assets of Political Parties in Financial Year (FY) 2008-09
Summary)

As on 31st March 2009, INC has shown the maximum total assets of 612 crores), followed by BSP 286 crores and BJP 261 crores.

Amongst the other parties, RJD has shown total assets of 3 crores, CPI 7 crores, NCP 32 crores, SP 178 crores and CPM 185 crores.
Party

Total Assets(crores) of the political parties (Financial Year 2008-09).

1) INC-611.77
2) BSP-286.15
3) BJP-260.7
4) CPM-185.47
5) SP-177.8
6) NCP-32.32
7) CPI-7.1
8) RJD-3.28

Submitted to Income TAX department by the National Political Parties.

TEMPORARY WORMEN ARE MOST AFFECTED DUE TO GLOBAL RECESSION

A new report issued by the International Labour Office (ILO) says that workers employed by temporary employment agencies have been among the first to lose their jobs as a result of the financial and economic crisis.

At the same time, the report also observes that ratification of ILO Convention No. 181 on private employment agencies can help to promote Decent Work and ensure better functioning labour markets.

The report – “Private employment agencies, temporary agency workers and their contribution to the labour market” – points to a direct correlation between economic growth and the state of the employment agency industry, with the strong performance and expansion seen during the boom years mirrored by the weakness and contraction of the industry today.

The report will be discussed at a global tripartite meeting on October 20-21 at ILO headquarters titled “Workshop to promote ratification of the Private Employment Agencies Convention, 1997 (No. 181)”. Convention No. 181 balances enterprises’ needs for labour flexibility with workers’ needs for employment stability, a safe work environment, decent conditions of work and social security.

“Private employment agencies play an important role in the functioning of contemporary labour markets. They act as intermediaries in modern labour markets, allowing enterprises greater flexibility to increase or decrease their workforces, while ensuring for the workers sufficient security in terms of job opportunities and employment standards, including pay, working time and training”, the report says.

“The private employment agency industry has grown at an incredible pace over the past three decades due to the increasing need to provide workers and services to a growing and flexible labour market. User enterprises hire temporary agency workers to be able to rapidly adjust to the shifting economic realities. Since mid-2008, enterprises have used this pressure-valve function to lay off temporary workers, while often leaving their core workforce intact”, said John Myers, industry specialist from the ILO’s Sectoral Activities Department and author of the report.

The biggest temporary job losses were recorded in the manufacturing sector of developed countries, most noticeably in the car industry. The report cites the example of Germany, where it is estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 temporary agency workers lost their placements in the four to six months after October 2008. Similar trends were seen in Japan, United States, Spain and France.

”Many of the largest private employment agencies are saying that it will be 2010 at least before they see any upturn in business. This would generally happen after overtime hours and the length of the working week begin to rise among the core workforce of user enterprises, and companies’ slack capacity begins to fall. When firms consider turning to agencies to meet their needs, this will be one of the first signs that the economic crisis is beginning to end”, said John Myers.

Meanwhile, the industry itself is introducing measures to cut costs and increase the efficiency of its services. According to the report, these measures will only be effective if the following challenges are addressed:

Continuing to ensure that national regulation on agency work is based on the flexicurity concept – achieving the right balance between the need for flexibility in the labour market while also ensuring the right protection for agency workers.

Assisting the transition of temporary workers displaced from user enterprises into other jobs as quickly as possible.

Staving off widespread business closures through cost-cutting and efficiency programmes.

Devising new ways of selling agencies’ services in an economic climate of cost-cutting by user enterprises and where some client firm – agency relationships have been damaged by the economic crisis.

Surmounting restrictions on agencies’ activities in certain countries and in certain sectors in post-recession recovering economies, as part of its quest for further global expansion.

Developing strategies to reflect various economic recovery scenarios: the possibility of a sustained rebound, a long flat period followed by a jobless upturn, or a brief rebound followed by renewed stagnation.

Rethinking its role in post-recession national labour markets as a means of increasing its penetration rates, particularly in the industry’s emerging markets of Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia.

“Countries that have not yet ratified Convention No. 181 are encouraged to do so, as its implementation can be an engine for job creation, structural growth, improved efficiency of national labour markets, better matching of supply and demand for workers, higher labour participation rates and increased diversity. It also sets a clear framework for regulation, licensing and self-regulation, thereby encouraging reliability; ensuring effective protection of workers against unfair practices; discouraging human trafficking; and promoting cooperation between public and private employment services. Finally, ratification could help to promote and implement the Decent Work Agenda by ensuring protection of the rights and working conditions of agency workers”, says the report.

In recent months, several international-level policy statements have highlighted issues surrounding agencies and temporary agency work. For example, the June 2009 Global Jobs Pact refers to “establishing or strengthening effective public employment services and other labour market institutions” and “providing adequate [social protection] coverage for temporary and non-regular workers”.

According to the report, “governments have come under pressure from a range of social actors to make changes to the benefits and social assistance provided to workers placed through agencies, although reform has been slow and piecemeal where it has occurred at all”.

Source : ILO

DIPAWALI GREETINGS FROM MAMATA BANERJEE

TMC COMBINE CAPTURED SILIGURI MUNICIPAL CORPORATION

Sept. 15: The winds of change blowing across south Bengal have roared into the north, smashing the 28-year-old Left redoubt in Siliguri and extending its losing streak as the Assembly elections draw closer.

The Trinamul-Congress combine today captured the Siliguri Municipal Corporation (SMC) — a feat that prompted Mamata Banerjee to speak of the “last nail” in the Left coffin and the CPM to lament the inability of “development” to stem the slide.

The victory enabled the Opposition to dislodge the Left from the civic body for the first time since 1981 when the front formed the board of the Siliguri Municipality. The Left continued to be in power from 1994, too, when the municipality was upgraded to a municipal corporation.

The dent that became evident was so deep that the Left tally dived from 36 last time to 17 now. (See chart)

“People want paribartan (change) and what was reflected in the Lok Sabha elections found a similar reflection in the results of the SMC elections as well,” said Trinamul leader Partha Chatterjee, who had camped in Siliguri for several days. “The people now want the Left to go and us to take over.”

The CPM’s Siliguri strongman, Asok Bhattacharya, who won the last Assembly elections from his pocket borough with the largest margin in the state, conceded as much today. He said: “The slogan of paribartan overtook our slogan of development that has taken place in Siliguri. Stability and development, it seems, have given ground to change.”

In defeat and despondence, development became almost a dirty word. “It’s now clear that development cannot ensure everything. There was enough development in Siliguri,” CPM state secretary Biman Bose said.

In Delhi, Mamata was looking ahead. “We have been winning every election, so the indication is clear enough… I don’t think the government should stay even for a day. It’s a great victory. If they have lajja, ghrina, bhoy (shame, hatred and fear), they will move and let people work,” she said.

The stirrings of change were palpable in Siliguri in June itself during an election to a body equivalent to a zilla parishad when the Congress opened its account and snatched three of the seven seats from the CPM. But in the SMC polls, the Congress-Trinamul alliance threw up far better results despite the hitch between the two parties over seat sharing for the Sealdah and Bowbazar Assembly bypolls.

Alluding to this unity, Congress leader and Union minister Salman Khursheed said in Calcutta: “It is this unity between the Congress and Trinamul that will see these parties to victory in the 2011 Assembly polls.”

But the most significant gain from this election has been for Trinamul, which for the first time made its presence felt decisively in north Bengal. Trinamul will almost be an equal partner by winning 14 of the 23 seats that it contested in the SMC polls, one less than that of the Congress.

The victory in the CPM bastion has come through without another familiar factor: Mamata did not campaign for the polls even once. In contrast, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had campaigned there.

CPM leaders said though they had expected the Opposition to make inroads, they did not think the Congress-Trinamul combine would win the polls.

Source : The Telegraph.

RESON FOR JOINING WITH AN UNION

The important forces that make the employees join an union are as follows: 1. Greater Bargaining Power The individual employee possesses very little bargaining power as compared to that of his employer. If he is not satisfied with the wage and other conditions of employment, he can leave the job. It is not practicable to continually resign from one job after another when he is dissatisfied. This imposes a great financial and emotional burden upon the worker. The better course for him is to join a union that can take concerted action against the employer. The threat or actuality of a strike by a union is a powerful tool that often causes the employer to accept the demands of the workers for better conditions of employment.

2. Minimize Discrimination The decisions regarding pay, work, transfer, promotion, etc. are highly subjective in nature. The personal relationships existing between the supervisor and each of his subordinates may influence the management. Thus, there are chances of favoritisms and discriminations. A trade union can compel the management to formulate personnel policies that press for equality of treatment to the workers. All the labor decisions of the management are under close scrutiny of the labor union. This has the effect of minimizing favoritism and discrimination. 3. Sense of Security The employees may join the unions because of their belief that it is an effective way to secure adequate protection from various types of hazards and income insecurity such as accident, injury, illness, unemployment, etc. The trade union secure retirement benefits of the workers and compel the management to invest in welfare services for the benefit of the workers. 4. Sense of Participation The employees can participate in management of matters affecting their interests only if they join trade unions. They can influence the decisions that are taken as a result of collective bargaining between the union and the management. 5. Sense of Belongingness Many employees join a union because their co-workers are the members of the union. At times, an employee joins a union under group pressure; if he does not, he often has a very difficult time at work. On the other hand, those who are members of a union feel that they gain respect in the eyes of their fellow workers. They can also discuss their problem with’ the trade union leaders. 6. Platform for self expression The desire for self-expression is a fundamental human drive for most people. All of us wish to share our feelings, ideas and opinions with others. Similarly the workers also want the management to listen to them. A trade union provides such a forum where the feelings, ideas and opinions of the workers could be discussed. It can also transmit the feelings, ideas, opinions and complaints of the workers to the management. The collective voice of the workers is heard by the management and give due consideration while taking policy decisions by the management. 7. Betterment of relationships Another reason for employees joining unions is that employees feel that unions can fulfill the important need for adequate machinery for proper maintenance of employer-employee relations. Unions help in betterment of industrial relations among management and workers by solving the problems peacefully.

CRIMINAL LIABILITY ON THE EMPLOYERS

Under the Tea Act 1953, the Central Government has vast regulatory powers particularly in relation to employers who have defaulted in the payment of wages and PF dues. Under Section 16D of the Act the Central Government and the Tea Board can initiate stringent measures against the tea undertakings or units if they are managed in a manner highly detrimental to the tea industry or to public interest. Central Government should immediately takeover the closed gardens under Section 16E of the Tea Act 1953.

The employers who have misappropriated the dues should be prosecuted under Section 405 of the Indian Penal Code i.e. criminal breach of trust.

The managements violated their statutory obligations by misappropriating huge amounts from the workers' earned wages, salaries, bonus, rations, earned leave, provident funds, gratuity, and life insurance. They also evaded their liabilities to the government exchequer.

Many operational gardens are also following this trend of not paying the wages/salaries in time, not disbursing cereals in due time, not depositing the PF amount, not paying gratuity, wages and are pushing the workers and their dependants into starvation and death. On the other hand the owners still have assets both in the closed garden and in other businesses that can be used to recover these dues. The State Government should therefore be asked to legal steps necessary to recover these dues. Receiver should be appointed for reluctant owners, and their assets should be sold off to pay moneys due to the workers as wages, provident fund etc. Under the law, it is possible for the establishment’s property and the other property of the owner to be attached and criminal cases to be filed against employers.

TEA INDUSTRY : VICTIM OF CRISIS

Has the tea industry really fallen victim to a crisis? Is the Indian tea industry suffering due to imported tea in market competition? Has tea production really turned into a non-remunerative business?Here are some facts, which repudiate this hullabaloo of “crisis”.
· The British multinational Cadbury Schweppes has recently entered the Indian tea market with a cold tea brand “Snapple”.
· Another multinational Hindustan Lever is about to launch “Lipton” brand cold tea in Indian market.
· Another multinational giant has decided to come up with Coca Cola instant tea in the market. Hindustan Lever and Tata Tea have prepared to launch tea varieties with different flavors.
· Very shortly Amul Tea will also enter the tea industry.
· The oldest tea company of the world is Assam Tea Company. The owner of this company of Duncan McNeil Group is Jajodia. They are set to establish hundred odd tea bars in India and innumerable tea bars abroad in the next three years under the camouflaged name of “Camellia”. By now five Camellia tea bars are already doing enormous business in Kolkata. Witnessing this new strategy of these multinationals that are ready to grab the domestic tea market, one can easily understand that tea gardens remain a significant resource to them if they want to reap huge profits.But for many years we are hearing lamentations about the tea industry. Since 1999, retail tea prices have increased by 3% annually.
From the above it is clear that most of the good tea brands have increased their prices. Almost all the tea produced in the Dooars and Terai region gets sold in the domestic market. It is a callous irony that these very regions have for a number of years been victim of unprecedented crisis and anarchy.

Slavery of Tea Garden Workers since the British Raj

Dogmatic Communists have ruled West Bengal for over a quarter of century now, nonetheless, they have in no way grasped the structure on which the Tea Gardens of Dooars is operationally managed.
Continually since the British Era, dependents of Tea Garden workers numbering close to 700,000 people living in 100 odd tea gardens in Darjeeling Hills and Dooars have no ownership right to their ancestral residential homes despite their private investment on extension, repair and maintenance. The status of their properties are limited to that of a “labour quarter” subject to lease contract of the management company and state as the land owners and not secured by individual legal documents in favour of the workers.
This has resulted in workers not being able to capitalize on their assets, thereby, forcing them to be continually be “bonded as a labour” of the company presently managing the Garden and it amounts to their ancestral land and residence being a form of collateral submitted to the tea company in exchange of work and right to reside.
This current structure of ownership/management of Tea Garden is a continuation of British Raj structure and the status of tea estate workers has remained same ever since and the government of West Bengal never bothered to apply the famous communist dogma of “land to the tiller” here unlike the rest of Bengal. The feudalistic structure remained with White Bada Sahebs being replaced by Calcutta based Brown Sahebs continuing with the privilege of absolute rule but with no accountability on regulation, welfare and local development.
The state of Adivasi people in Dooars area is in complete despair with every indicator about these communities being below state and national average. Indigenous people of Dooars like the Koch and Totos are completely lagging behind in all parameters of human development such as such as literacy percentage, per capita income, school enrollment percentage, access to higher education, access to medical services or unemployment percentage.
We often hear about cases of suicides and hunger related deaths especially amongst the Adivasi community and further their indigenous language and culture is in process of being eroded owing to their strength of population numbers being diluted due to the arrival of mainstream ethnic Nepalis as per 1950 Indo Nepal agreement in traditional Adivasi land.
Evidently, the cause of the Adivasi community in Dooars and North Bengal has never being prominently featured in West Bengal’s governments’ priority list despite the Marxist government being one of the world’s longest ruling government.
India as a nation has one of the fastest growing economies and is being lauded for the continuous growth that it has managed since last one decade, however, many independent studies continues to place West Bengal in the bottom rung of investment attractiveness and lags behind in all the parameters in creating investment friendly environment.
Years of cadre driven philosophy of Marxist Government has infiltrated all institution of government, including the law and order machinery hence the West Bengal has not been able to attract neither domestic nor foreign investment thereby not being able to create employment and opportunities for it’s people to partake.
Dooars possesses unique potential in the areas of specialized agriculture, floriculture, hydropower, handicrafts for exports, non timber forest products such as medicinal and aromatic plants and furthermore on service sectors such as Tourism and Information Technology Enabled sectors ( ITES).
Governance either federal, state or local is the key issue and will continue to be a key issue and governments world wide including some state governments within India are embarking on steep learning curve to improve government services such essential utilities, tighter regulations on environment, justice delivery, human rights, law and order, education, health, employment and broad based local economic development and other continuously evolving infrastructural requirement such as telecom, transport and digital communication. But the West Bengal Government in the last 60 years of post independence period neither have shown any vision to make use of the huge potentials of this strategically located region, nor have displayed any political commitment and will to bring this region into national mainstream. As a result, this dooars & terain region has remained backward, den of all activities that hamper national security and people with deep rooted frustration. More seriously, the Bengal administration because of conscious act of dividing people on various grounds have turned out to be the finest practitioner and ace custodian of internal colonialism. West Bengal Government’s Health care system is considered to be one of the poorest in the world and for years’ variety of independent media has highlighted the deplorable conditions of state run hospitals across West Bengal. Similarly, the state run educational facilities are poorly funded and the majority of public prefer privately run educational services despite the Marxist promises of competitive educational quality.

CPM WIPED OUT FROM BENGAL

THE LOK Sabha election results in West Bengal have exposed several fresh political truths those were hidden so far. Almost wiping out of the Left in the left bastion and sudden spurt of the totally wiped out force (in 2004) Trinamool Congress, have proved that people were waiting to bring in a change, not for the sake of change only but to register a protest and hatred towards the rulers who claimed that none can remove the left for 50 years consecutively because they were the only saviour of the proletariats.The results have confirmed the all time truth that one cannot make fool of everybody for all the time.
The results have established the fact that if the electors get a chance to franchise on their own, no political party can rule a state for long 32 years. Some ploy were somewhere behind the screen, which let the Left to continue in power for so long.The results have substantiated also that it has reflected the conflicts within the party on ideological implementation, on political and economic approach, on contradictions of the rules and reality and differences in lifestyles of the party leaders who had been honoured for their sacrifices all through.
And last but not the least, the result has reposed people’s aspiration for unity of Congress and Trinamool Congress, which unfortunately did not happen earlier. The results have attested the faith and confidence of the voters on the opposition despite having hardly any organized strength in the entire state. It has reposed faith despite the opposition playing a destructive role against state’s policy for industrialisation. It has renewed the belief, discarding all the apprehensions and advocacy of the opposition that Mamata Banerjee is an unpredictable political personality and never can gift the people a stable political platform that people, specially the new generation voters were waiting for new sunrise – a sunrise for newer thoughts, newer steps and overall a new political horizon. They have thrown a challenge to the opposition – a challenge to honour their hopes and aspirations.Now the Trinamool Congress and Congress are to face the challenge – the severe one without repeating the experiences of 1972 and the following years of uncanny political situations that reigned supreme inside West Bengal.The immediate need is to control the party workers and the people as a whole, who have been so far been the victims of misrule of the left whether in urban area or in the rural society. They should be made to understand that the electoral result this time is the only fitting reply and they have to wait for the greater gift of winning the state Assembly elections due in 2011 leave aside the elections of Kolkata Municipal Corporation due in 2010 and elections for other municipal boards.
The next step will be to proceed for developing the party organisation because only political sentiment and love for a single political leader cannot quantify the people’s aspiration for a longer period.The Congress and Trinamool Congress will surely be invited to central cabinet and Mamata Banerjee is going to have one of the prime most ministry in the new central cabinet. Whoever may be the ministers, their one and only target will be to use the power for the betterment of the state and flash on the dubious functions of the state government.The most serious challenge for the Trinamool Congress however, is to shoulder the responsibility of continuing the alliance with the Congress despite facing serious consequences from the other part. The Congress also will have to shoulder the responsibility to forget its old mistakes of using the left for their individual purposes and let the left continue in power. The people really want to enjoy the sunrise – not by surprise but from the core of their hearts.

WELFARE OF WORKERS

Press Information Bureau Government of India
Wednesday, January 21, 2009

LABOUR & EMPLOYMENT
REPUBLIC DAY 2009

The Ministry of Labour & Employment has made serious efforts to promote welfare of workers , especially relating to enhancement of well being of farmers, farm labour and those belonging to the unorganized sector, striving for elimination of child labour , providing vocational training etc. Major initiatives taken are indicated below: Legislative Measures The Apprentices Act, 1961 was amended, inter alia, to provide for reservation for other Backward Classes. The amendment was notified on 28.01.2008 making it effective w.e.f. 01.02.2008. The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 was amended to enhance the medical bonus from Rs.250/- to Rs.1000/- and also empowering the Central Government to increase it from time to time before every three years, by way of notification in the Official Gazette, subject to maximum of Rs.20,000/-. The amendment was notified on 15.04.2008 making it effective from the same date. To provide social security to workers in the unorganized sector, the ‘Unorganized Workers Social Security Bill, 2008’ has been passed both by the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha. The salient features of the Bill include formulation of welfare schemes for different sections of the unorganized sector workers on matters relating to: (a) life and disability cover, (b) health and maternity benefits, (c) old age protection, and (d) any other benefits that may be decided by the Central Government and constitution of a National Social Security Advisory Board at Central level and similar Boards at State level. Bills to amend (i) the Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972 so that teachers in educational institutes benefit from it, (ii) the Labour Laws (Exemption from Furnishing Returns and Maintaining Registers by Certain Establishments) Act, 1988 to expand its coverage and allow maintenance of registers and submission of returns through soft devices, (iii) the Workmen’s Compensation Act, 1923 for replacing the term ‘workman’ by ‘employee’ to make the Act gender neutral, (iv) the Plantation Labour Act, 1951 to change the definition of employer, family and workers, adding a new chapter on safety bringing it in line with the provisions of Child Labour (Prohibition & Regulation) Act, 1986, (v) the Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948 to enable utilization of medical facilities of the Employees State Insurance Corporation for implementing the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana and Section 66 of the Factories Act so that women workers can be engaged during night shifts providing adequate safeguards for the safety, dignity, honour and transportation have been introduced in the Parliament. Unorganized Sector Workers Pending the enactment of The Unorganized Sector Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008, a Scheme called the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) to provide health cover to unorganized BPL workers has been made operational with effect from April 1, 2008. Under the scheme, a Smart Card is being issued to each beneficiary and covers a family of 5 persons facilitating cashless/paperless transaction upto Rs.30,000/- per annum. So far, 21 States and one Union Territory have implemented the scheme and some others are at various stages. More than a million cards have been issued. Medical assistance is now available to 5 million people and is being obtained by those who need it. About 10,000 cards are being issued daily. Government also decided to extend the RSBY to building and other construction workers with stipulation that the premium for the scheme would be paid from the fund collected by State Governments under the Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996. The step will cover the second largest group of unorganized workers i.e. construction workers. Government has also recently approved inclusion of Maternity Benefit under the RSBY. Various other measures have also been taken for promoting the welfare of unorganized sector workers such as enhanced housing subsidy under the Revised Integrated Housing Scheme (RIHS) 2007-08 for beedi workers. During 2007-08, 38,978 houses have been constructed for beedi workers, which was double of the number of houses constructed in 2006-07. This growth momentum will continue. Group Insurance, Medical and Health Care, Scholarships and Pension for the construction workers out of the cess funds are being provided under Central Government’s monitoring. Vocational Training With a view to creating a world class skilled labour force, vocational training has been given utmost importance. The existing Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) are being upgraded as Centres of Excellence Employment Exchanges are being upgraded on a mission mode under e-governance project. Steps are also being taken to establish 1500 new ITIs and 5000 Skill Development Centres in PPP mode. Skill Development Initiative (SDI) for school dropouts and existing workers was launched in 2007-08 in 340 modules. During the current year, it is proposed to train 2 lakh persons. For realizing Prime Minister’s vision of imparting vocational training to 500 million persons by 2022, a presentation on Skill Development Policy was made to Prime Minister during the meeting of the PM’s Council on Skill Development on 03.11.2008. After incorporating his advice and the recommendations of the National Skill Development Coordination Board, the policy is now ready to be brought before the Cabinet. Elimination Of Child Labour The National Child Labour Project (NCLP) Scheme operates in 250 districts. In addition, a $40 million INDUS project (Indo-US joint project) on Child Labour has also been launched in 21 districts with additional features of vocational training, monitoring and tracking of child labour and providing viable income generation alternatives for their families etc. A Protocol on Prevention, Rescue, Repatriation and Rehabilitation of migrant and trafficked child labour has been developed. The list of occupations for which child labour is banned has been enlarged. Social Security Careful attention has also been paid to the efficient operation of our Social Security Organizations – Employees’ Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) and Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC). The Central Board of Trustees (CBT), Employees Provident Fund (EPF) mandated appointment of Multi-fund Managers for efficient management of the EPFO corpus. The new Fund Managers started functioning w.e.f. 01.10.2008. In order to arrest the increasing deficit in the Pension Fund under the Employees Pension Scheme, 1995, necessary amendments have been carried out with regard to computation of past service, withdrawal benefit etc. as a result of which the entire deficit has been wiped out. The EPF Scheme revised to cover international workers to enable the Government to enter into bilateral Social Security agreements with various countries with a view to seek exemption from Social Security contribution for Indian workers posted abroad by Indian companies to make them more competitive internationally. An Unemployment Insurance Scheme viz. “Rajiv Gandhi Shramik Kalyan Yojana” is being operated by the ESIC w.e.f. 01.04.2005. Wage ceiling enhanced for coverage under the Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948 from Rs.7,500/- to Rs.10,000/- per month. Others The Central Government has revised the national floor level minimum wage from Rs.66/- per day to Rs.80/- per day with effect from 01.09.2007. Besides, minimum rates of wages for workers employed in the scheduled employment “Employment of Sweeping and Cleaning excluding activities prohibited under the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993” in the Central sphere under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 have been notified on 7.8.2008. Minimum wages in respect of another scheduled employment, namely, “Employment of Watch and Ward” with and without arms in the Central sphere have been notified on 18.09.2008. Two Wage Boards, one for the Working Journalists and another for Non-Journalists Newspaper Employees have been constituted. Their Interim Report for grant of 30% Interim Relief has been accepted and this hike notified. Year 2008 was observed as the “Year of Industrial Safety and Health”. The National Employment Policy and the National Occupational Safety and Health Policy are being formulated. These measures will go a long way in achieving the objective of having a strong, efficient and productive workforce in India. *Inputs from the Ministry of Labour & Employment RTS/VN SS-16/SF-16/21.01.2009