-The Hindu     Deep-rooted caste biases and the brazen disregard by civic authorities of court judgments are the main reason for the frequent deaths of sewerage workers across the country Earlier this month, a group of men set forth to unblock a drain sewer in the basement of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in Delhi. Two of the men, Ashok and Chhotu, entered the sewer but did not return....

-Outlook Labour is bought cheap, treated cheap-in India's garment factories as at Bangladeshi ones Even as the world remains morbidly fixated on the tragedy in Rana Plaza on the outskirts of Dhaka-the collapse of the textiles sweatshop three weeks ago buried 1,127 workers and sparked off a global outrage-it is business as usual at India's textile hubs. And you don't have to travel far from the city centre to...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Saradha group's collapse has possibly bankrupted lakhs of small investors robbing them of their life svaings, and has rendered thousands of its agents jobless. The scam highlights the failure of the government and its regulatory agencies to reign in the mushrooming chit fund companies in West Bengal. It also brings under the scanner the Trinamool Congress' proximity with the tainted group. In the wake of the...

-The Economic Times For many, it is a sense of deja vu. Fifteen years ago, the government and India's financial regulators came under fire after hundreds of crores were cleaned up by a few individuals and entities from gullible investors, who were promised fabulous returns from plantation schemes. In the uproar that followed, the government and the regulators sought to palm off the responsibility of regulation of such schemes on each...

-The Times of India Some 20 months after hotly contesting data on UPA-1's "jobless growth", the government has admitted to lack of substantial increase in employment between 2004-05 and 2009-2010, with the self-employed workforce shrinking from 56.4% to 50.7% of the total workforce. In absolute numbers, the self-employed decreased from 258.4 million to 232.7 million in this period while regular salaried workers rose from 69.7 million to 75.1 million. The ranks of...