-PTI KOLKATA: Flood situation in south Bengal districts remained grim on Monday after fresh water was released from different barrages, compounding the woes of over 37 lakh people in 12 affected districts. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who stayed at state secretariat Nabanna overnight to personally monitor the flood situation, would visit Habra and Ashoknagar areas of North 24 Parganas to monitor the relief and rescue operations there. "Flood situation in the...

-Business Standard The Subramanian report had been panned by environmentalists and tribal rights groups for seeking dilution of existing safeguards in the name of reforms The report of the Subramanian committee to revise environment laws should be scrapped and the issue looked at afresh, Parliament’s standing committee on the sector has recommended. The committee, headed by Ashwani Kumar, a Rajya Sabha member from the Congress party and an ex-Union minister, gave its...

-Down to Earth After two budgets and Rs 5,300 crore in funding, the Centre's micro irrigation project that promises water to every farmland is not even close to a roll-out The news of deficit monsoons this year has once again left the Centre worried. A concerned prime minister chaired a high-level meeting on June 8 where he emphasised the need to quickly augment the irrigation capacity of the country. But he conveniently...

-Business Standard Factories with up to 300 workers can fire without government approval After failing to get the Centre’s approval to the ordinance route, the Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Wednesday passed a single Bill to amend eight major labour laws; seven other laws would be changed through compounding provisions, etc. With this, Madhya Pradesh became the third state in a year, after Rajasthan and Gujarat, to pass its own labour law amendments...

-Business Standard No consensus as yet on social security code  Even though the Indian Labour Conference (ILC) could not build a consensus on forming a labour code on social security schemes, it recommended a slew of measures to broaden their coverage. The two-day conference, a tri-partite platform of trade unions, industry and the government, concluded here on Tuesday with a series of recommendations. It recommended that Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) coverage be expanded...