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Former Union Minister and senior Congress leader, P Chidambaram in his column for The Indian Express writes on the feasibility of pensions as a social security scheme in India.
"Not all citizens of India of a certain age get a pension. There is no social security scheme in India that offers a pension to a citizen. Millions of persons employed in the private sector do not get a pension on retirement. Even short service commissioned officers in the Indian defence forces do not get a pension," Chidambaram says.
He adds: "As long as life expectancy was low, pension was of little consequence. Few got a pension but fewer lived for long after retirement. In 1947, when India became independent, the life expectancy was under 35 years. Today, it is slightly over 70 years. The obligation of pension will, on average, remain for 10-12 years after retirement and may continue to the spouse if there is the concept of family pension. That is why most employers are wary of pension. The employees have a powerful case: pension is a right earned through long and loyal service; or pension is a deferred wage; or pension is the path to the right to live with dignity after retirement."
"A perfect storm is brewing in the world of internet platforms," senior journalist Nikhil Pahwa writes in his column for the Times of India.
He continues, "In the last 10 days, Pavel Durov, the founder of messaging app Telegram, has been arrested in France; in Brazil, a judge has banned X (formerly Twitter) after it refused to comply with orders, and in the middle of a hotly contested election in the US, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has disclosed pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to censor content."
"In the film industry, they call it “compromise” without the faintest trace of irony. Maybe the word assuages some of the guilt in the man and the humiliation of the woman, for what is, more often than not, a quid pro quo," writes senior journalist and critic Deepa Gehlot in her column for The Indian Express in light of the Hema Committee report on sexual exploitation in the Malayalam industry.
"If the story of any city in India can be told through the culture of protest, Kolkata is a strong contender," argues author Rupleena Bose in her column for the Hindustan Times.
She writes, "In a city ripped apart by the brutal assault and murder of a young doctor, angry protests have spread through the length and breadth of the milling metropolis of Kolkata. Since that night, students and citizens have redrawn the map of the city, walking through sultry days and nights lit by candles and mobile phone torches while vested interests have tried to seek political purchase rather than justice."
In The Indian Express, columnist Tavleen Singh writes on Rahul Gandhi making caste the focal point of his politics.
She writes, "Rahul’s preoccupation with people’s castes has led him to say a lot of peculiar things. Not long ago, he declared that it saddened him to see lower castes unrepresented in Bollywood. Becoming a movie star is also not a government job. It is the box office that decides who becomes a star. It becomes hard to take the Leader of the Opposition seriously when he says things like this."
Author, diplomat, and former Member of Parliament (MP), Pavan K Varma, in his column for the Hindustan Times, asks if decades after emerging from the colonial rule, we are still adrift from our mother tongues and retain an inferiority to our own languages.
Varma writes: "Kenyan Nobel Laureate professor Wangari Maathai once told me that it was only the colonial rulers who truly understood the importance of a language. That is why it is the first thing they took away. In India, the undisputed architect of this colonial policy was Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), who, in 1834, joined the Supreme Council to govern India. His policy to impose English on the “natives” was so spectacularly successful that the British could well have put his statue in the canopy at India Gate!"
"The myth of responsible politics was shattered long back," writes author and columnist Shankkar Aiyar in The New Indian Express (TNIE) as he discusses the economic crisis looming large over the Himachal Pradesh government.
"On Friday, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu informed the state Assembly “I am suspending mine and state ministers’ and CPS’ salary allowances for two months.” The reason: his government was making efforts to increase its revenue and reduce unproductive expenditure. It isn’t clear what is deemed “unproductive expenditure” but the “symbolic gesture” would save the state barely Rs 2 crore," says Aiyar.
"Sarma’s hoary Hindutva hyperbole indicates he has unlearned all he had absorbed from the Congress culture," senior journalist Prabhu Chawla writes in The New Indian Express.
In his column for the Times of India, professor Khalid Anis Ansari writes on the Supreme Court ruling on sub-classification within the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories.
He says, "While the ruling correctly acknowledges the heterogeneity within SC/ST groups and upholds the validity of sub-classification, it also introduces the idea of applying the creamy layer principle to SC/ST reservations — a concept previously limited to OBC reservations. This ruling has received mixed responses from the SC/ST community, with strong opposition to introducing the creamy layer principle. Regarding sub-classification, the ruling is not binding on states but serves as an enabling provision, allowing states to sub-classify based on sound data, subject to judicial review."
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