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Prime Minister Narendra Modi lifting the 44-year-old ban on government employees from joining RSS and allowing them to actively participate in its programmes, might be construed as a tactical move to buy peace with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, but more than that, it is a move to legalise RSS interference in managing and running the state machinery and allow it to have access to the decision making mechanism.

“Indian economy needs to generate average of nearly 78.5 lakh jobs annually until 2030 in the non-farm sector to cater to the rising workforce,” said the Economic Survey 2023-24 tabled in the Parliament of India on July 22. Next day on July 23, the Union Budget 2024-25, announced several schemes for employment generation. Three days later on July 26, an inter-ministerial brainstorming roundtable session promised only formation of a crore group on building synergies and providing holistic picture of employment generation in the country, but failed to even promise concrete employment generation programmes for the current year in the short term, or in the medium term by 2030, or in the long term by 2047 the year for which a dream of a Developed India is sold.

The new coalition government of South Africa formed last month after the national elections on May 29 is facing a major crisis as the leading party African National Congress (ANC) has been taken to court by its partner Democratic Alliance (DA) on the issue of a speech delivered by the President Cyril Ramaphosa during the election campaign.

Puducherry is said to be the BJP’s plan B to get a foothold in the Dravida land. But it took a serious hit in the Lok Sabha elections when its candidate in the lone constituency in the union territory, home minister A. Namassivayam, suffered a humiliating loss against the Congress’s V. Vaithilingam. And the poll debacle has led to a rebellion within the party, putting the N. Rangaswamy-led coalition government in trouble.

G20 has made a history to agree on working together to ensure ultra-rich are taxed effectively, even after the United States dismissed the need for an international accord on the matter for now. The agreement was reached on July 25 at a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Rio de Janeiro. The text will be presented at the G-20 summit in Brazil on November 18 and 19 this year.

For the first time, the Indian annual budget for 2024-5 focused on the aim of manufacturing from the perspective of job creation, rather than boosting GDP. Manufacturing has been a failure in the earlier years to drive the GDP growth. The , BJP led NDA government, vowed to give a new shape to manufacture with larger share in GDP composition – from 17 percent in 2014 to 22 percent by 2022. A new focus was made with Make in India to resort to growth in manufacturing, with simultaneous emphasis on employment generation. But, Make in India lost sheen, losing catalysis for job creation.

The 2024-25 budget proposals of Narendra Modi government simply endorse the common perception that instead of being a tool for ameliorating the economic condition of poor, planning and allocating financial resources to meet the needs of common people and organisations it has become a device to serve the electoral needs of the ruling party.

Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar is still to recover from defections of NCP (Ajit Pawar) leaders to the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) faction of Ajit Pawar’s uncle Sharad Pawar. Four Pune-based NCP (Ajit Pawar) leaders resigned and rejoined Sharad Pawar’s NCP and a week later the faction led by Ajit Pawar is still sweating.

Venezuela’s Presidential election on July 28 takes place in a context dominated by Venezuela’s robust economic recovery, which, considering the calamitous situation the country found itself as late as the end of 2020, the 1 per cent rate of inflation June this year and an expected rate of growth for 2024 of between 5 to 8 per cent, is near miraculous. The incumbent president of the socialist coalition Nicholas Maduro is defending his seat against the national opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez.

Early this week, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra won the 2024 Weston International Award. The $75,000 award is given to an international non-fiction writer based outside Canada by The Writer’s Trust of Canada. “Through a compelling and essential body of work that braids memoir, philosophy, history, sociology and criticism, Mishra proves he is a master of disassembling and uplifting magmatic argument and pressing issues of identity, nationalism and belonging,” said the jury in a press statement.