-Reuters Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set in motion the first major revamp in decades of the archaic labour laws, part of a plan to revive the flagging economy, boost manufacturing and create millions of jobs. Successive governments have agreed labour reform is critical to absorb 200 million Indians reaching working age over the next two decades, but fears of an ugly union-led backlash and partisan politics have prevented changes to free...

-IANS   NEW DELHI: Rapid economic growth has engineered employment in India but also led to deteriorated working conditions in many sectors, especially manufacturing, an expert said at a conference here Wednesday. Speaking at "Dialogues on the India Exclusion Report-2014", Ravi Srivastava, a professor in the Centre for the Study of Regional Development in Jawaharlal Nehru University, elaborated how the rapid economic boom (2003-2014) generated employment in the country, but necessarily didn't offer...

-The Business Standard     Foreign direct investment in the NGO sector is, in fact, no different from the cross-holdings and the FDI web of the corporate world  ClimateWorks, one of the two international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) recently restricted by the National Democratic Alliance government from funding Greenpeace India Society in India, also funds another NGO, Global International, which, till recently, was headed in India by Union Environment and Forests minister Prakash Javadekar. When...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: The highways ministry is looking at entering into long-term contracts with cement majors across the country to purchase the construction material at a lower cost and shift to concrete roads, which are seen to be more durable although they cost more than those made using bitumen. Road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari - who had announced his support for concrete the day he took...

-Live Mint   Voters who gave the Congress its worst drubbing did not reject its welfare agenda, but its performance There are many who interpret the emphatic rejection of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the significant endorsement of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the elections of 2014 as a mandate to end the architecture of rights-based legislation for social and economic welfare constructed during the 10-year UPA regime. Commentators opposed...