The heavy rain and 120-130 km. cyclone yesterday in Chennai completely shattered the lives of the people, with more than 10 dead and colossal loss of buildings etc. Thousands of trees have been uprooted and almost all roads blocked. Electricity shut down. Life in shambles. This is almost a repetition of the last years deluge. Nature’s fury has once again struck Chennai.

Our sympathies are with the suffering people. Telecom workers are on 24 hours job to restore connections, wherever destroyed. Hope normalcy will be restored soon.

The coastal areas of Andhra also have been affected seriously. We sympathise with them and hope for early normalcy.

The central government and the RBI are issuing statements daily intimating that sufficient cash is being released to the Banks for transaction. But the fact is that the queues in front of the lakhs of ATMs and Bank Branches are becoming longer and longer. People have to stand in the queue for hours together and sometimes by the time they reach the front, there is no cash.

The question is: Where the new notes are going, if sufficient supply is there? The fact is that very insufficient notes are being released by the RBI. Secondly, the reports of laundering as also catching of many with lakhs of new rupee notes in their hands show that in many places, the notes are being diverted to some influential persons or by bribe. The Income Tax and police might have only caught about 1 or 2 % of these thiefs. They are influential and they may come out with out any scratch.

The net result is that the ordinary people, workers, employees, small traders, kisans are all put to great misery for getting some money for their daily expenditure. This hell of a situation should end. The government should be compelled to take immediate action.

The Modi Government is gradually taking away the social security benefits to the workers to help the employers.

The latest is the decision of the government to give option to the workers in garments, textile and  made-up sectors who are getting less than Rs.15,000 per month to opt out of EPF. Though the decision is for option, the employers will forcibly compel the poor workers to opt out of EPF. This helps the employers not to  remit the 12% contribution to be paid by them. This decision will deprive the workers from the only statutory social security after their retirement.

We demand that the government rescind this  anti-worker decision.

Prime Minister Modi continues his speeches about surgical strike against black money and the need to educate the people about cashless transactions. No Comments, except that it is the poor and ordinary people who are suffering because of the demonetisation and not the  rich and corrupt persons with black money. None of the latter is standing for hours together in the unending queue before the ATMs to get some money for their day today expenditure. None of them is curtailing their expenditure on food and other necessities. The misery of demonetisation has maximum  hit the ordinary people and not the rich.

But what about surgical strikes against illiteracy, poverty and unemployment which are the main causes for the misery of large number of people in the country?