Striking workers at Foxconn India in Sriperumbudur near Chennai take on the corporate giant, demanding better wages. WORKERS at Foxconn-India in Sriperumbudur in Kancheepuram district, Tamil Nadu, have been on strike from September 24 demanding better wages. They also want the reinstatement of 24 suspended colleagues and the withdrawal of an eight-day wage cut slapped on some workers. That they have held out for so long is remarkable, not least...

About 25,000 fishermen in Jagatsinghpur and Kendrapara districts are looking for alternative means of livelihood following a ban on marine fishing in and around the Gahirmatha sanctuary in view of mass nesting season of endangered Olive ridley sea turtles. The State government clamped a seven-month ban on Monday on fishing activity along the entire 20 km stretch of Dhamra-Barunei mouth within Gahirmatha marine sanctuary. Fishing within the prohibitory zones disturbed...

Did Posco exaggerate the employment potential of its Rs 50,000 crore plant in Orissa? A group of US-based experts has accused the Korean steel giant and Orissa of fudging statistics on potential jobs to hardsell the integrated steel plant. A paper prepared by Mining Zone Peoples' Solidarity Group — a collection of economic professors and engineers and others based in the US — has unravelled the figures estimated in an NCAER...

Last week's column, “The plight of Dalits and the news media” (October 25, 2010), has generated a lively and interesting response from several readers. The column was about the prioritisation of the tasks before the National Commission for the Scheduled Castes (NCSC) by its new Chairman, P.L. Punia (not P.J. Punia as erroneously mentioned in the column.) The concern of most who wrote was over the failure of successive governments...

India has slipped to 87th spot in Transparency International’s latest ranking of nations based on levels of corruption, with the global watchdog asserting that perceptions about corruption in the country increased in the wake of the Commonwealth Games Against the backdrop of alleged irregularities in the recently held Commonwealth Games (CWG), India’s perceived corruption levels have gone up, with a corresponding worsening of its world ranking. According to Transparency International’s Corruption...