GORAKHPUR is known as capital of eastern Uttar Pradesh, which was rightly chosen as the venue of the convention on Encephalitis, an epidemic affecting large parts of Eastern UP. Encephalitis was first detected in the year 1978 in Gorakhpur. Since then, around 15 thousand children have died of this dreaded disease. It is estimated that 90% of the casualties have affected poorer sections of society. During the year 2012, 1256 cases of Encephalitis were detected out of which 557 cases resulted into death.

THE Odisha Khet Mazdoor Union and the CITU Odisha state committee have jointly organised a state convention of migrant workers at Balasore on September 27. This programme was organised as per the call given by the recently held 7th all India conference of the All India Agricultural Workers Union.

AFTER over a month of pretence at negotiations over seat-sharing, both the major alliances in Maharashtra finally announced their split on September 25. The Shiv Sena-BJP communal combine which was formed in 1989, broke up after 25 years; and the Congress-NCP alliance which was formed in 1999, split after 15 years. With all these four parties now contesting the state assembly polls separately, it is a completely new situation in Maharashtra today. The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) is contesting most of the seats; and so also is the BSP.

THERE is a peculiar paradox at the centre of capitalism. Since it is a system that institutes free mobility of workers between sectors, real wage rates should be equalised across occupations which are not too dissimilar from one another in terms of their arduousness, or hazardousness, or unpleasantness, or skill requirements, or intensity of effort etc. In other words, more arduous, more hazardous and more unpleasant jobs should be better paid compared to less arduous, less hazardous or less unpleasant ones, other things being equal (i.e., per unit of homogeneous labour-time).

THE relationship between capital and labour is not confined to the material reality alone, rather it operates as much in the production and communication of knowledge. The penetration of capital into all non-material ideological spheres and the instruments of hegemonic control has become a norm under the neo-liberal regime. The privatisation of electronic media and its control by big and trans-national capital under neo-liberal globalisation is one such example of this phenomena.