THE Bank Employees Federation of India, in a statement issued on the Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance Bill 2016 (FRDI) cleared by the union cabinet on June 14, 2017, said that this bill is a piece of legislation for overnight closure of banks impelling doom for crores of depositors, not to speak of lakhs of bank employees.

MUCH hype has surrounded the transition to the Goods and Service Tax (GST regime) which has tended to be elevated to the status of being the magical solution to all of India’s economic problems. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Quite independent of the intrinsic merits or demerits of GST compared with the structure of taxes it has replaced, the changeover does not address the fundamental challenges of the Indian economy even in the sphere of taxation.If at all GST is a reform, it is a reform of the indirect tax regime.

NARENDRA Modi’s attempt to imitate Jawaharlal Nehru by giving a mid-night speech on July 1 at the Central Hall of parliament, while inaugurating the Goods and Services Tax, could perhaps be passed off as a merely laughable idiosyncracy. His equating, or even putting on a parallel footing, a mere tax-reform with the grand historic event of India’s attaining independence, could perhaps be shrugged off as just harmless self-promotion by one who prides himself as the author of the tax-reform.

SINCE the start of July, communal conflagration and tensions mounted in large parts of North 24 Parganas district. The district, along with Howrah, Birbhum and Maldaha, has witnessed communal clashes in recent months. Major areas of disturbances this time are in Basirhat, Bangaon, Barasat sub division. Apparently it started with a derogatory Facebook post attacking Islam and its holy places. The identified culprit is a teenager, but whether he acted on his own or had any RSS links, is not clear.

WITH an eye on the Tripura Assembly election slated for early next year, parochial forces such as IPFT, an open political wing of the outlawed NLFT, have declared a destructive movement of indefinite blockade of the lone national highway and railway in the state from July 10 on the so-called demand of a separate state to be carved out of the existing Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC). The demand is in line with the slogan of an ‘independent state’ mooted by the secessionist NLFT.