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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.

The radical shift in labour relations from regimes of standard employment to fragmented and flexibilised labour force under neoliberalism is signified by a radical shift of responsibilities of their production of labour force from the capitalist employer to the State through the denial of indirect wage payments to workers. One of the major achievements of labour movement in the past was the recognition of elements as constituents of wage and benefits that ensured the reproduction of labour force in its totality. The underlying spirit was wages should not only cover the immediate needs of the worker but also should at the minimum be enough to maintain the intergenerational supply of a healthy workforce and the labour force not currently absorbed at work. This was required by capitalism to ensure the supply of workers in future.

The Indian economy is at a critical cross-road, where the GDP growth is in no way boosting the employment generation capacity. Even within the jobs created, 57.3 per cent are self-employed, 18.3 per cent are unpaid household workers and more than 45 per cent are employed in agriculture. The Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme launched in March 2020 has utterly failed to generate employment in manufacturing and strikingly India’s year-on-year manufacturing productivity has fallen by 2.38 per cent in 2022-23.

Venezuela is at cross road as the country with 31 million population is going to elect the next President in the Presidential polls scheduled on Sunday, July 28. President Nicholas Maduro who is ruling the South American nation since 2013 is being challenged by the national opposition nominee Edmundo Gonzalez.