-Livemint.com IT employees in Tamil Nadu, represented by unions, are seeking intervention of courts and state governments to prevent the companies’ growing penchant for job cuts Chennai: Two unions in Tamil Nadu, the only state where labour groups have been actively supporting information technology (IT) employees, have become their voice in the fight against layoffs in the industry. The IT employees’ wing of the New Democratic Labour Front (NDLF) on Tuesday sought the...

-The Hindu How Tiruppur, India’s knitwear hub, is now weaving a green cover for the entire district We moved this tree 15 km on a truck along the stretch between Avinashi and Avinashipalayam.” V. Mahendran points to a hulking tree trunk. “The operation took us nine hours. Even with its branches and most of its canopy chopped off, it weighed more than 40 tonnes.” We are at the Tiruppur Collectorate, and Mahendran,...

-Scroll.in Those who buy and sell milch cows and oxen for farm work say cow vigilantes have made it impossible for them to conduct their business. Cow vigilantism has been portrayed as a blowback against the Muslim community’s insistence on consuming beef, unmindful of the fact that slaughtering cows hurts Hindus who worship the animal. This depiction has framed the cow as an incendiary issue between Hindus and Muslims, an irreconcilable...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Peasants from Haryana's Nuh region converged in the capital today to not only demand justice for Pehlu Khan - the latest victim of cow vigilantism - but also drive home the point that cattle trade was a matter of livelihood. The mobilisation was part of the Bhoomi Adhikar Andolan and brought on the platform leaders of various parties, like the Janata Dal United, NCP, CPI and the CPM-L. All...