What started as a sympathy & solidarity expression by 8 students of Loyala College, Chennai, has catapulted into a mass youth mobilisation across Tamil Nadu. In a span of few days the student youth of Tamil Nadu have created history and have certainly rattled the political establishment of the day and also the opposition political forces.
A protest was held at the Town Hall in Bangalore against the forced land acquisition by Posco in Orissa and the burtal violence by corporate goons and the state upon children and women.
Kaveri Rajaraman, an activist from Bangalore, spoke about Posco’s demand for a captive port in Orissa and how the forced land acquisition would affect the livelihood of the people earning through beetle vineyard and cashew plantation within that region. She spoke about the protesters from the villages of Jagatsinghpur district who are carrying out their struggle, about their methods of involving their children and creating a protective circle around the women and men at the core. She also talked about how well organised the protesters are and how well educated everyone is about the issues that concern them.
India held the unique position of being the largest producer of tea in the world for nearly 100 years, until it was overtaken by China in 2005. Now India is the second largest producer of tea in the world. But India paid a huge price in order to become world number one. Forests were destroyed, wildlife like tigers and elephants were shot dead, but probably the greatest tragedy was the living and working condition of the tea plantation workers. One of the finest directors in the country – Bala, whose latest film “Paradesi”, based on the novel “Red Tea” by Paul Harris Daniel, depicts the tragic life of the workers in the pre-independence era.
Socialist Challenges Democratic Party Establishment
Kshama Sawant, economics teacher at Seattle Central Community College, announced today at a press conference she is running this year as a Socialist Alternative candidate for City Council against Democratic incumbent and former city council president Richard Conlin.
The following article is written by K Khan{{1}}, an IT employee working with a software firm in Bangalore and a member of All India IT Employee Association (AIITEA). The article, while referring to the very recent protests by HCL fresh recruits who have been kept on the wait list by the company for over a year, but also talks about the prevailing bad working conditions in the Indian software industry. This has been often glossed over not only by the corporate controlled media and the pro- IT industrialist Governments, but even worse by all the main TU’s.
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