By Wednesday elections had been held for 438 seats, or four-fifths of the 16th Lok Sabha, and it seemed like a good point to draw breath and take stock of the men and women who will wield power over us for the next five years. Many of us believe that these elections will be decided…
‘Is Drinking A Ritual “? Then I Think ‘It Is Better to Close Our Diplomatic Missions!’ The appointment is at 1 pm at the Prime Minister’s Office in South Block. These imposing stone buildings, a few hundred yards away from Rashtrapati Bhavan, contain the offices of most of India’s government leaders. A surprisingly courteous Reception…
4 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 4, Reuter – Low pay and poor working conditions have fuelled unrest in the Philippine military and laid the ground for further coup attempts, analysts said on Friday. “Most soldiers barely manage to survive,” a Western military attache told Reuters. “Housing is almost…
14 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 14, Reuter – The Philippine government is considering setting up a special police force to enforce return-to-work orders at strike-hit companies, Secretary of Labour Franklin Drilon said. Labour unrest had declined this year but was still simmering because workers were testing their new-found…
From The Editor “Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up— very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody dead beat and wretched—except Uncle…
Senior Editor of this newspaper were about to sit down for their evening news-planning meeting when the smoke alarms started jangling. Within moments the first floor newsrooms filled with thick billowing smoke. Journalist for both the Hindustan Times and its sister Hindi newspaper, Hindustan, began to file out and down the stairs There was no…
Inscrutable are the ways of public-sector trade unions. The Federation of the State Trading Corporation Employees’ Unions (FSTCEU) lived up to this image when it resorted to an eight-day strike last fortnight over a peculiarly non-economic issue: the shifting of the corporation’s Delhi branch office from its location on the arterial Janpath to Malcha Marg…
While it lasted, last fortnight’s nine-hour hostage hold-up in Congress(l) Member of Parliament Dalbir Singh’s.Delhi apartment generated wild images of urban terrorism on the loose. lt was the first time ever that the problems of distant, rural India had been so dramatised and Ram Narayan Kumar, the improbable attacker, appeared to signal a new and…
Rarely had an event invited such determined and concerted action by Union Government: When the 24-hour national strike called by the National Campaign Committee (NCC) ended at 6 a.m. on January 20. two things stood out clearly: the effects of the strike were either negligible or tremendous, depending on which side of the fence the…
On January 18 the strike by 2.5 lakh textile workers in Bombay’s 60 mills will complete a year; 25,000 of these workers in eight mills have been on strike since October 1981. In every way, the lengthening strike has become a grim milestone in India’s industrial history, with the opposing sides only gaining in belligerence…
Every dissenter is in a minority of one, and K. Ashok Rao, 36, deputy manager in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), is discovering what it is like to take on this public sector leviathan. Rao is, after all, only one of BHEL’S 70,000 employees. Yet, on February 23 this year, Rao filed a writ petition…
“In India, I See a Lot More Acceptance of Gender in the Workplace” Do you think the India-US CEO Forum you are a member of has managed to get things moving a bit in terms of a more positive attitude towards bilateral trade? It is very important to get things on the table to understand…