A committee on social security, set up at the 44th Indian Labour Conference (ILC) that concluded its session here on Wednesday, has suggested that maternity leave to women employees, now provided under the Maternity Benefit Act, be raised to 24 weeks from the present 12 weeks. This has come even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while speaking at the conference on Tuesday, stressed the need to understand the constraints women staff...

The huge expenditure on the food bill, with the attendant leakages, could well make fiscal recovery impossible In the first part of this article, we have estimated the actual cost of implementing the food security bill in its current form. In this part, we now examine the fiscal sustainability of the same. The current state of the revenue and expenditure trends of the Central government (refer table) show that while revenue...

-The Hindustan Times The government is pushing for making it mandatory for recipients of funds from abroad to clearly identify themselves. The reason: intelligence agencies caution that some small money transmission agents are funneling funds for terror activities. As recording all recipients’ photographs has been found cumbersome, the authorities, on the RBI’s advice, may demand Aadhar unique ID numbers — after the numbers are made available — even from individuals receiving less than...

Indians with undisclosed foreign assets and offshore bank accounts will be in for a shock this Budget if the finance ministry clears a proposal empowering income tax authorities to reopen assessments up to 16 years as against 6 years now.  The proposed amendment, the ministry feels, may not only act as a deterrent, but also put pressure on people to declare their wealth stashed away in Swiss banks and tax havens.  In...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...