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…
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…