The alleged incident of two quarry workers in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district being forced to swallow faeces draws attention to larger issues. NORMALLY the villages and hamlets in and around Thiruvakkarai in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district are woken up by the loud noise and vibrations caused by the blasting of rocks and the pounding of boulders with sledge hammers, apart from the rattling sound of tipper lorries transporting stones from 40-odd...

Historians tell us of the colonial era stories of miserable conditions of workers, even bonded labour, in tea plantations of eastern India. However, the situation improved after independence. In the past few decades the tea industry has made steady profits even in worst years of economic downturn. And that is why reports of starvation deaths in tea plantations of Assam are so shocking. An Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) report says that...

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...

 Worried at the prospect of having to match the arbitrary minimum wage rate fixed by the states, the central government is considering changes in the law to specify a separate wage norms for its flagship rural employment guarantee scheme that is undergoing a complete makeover under minister Jairam Ramesh.  The centre has already contested in the Supreme Court a Karnataka High Court interim order directing it to align wage rates under...

Worried at the prospect of having to match the arbitrary minimum wage rate fixed by the states, the central government is considering changes in the law to specify a separate wage norms for its flagship rural employment guarantee scheme that is undergoing a complete makeover under minister Jairam Ramesh.  The centre has already contested in the Supreme Court a Karnataka High Court interim order directing it to align wage rates under...