The nationwide two- day strike by trade unions to protest against the alleged wrong policies of the BJP-led government while demanding the scrapping of National Monetization Plan, labour codes, and increased allocation of wages under MGNREGA has elicited a mixed response. While it has brought the normal life in to a grinding halt in Kerala and in the parts of West Bengal, it did not throw life out of gear in other States.
The unions resorted to a strike after having served a legal notice and therefore it cannot be termed as illegal . However, given the infinite hardships it caused to the people and losses on the businesses and the economy especially at a time when the country’s economy is yet to recover fully from the pandemic’s impact , unions should have refrained from the general strike.
M Jeyaram
Sholavandan (TN)
Plug the IT glitches
This refers to 'SEBI puts onus on NSE, NCL MDs for Feb 21 glitch' (March 28). It is surprising to see the sequence of events which led to technical glitch halting the business throughout the day. The 'failover logic' which failed at server level in automatic switching over to standby server or to Disaster Recovery (DR) server speaks volumes about overall quality and standard of their IT systems.
It is not clear whether the basic checks like stress testing, load balance testing were done to ensure system's capability to withstand surge in transactions. The NSE's argument that certain 'unknown changes' were done by the vendor which caused such disruptions also reveals the poor internal approval mechanism.
The major gaps existing in the present system needs to be plugged to ensure smooth functioning of business and to prevent such recurrence in future.
RV Baskaran
Chennai
Don’t privatise banks
When the insolvency and Bankruptcy Board was formed banks had pinned their hopes on the recovery of their dues.
But to the dismay it proved otherwise. Let leave alone the interest the principal itself was not fully recovered. For example the Amtech group of companies were sold for just ₹4,100 crore whereas the loan amount was .₹21,000 crore. In the Videocon and Alok Industries cases too, the amounts realised were much smaller the the dues owed to the banks.
In all these cases the promoters who committed mistakes got away without getting punished. Bank unions have been urging the government to charge wilful defaulters with criminal offences and proceed as per the laid down procedure.
The government’s action against banks’ NPAs reveals its intention to push ahead with bank privatisation. But this may not be in the best interests of the country.
TSN Rao
Hyderabad.
PVR-Inox merger
With reference to the news report, ‘PVR, Inox Leisure set to merge operations’, the last two years of this pandemic has taken a huge toll on the film exhibition industry and OTT has gained massively in this period.
So this latest move by PVR and Inox should not surprise anyone, because this consolidation augurs well for growth of the Indian cinema exhibition industry, by creating value for all stakeholders. Now the combined entity will have 1,546 screens across 109 cities.
Hopefully now Tier2 and 3 cities movie watchers will get to have world class cinema experience. Despite OTT gaining at the cost of cinema, there is no doubt that cinema has its exclusive fans.
Bal Govind
Noida
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