Archives: Business

Vodafone Essar’s decision to shoot off a legal notice to a customer for purportedly defamatory comments on his Facebook page goes beyond the legal nitty-grities of publishing comments in cyberspace – it is a frontal attack on free speech, and shows utter contempt for consumer dissent. At the dawn of the social-networking phase of the Internet age, corporates had wallowed over what all wonderful things social media could do for them. They had gone to town about empowerment of citizens, and secretly exulted at the rich financial dividends that social media could reap for them....

If you look at the above picture, you might find it heart-wrenching. You may feel pity for the child. You would even think what crime the child might have committed to deserve this. But that pity could well turn into anger if you were told that it is the current dispensation in Delhi which is, to a considerable extent, responsible for the plight of the child. For, it is the Congress-led regime which has been callous to the perils of a pesticide called endosulfan and has done all within its mite to protect the interests of business establishments that manufacture and distribute this...

It is not rare to see corporates letting the people know in no uncertain terms about how the State ought to be run. There's nothing wrong with that; it is an inalienable democratic right. It is however yet another thing to believe in democratic values. And practice what you preach. So their honchos time and again pour their hearts and anger out in books, in interviews. Among those with the holiest attitude is Infosys. Yes, the same company that has been trending practically all day on Twitter. The company apparently has not made pots of money in the last quarter. The fragile stock...

Wage riots and workplace accidents in Bangladesh have not been making mainstream media headlines. The over-populated, under-fed country, should one be told, is caught in a vice-like grip. This stranglehold is all about the lust for fashion in the West over lives of labourers in a developing country. It is about robbing the poor to feed the rich. What Bangladesh has been witnessing for the last few weeks is a fallout of the global economic meltdown and the exigency of outsourcing, the two being quite inter-dependent and inter-related. The first put pressure on retail companies in the...

The ongoing India-European Union Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations have been non-transparent. They are a threat to the livelihoods of millions of people, and any hasty conclusion of the talks will only fuel poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction. The terms of a new deal between the EU and India, negotiations of which have been “hijacked” by big business and vested interests on both sides, will jeopardise the livelihood of millions of small farmers and patients, a joint study by the Belgium-based Corporate Europe Observatory and New Delhi-based India FDI Watch...

On August 10, a frantic message landed in the mailbox of members of a Facebook group called Save Niyamgiri. Two leaders of the Dongria-Kondh tribe’s resistance to a controversial mine in Orissa’s Lanjigarh were said to have been abducted, and had subsequently gone missing. The two men were reported to have been ambushed at the base of the hill range where they live, bundled into a vehicle at gunpoint, and driven away. They were not being held at local police stations, Lanjigarh or Muniguda. A third person accompanying them was left alone. HERE'S AN ENCOURAGING UPDATE ...

It ought to be counted as one of India’s most downplayed stories of the day. It is about the struggle to save an ecosystem called Niyamgiri in Orissa from mining, deforestation and devastation. It is about indigenous people and the rights over their land. Vedanta Resources, a stinking rich British company owned by NRI Anil Agarwal, intends to dig an open-pit bauxite mine in Niyamgiri. This mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area. The Supreme Court has given the go ahead for the...

We have a new national pastime these days – humiliating our heroes, degrading the very people who have done our nation proud. If the jeering of Sachin Tendulkar by the lumpen scoundrels of Mumbai masquerading as cricket fans wasn't enough, the takeover mafia of Gujarat has done a moo de grace by hounding out Verghese Kurien. It is all fine, some might say. The old order must certainly changeth. And it must just as certainly yield place to the new. You cannot fault the contention – it is the law of nature. But you can drill holes in this contentious argument when it becomes a...