by Varanasi Subrahmanyam

It is eight in the morning. Maina Devi stands at a bus stop on the sidewalk beside a large warehouse in Noida’s Phase 2 industrial belt. Her left thumb was wrapped in a fresh bandage. The day before, a wire terminal had punctured through the flesh while she worked at Gurudas Amardas International Private Limited. It is a firm that makes wire harnesses for automobiles and shielded cables for data systems. The pain is severe. But she is waiting for the company bus regardless.

A reporter asked her why she isn’t resting. She answers.  She has three children to support.  If she missed a single day of work, she would lose 530 rupees. That is the hard arithmetic of her life-  brutal, and non-negotiable.

Maina Devi is a migrant from Muradabad. It is 160 kilometres from Noida¹, which lies in Gautam Buddha Nagar District of UP, bordering Delhi. Before this job, she worked for two years in garment factories across the road in the Noida hosiery complex. Those factories, she says, paid even less-  nine thousand rupees a month. “For two years I stood at the table cutting threads in twelve-hour shifts,” she recalls, “and the company did not increase our wages by even one rupee.” When she worked overtime –  three to four hours nearly every day, she says –  she was paid twenty-five rupees per hour, in open violation of the law that mandates a minimum of twice the regular wage for overtime. Nobody complained. Because nobody could afford to lose their job, around her, her younger co-workers nod.

Lower wages; twelve-hour work is the norm in Noida factories.

The Factory Republic: The Capital and Labour in Noida

What did happen in Noida’s industrial zone in April 2026? We must first understand what Noida actually is. It is not the glass-tower city of IT parks and expressways that appears on the glossy real estate brochures.  But it is the other Noida.  The Noida of sheds and sirens, of migrant dormitories stacked six to a dungeon-like room, of factory gates that open at eight and close at nine at night- a rhythmic subjugation that makes the 181-year-old observations of Friedrich Engels on the English working class feel less like history and more like a contemporary report.

Noida-  an acronym for the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority-  is among the largest planned industrial townships in Asia. Its Special Economic Zone (NSEZ) alone accounted for over 11,000 crore rupees in exports in 2025. Across the broader industrial zone, there are more than ten thousand industrial and service units. They are small-scale establishments employing fewer than a hundred workers each, subcontracted from the factories of Indian and global monopoly corporations, such as TCS, HCL, Microsoft, Samsung, Xiaomi, and a constellation of multinational clothing brands whose labels adorn garments sold on the high streets of Europe and the US. The Noida readymade garment cluster alone, with roughly three thousand export-oriented units, generates between 18-20,000 crore rupees in annual exports. When Covid-19 froze the city in 2020, the Noida Apparel Export Centre wrote to the UP government in desperation, noting that their units needed two lakh workers to resume normal operations. Remember those heart-wrenching pictures? The workers and their families, who had fled on foot across highways and along railway tracks, were trying to get home to the hinterlands of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh during the COVID pandemic period.

There are approximately 20,000 industrial units in Noida and Greater Noida employing about 17 lakh workers.²

The production landscape of Noida spans mobile phones, electronic components, auto parts, IT services, medicines, and, importantly, readymade garments. These are the sinew of India’s manufacturing exports, sewn together by human hands under fluorescent lights, in temperatures that climb above the forties between April and June. Work is outsourced layer by layer, from global brand to Indian conglomerate to sub-contractor to labour contractor, each layer extracting a margin, each layer placing another layer of insulation between the brand and the worker. By the time a production order reaches the shop floor, the workers who fulfil it have no direct employment relationship with the company whose product they make. They are hired on a temporary contract, through a private placement agency, which pockets a percentage of their paltry wages as a service fee.

Naomi Klein demonstrated in her book No Logo, the great corporations of our era have strategically exited production altogether – Nike does not make shoes, Apple does not make phones, Louis Vuitton does not stitch its garments. What they manufacture is the brand, the logo. The commodity is made elsewhere, by someone else, through a chain of contracts so long that legal responsibility dissolves before it reaches the worker. Marx described alienation as the worker’s estrangement from the product of her labour. What Klein documents – and what the Noida factory floor makes viscerally concrete –  is a further mutation: the capitalist’s own deliberate self-alienation from production, a designed amnesia about where the thing comes from and whose hands made it.

In organised manufacturing across India, the share of contract workers rose from 38 per cent to 42 per cent between 2019–20 and 2023–242. In Central Public Sector Enterprises, excluding banking and insurance, it rose from 34 per cent to nearly 50 per cent between 2019 and 2025.³ In Noida’s industrial belt, this contractualisation has been total. Nearly all workers in the garment and electronics units are hired on short-term contracts. There is no permanent employment. No union recognition. No collective bargaining. No grievance mechanism. The Minimum Wages Advisory Board in Uttar Pradesh, the body that should have been calling for wage revisions, had been inactive for fourteen years. The Indian Labour Conference, the institutionalised tripartite dialogue between government, employers, and workers, has not met since 2015.

Even among regular wage and salaried workers in non-agricultural sectors, informality remains widespread. In 2025, about 58.2% of workers had no written job contract, while 51.7% were not eligible for any social security benefits. In addition, 47.3% were not eligible for paid leave. This means that a significant section of workers employed in formal establishments is, in practice, informally employed.⁴

It is as if the capital were a different republic with its own constitution and laws.

Women Workers

In the garment sector, women constitute nearly 60 per cent of the total workforce, according to 2025–26 industry estimates.⁵ Particular vulnerabilities compound their situation. Supervisors use the threat of dismissal to extract sexual compliance- a systemic issue highlighted by the April 2026 industrial unrest, where workers demanded safer harassment-reporting protocols. Toilet breaks are rationed and timed, a hallmark of the high-pressure production lines. Pregnant workers are often ‘quietly edged out’ to avoid maternity benefit liabilities. Women migrant workers, far from their family networks in Bihar and eastern UP, live in cramped single-gender hostels or shared rented rooms- where a single room costs between five thousand and seven thousand rupees a month in Noida’s industrial zones. This rent consumes forty to sixty per cent of an unskilled worker’s monthly wage, which, before the April 2026 strikes, was officially stagnant at ₹11,313. The rent does not leave room for illness, children’s school fees, or the bus fare home. For Maina Devi, standing from eight in the morning until nine at night- with toilet breaks as the only respite and an injured thumb that cannot be rested because rent is due- is simply the condition of being a woman worker in Noida.” A worker said: “Only our lives are cheap. And everything else is expensive”.

The migrant character of the workforce is phenomenal. Workers come primarily from Bihar and the eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh, regions where agriculture has collapsed into smallholding misery and where industrial jobs do not exist. In the city, they are isolated and have no roots. The contractor knows this. The factory owner knows this. The state knows this.

Rising Prices

The wages they earned before April 2026 ranged between Rs 9000 and 11,013 per month for unskilled work –  wages that had not been revised in any meaningful sense since 2012. The Minimum Wages Act mandates revision at least every five years. Uttar Pradesh had flouted this obligation for more than a decade. Meanwhile, the Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers (CPI-IW) had risen nearly twenty-five per cent between 2021 and 2026 alone. The gap between nominal wages and real purchasing power was not a policy failure-  it was an intended policy. The state’s silence was conscious and benefited the factory owners. So, the owners could keep labour costs artificially suppressed while the rest of the economy, including the price of a thali swallowed too many times.

Labour Codes- Legalising the Illegal Practices on the Ground

And then, in November 2025, the Union government notified the four Labour Codes –  the Code on Wages, the Industrial Relations Code, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, and the Code on Social Security –  consolidating twenty-nine existing labour laws into four, in a sweeping restructuring of India’s labour regulatory framework, facilitating the Capital “for an easy way of doing business”. Central trade unions were unanimous in their condemnation, calling the codes a “genocidal attack on the lives and livelihoods of workers”. They accused the government of “imposing virtual slavery.” Their objections were substantive. The new codes allowed for “spread over” working hours of up to twelve hours a day, effectively legalising the twelve-hour shifts that Maina Devi had been working illegally for years. The threshold for factory recognition of unions was raised, making collective bargaining harder. The definition of “worker” was narrowed, excluding more categories of contract labour from statutory protection. On the promise that the codes would rationalise wages from April 1, 2026 –  a promise that was then quietly left unfulfilled as the Iran war disrupted oil supplies and the cost of everything from cooking gas to cooked food surged –  the workers’ patience ran out. The Central government fully operationalised the Labour Codes from 9 May 2026, with the notification of the rules. Rules of Code failed to come out with fixing of minimum wages, saying: ‘.. a special order shall separately specify criteria..’.

The Spark from Manesar (Haryana)

It did not begin with any trade union’s strike call. There was no leader. No stage. No microphone. It began with a single act of collective refusal that caught fire because the conditions for the strike had been building for years.

The spark came from across the state border. In the industrial hub of Manesar, Haryana, home to Maruti Suzuki and hundreds of auto-component and garment-export units, workers had been protesting through late March and early April 2026. The protests spread from factory to factory like a wildfire. It spread from Honda to Munjal Showa to Satyam Auto to Roop Polymers by early April. Garment companies like Richa Global and Modelama saw workers walk out. By April 9, the Haryana government had to come down.  It announced a 35 per cent increase in the minimum wage for unskilled workers, from roughly Rs. 12,000 to over Rs. 16,000 per month, effective from April 1. It was the first revision in nearly eleven years. Who would then deny that it is the people who create history and change things?

The news reached Noida. Workers who assembled auto components and stitched garments in Noida discovered that their counterparts doing identical work twenty kilometres away in Haryana would now earn a third more. The injustice was too stark. The simple arithmetic that workers who laboured twelve-hour shifts could perfectly understand.

On April 9, 2026, workers gathered near the NSEZ Metro Station in Noida’s Phase 2 industrial area. Hundreds came out. They sat down. They raised slogans. They demanded the same wage revision that Haryana had conceded. They were peaceful. The police watched.

What are workers’ demands?

The primary demands include a minimum wage of ₹20,000 to 26,000 per month for unskilled workers to match the rising cost of living, and direct company hiring to prevent contractors from skimming wages. Workers are also demanding strict implementation of double pay for every hour worked beyond the standard shift, immediate clearance of pending bonuses from the previous financial year, and retrospective payment of wage arrears. They have called for a significant increase in the House Rent Allowance, citing skyrocketing rents in Noida’s sectors and villages.  They also insist that any work beyond eight hours be voluntary and compensated as overtime, and that employees be guaranteed paid weekly holidays. Additionally, they seek the establishment of functional Internal Complaints Committees to address workplace harassment and verbal abuse by managers, as well as the withdrawal of FIRs and unconditional release of those arrested during the April 13 protests.

Over the next three days, the protests spread from factory to factory. Workers at Richa Global, which operates five garment factories in Noida (and three more in Manesar, where the earlier wage hike had already been won), walked out demanding parity. Workers at Motherson Sumi Wiring, the automobile components giant, joined. Domestic workers, gig workers, even the invisible army of home-based piece-rate workers who stitch elastic bands and cut threads in their single rooms in Sector 63 –  all of them began to move out from the factories. While the strike began in the second week of April 2026 with factory workers in industrial phases, it saw a significant spread to many categories of workers, as domestic workers- maids, cooks, and cleaning staff- launched their own protests starting from 14–15 April 2026.It was an unprecedented general strike, so to speak, in Noida.

The Battlefield

And then the morning of April 13 arrived.

The factory owners had not been responding. The state government was too adamant. The workers had been sitting peacefully at factory gates and road intersections for four days, and the only answer they had received was more police officers. On April 13, the crowds were larger, the anger wafting in the air, the desperation flowing more acutely. In the industrial sectors of Phase 2 and Sector 60, the situation escalated.

The Week wrote that the violence escalated in Phase 2 after a lathi struck a female employee during a police action, which enraged the crowd. Then the use of tear gas and lathi-charges to disperse large crowds in the Hosiery Complex area transformed a protest into a street battle.

Vehicles were set on fire. Stones were hurled. Police motorcycles were attacked. The police responded with lathi charges and tear gas shells. By nightfall, the images had gone countrywide: flames rising from police vehicles, workers running through smoke, the satellite city thirty kilometres from Parliament as if in a state of insurrection. Castigating the police’s accusation that violence was the “well-orchestrated syndicate activity”, the trade unions said that the violence was a spontaneous outburst of “simmering anger” from workers who have seen their real wages decline due to inflation. At the same time, their working hours increased to 12-hour shifts.

Behind the fire and fury, the unscrupulous exploitation and the horrible conditions in the factories and the unlivable conditions in the jhuggi-jhopdis were undeniable facts.

Unless we hear the voices from within the agitation, we cannot get the real picture of those conditions.

Vinay Mahoti is thirty years old, from Bihar, and a worker at a hosiery company in Noida. He describes how he first protested inside his manufacturing unit, and then joined the throngs from other companies who had taken to the streets. His demands were elemental: “Duty hours should be fixed, overtime hours should be paid.” Just imagine. He was not asking the moon. He was demanding that the law be applied.

A young woman worker at a garment factory said, her voice recorded and shared widely: “They tell us there are no funds for wages, but the owner just bought a second house in Greater Noida. We can see who is poor and who is not.” Another worker, who had migrated from Gorakhpur, said: “We are not criminals. We pay our rent, we send money home, we buy food. And they haven’t changed our wages in ten years. Ten years! What were we supposed to do?”

According to multiple estimates, nearly 50,000 workers have come out onto the streets in Noida by April 13. This was not a riot. This was not a conspiracy. This was decades of accumulated anger against the exploitation of their sweat and blood. This was a reminder of the agitation of 1997, when more than a lakh workers in Noida protested and went on strike, attracting countrywide attention.

Response in Repression

The Yogi Adityanath government’s first response was not a wage committee. Or talks with the agitating workers. Nor the involvement of the Labour Commissioner. It was an FIR. Shreya Ghosh of the Centre for Struggling Trade Unions said in an interview to G Sampath of The Hindu: Why do labour disputes get treated as ‘law and order’ issue?⁶

Within hours of the events of April 13, Noida Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh announced the registration of seven First Information Reports and the arrest of more than three hundred individuals. By April 14, the count had risen to over 300. Over three hundred and fifty people were, according to police, “rounded up,” with more than two hundred formally arrested, including those accused of “arson in a methodical and pre-planned manner.” Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath described the events as a “conspiracy” aimed at derailing the state’s development.

And then came the political vocabulary that the Bharatiya Janata Party has deployed with such practised fluency in the post-2014 years: “Pakistan hand.” “Urban Naxals.” “Anti-national forces.” Uttar Pradesh police sources announced to the media that the violence was “no spontaneous protest but a meticulously orchestrated conspiracy.” According to the police, phones seized from the arrested accused revealed WhatsApp groups circulated by “external” organisations with “incendiary and provocative” messages. Two contact numbers, traced by the police to Bigul Mazdoor Dasta, a workers’ organisation, the police said. Some trade union leaders were put under house arrest.

The subsequent arrests tell the real story of what was happening.

On April 13 itself –  before the violence had even fully erupted –  Rupesh Roy, an auto-rickshaw driver associated with Mazdoor Bigul, the workers’ newspaper, was taken into custody. According to his colleagues, Roy was at the protest site as a reporter, covering the workers’ movement for the journal. His family later filed a formal complaint with senior UP Police officials, alleging torture in custody, fabrication of evidence, and that the police had taken him to a location within NSEZ where bottles of kerosene and torches had already been “pre-positioned” –  a chilling allegation of evidence-planting that could not be independently verified but could not be dismissed.

On April 18, twenty-four-year-old Himanshu Thakur –  a young man preparing for his PhD, who had cleared the National Eligibility Test –  was taken into custody. His sister Neha says neither a warrant was shown nor were grounds for arrest stated.

On the same day, Satyam Verma –  a senior journalist, formerly with the United News of India (UNI), and the son of renowned retired historian Professor Lal Bahadur Verma at Allahabad-  was, according to the Countercurrents report, “abducted by Noida police for two days and then imprisoned.” Verma was neither a factory worker nor a union organiser. He was a journalist, a man of letters, a public intellectual. The message his arrest was meant to send was not lost on anyone: even bearing witness to this movement would be treated as participation in a conspiracy.

And then there was Aditya Anand. The police named him as the “prime mastermind” of the Noida violence. He was arrested on April 19 –  not in Noida, but at the Tiruchirappalli Railway Station in Tamil Nadu, by the UP Special Task Force acting on a lookout notice. The image of the state deploying squads to a railway junction in the deep south to arrest a labour activist from Bihar, for attending workers’ protests in Noida, speaks volumes about the geography of state power and its fragility.

Also arrested was Akriti, a NET-qualified young woman. The police accused her of being a criminal conspirator.

The arrested are not the factory owners who violated the minimum wage law for fourteen years. They are not the contractors who paid twenty-five rupees an hour for overtime, even though the law mandates double the regular wage. They are the people who helped workers understand their rights, who circulated their newspaper, who organised door-to-door campaigns explaining what workers in Haryana had won.

Central Trade Unions Call for a Nationwide Demand Day on May 12th!

Mazdoor Adhikar Sangharsh Abhiyan (MASA), the coordination of fourteen workers’ organisations and unions, issued statements demanding the immediate release of all arrested. The Samyukta Kisan Morcha, continuing its tradition of workers-and-farmers solidarity, expressed support for the Noida workers and condemned the repression. Central trade unions –  CITU, AICCTU, AITUC, HMS, INTUC, and others –  jointly called for a nationwide “Demands Day” on May 12, 2026, describing the events as a “state-backed corporate offensive” against democratic labour rights. They demanded the rollback of the Labour Codes, a statutory minimum wage of twenty-six thousand rupees per month, an eight-hour workday, and the abolition of contract labour in permanent jobs. More than a thousand workers, they estimated, had been arrested across the recent wave of labour unrest. They demanded the immediate withdrawal of all cases.

The ruling party-affiliated BMS Union did not support the workers’ agitation. It opposed the imposition of a uniform minimum wage on the industrial working class. It said: “The recent unrest in Manesar Noida was a matter of serious concern. Disagreeing with the other central trade unions about a uniform wage structure, and the idea of a uniform wage structure across the country is neither practical nor economically sustainable.” It condemned the workers’ “violence”.

The UP government, under this combined pressure, moved –  grudgingly and partially. On April 17 and 18, 2026, the state notified revised minimum wages. Unskilled workers would now receive between twelve thousand three hundred and fifty-six and thirteen thousand six hundred and ninety rupees per month, up from eleven thousand three hundred and thirteen. Skilled workers would receive between fifteen thousand two hundred and twenty-four and sixteen thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight rupees. A high-powered committee under the Infrastructure and Industrial Development Commissioner was constituted to develop a “permanent wage revision framework.”

The workers received the news with cautious satisfaction. “Our wages were stolen, and we forced a correction,” said one woman worker in Noida’s industrial complex. But union leaders and labour analysts pointed out that even the revised wages lagged far behind Haryana’s levels and were nowhere near the 26,000 rupees the trade unions had demanded as a living wage. The Minimum Wages Advisory Board in UP had been inactive for fourteen years. What guarantee was there that the next revision would not take another fourteen?

Meanwhile, as of early May 2026, scores of workers and activists remained in custody. Many –  including workers who are women and in some cases minors –  faced serious criminal charges under provisions that carry heavy sentences. Opposition leaders, human rights organisations, and lawyers reported being prevented from meeting those detained. The cases registered against labour organisers like Aditya Anand and Rupesh Roy remain active, with the UP Special Task Force pursuing what the state has framed as a conspiracy case.

Lessons

The Noida uprising of April 2026 will be remembered as a watershed –  not because it won a complete victory, but because it was irreducible. Fifty thousand people coming out of factories in a city that is the showcase of UP’s industrial development, spontaneously and without central union direction, cannot be dismissed as a “planned conspiracy.” It was lit by 14 years of minimum-wage stagnation. It was lit by twelve-hour shifts made legal by the Labour Code. It was lit by twenty-five rupees per hour of illegal overtime. It was lit by a woman standing at a factory gate with a punctured thumb, doing the math.

In the era of the Labour Codes, amid the backlash of capital against the working class, with the state’s help, the working class is fighting back. As people fought against CAA and NRC, as the farmers did against the farmers’ laws, the working class is fighting the effects of the Labour Codes regime. Samsung workers in Sri Perambadur fought against low wages, unpaid overtime, and the company’s refusal to recognise the union two years ago. Workers at Baruani, Panipat, and Hazira struggled against the parasitic contractor system and for better working conditions in February.  Workers at Patratu Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (PVUNL) plant- a joint venture between NTPC and the Jharkhand government- held protests against unpaid wages and long hours in February and March. The workers struggled at Raikheda, at the Adani Raikheda Power Plant in Raipur, against contract labour rights, safety concerns, and unfulfilled land-for-job promises.

A spectre of workers’ struggles is haunting the capitalist class. Suchvaliant expressions of direct class confrontation are bound to increase in the coming days, especially the burden and ramifications of the US- Israel war on Iran, and the resultant price rise all over for the common masses.

The Noida ‘uprising’ remains etched in the memories of the working class for long, long years. Workers will learn the hard lessons of unity, the strength in the organisation, the collusion of state and capital, and the irreconcilable contradiction between capital and labour. All the workers’ actions are rehearsals for the final acts of liberation, Lenin said.

There is Maina Devi, standing at the bus stop with a bandaged thumb, still going to work, still doing the math. She has won something –  a small, inadequate, but real increase in her monthly wage. She has won it not through any institutional process but through the collective courage of fifty thousand people who took to the streets and refused to be invisible. She will go on standing for twelve hours a day, handling forty to fifty pieces an hour, rushing back from the toilet so that production targets do not pile up. The fight she and her co-workers lit is not over –  it is only beginning.

The fire in Noida will not be easily extinguished as long as the exploitation of workers like Maina Devi continues. Working-class people all over India certainly take inspiration from Noida, Manesar, and the refinery workers’ struggles at Barauni, Panipat, and Hazira.

I owe to The Migration Story (Anumeha Yadav, April 22, 2026); The Wire (Shruti Sharma, May 2026); Countercurrents, April 2026; The Federal, April 21, 2026; Groundxero, November–December 2025, for writing this piece.

1 Okhla was a village in Delhi city bordering UP and Faridabad of Haryana. Around Okhla and Industrial Estate was planned in 1958. The UP counterpart, as an extension of the Okhla industrial belt, began in 1976. Okhla Industrial Estate (Delhi), Noida (UP) and Faridabad (Haryana) form a vast contiguous belt of industrial activity where 10 lakh workers labour in various kinds of factories.

2 The Hindu, How the War on Iran set off worker protests around Delhi, April 18, 2026.`

3 Weaving Futures: A Study on Women’s Employment in India’s Textile Sector”, VNGSU Journal of Research and Innovation

4 The Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) 2023–24 report, released in August 2025, confirmed that contract workers now account for 42% of India’s organised manufacturing workforce – the highest level recorded in at least 27 years. This represents a steady rise from the approximately 38% observed during the 2019–20 period.

5 The Hindu, Why Noida’s factory unrest is about more than just wages, 20 April 2026

6 Economic Times, April 19, 2026

by Richard Stone

Photo caption.  A U.S. blockade of oil deliveries to Cuba has contributed to power blackouts that have plunged the island nation’s communities into darkness. Angelo Mastrascusa/Anadolu via Getty Images

Cuban scientists are known for ingenuity in the face of adversity. Over the years, as U.S. sanctions coupled with government mismanagement worsened the island’s economic woes, Kalet León Monzón and his colleagues at the Center of Molecular Immunology (CIM) in Havana continued to develop and produce monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins, resorting to clever workarounds such as retrofitting old instrumentation and what he calls “nontraditional ways” of importing reagents.

But months into a de facto oil blockade imposed by the United States, CIM’s R&D director is at his wits’ end. Crippling power outages and a collapsed transportation system have forced León Monzón to put eight of CIM’s 10 current clinical trials on hold. “We’ve had no choice but to prioritize,” he says.

Cuba’s downward spiral accelerated in January, after the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro choked off oil from Cuba’s main benefactor. (As Science went to press, the U.S. signaled it would allow a Russian tanker full of crude oil to reach Cuba this week.) The U.S. government hopes the crisis will finally dislodge the island’s Communist regime. “I do believe I will have the honor of taking Cuba,” U.S. President Donald Trump told journalists this month. Cuba’s science is collateral damage. “There’s an effort to degrade everything Cuba has achieved in education and science, and send us back to the Stone Age,” says Mitchell Valdés Sosa, director of the Cuban Neurosciences Center.

Nationwide electricity blackouts lasting 20 or more hours a day are forcing doctors to triage care and putting lives at risk. At the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in Havana, “we receive the most complex neurosurgical cases in the country,” says neurosurgeon Marlon Manuel Ortiz Machín. “Surgeries must not stop; it’s sometimes a patient’s last chance.” Yet he’s been “caught in the dark” during complex operations. “All you can do is pray until the generator comes back on.”

Gail Reed, a volunteer for the U.S. nonprofit MEDICC who was in Havana last week, fears Cuba’s medical system is on the brink of collapse. “Hospitals are running out of supplies. It’s heartbreaking and unconscionable,” she says. With Cuba’s infant mortality rate rising, MEDICC is “trying to protect women with high-risk pregnancies” by installing solar panels in maternity homes, Reed says.

“We’re seeing malnourishment, people losing weight,” says Angela Garcia, executive director of Global Links, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit. Flying into Havana last month, she says, “the first thing I noticed was an acrid odor”—from burning mounds of trash that has gone uncollected because of fuel shortages.

Damage to Cuba’s vaunted biotech sector could have an outsize impact on health and the economy. The 51 enterprises that make up BioCubaFarma, a government entity, produce scores of drugs, vaccines, and reagents, many of which are exported to 77 countries. One high-profile compound is CIMAvax-EGF, an immunotherapy against lung cancer that had positive results in early clinical trials in the U.S., done in partnership with the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, CIM teamed up with the Finlay Institute of Vaccines in Havana to produce Cuba’s Soberana vaccine, which targets the virus’ spike protein and was shown to be effective. The Cuban vaccinemakers are “among the best experts in the world,” says Fabrizio Chiodo, an immunologist at the Institute of Biomolecular Chemistry near Naples, Italy, who helped design Soberana.

The successes came in spite of long-standing sanctions that made it hard for Cuban labs to obtain equipment and supplies made in the U.S. or containing 10% or more U.S.-made components. During Trump’s first term, the U.S. tightened the screws, including by adding Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. “Some companies that were our lab suppliers for 50 years were forced to stop dealing with us,” says Vicente Verez Bencomo, head of vaccines at the Finlay Institute. International collaborations are withering and research funds from abroad have largely evaporated. “The U.S. has managed to cut almost all sources of our revenue,” Valdés Sosa says. Major philanthropies now exclude Cuba; the Gates Foundation, for instance, has an antiterrorism policy that forbids spending in Cuba.

The Soberana COVID-19 vaccine is administered in a boxing gym in Havana in 2021—an example of Cuba’s homegrown biotech capacity now under strain. Fabrizio Chiodo

Airlines, no longer able to refuel on the island, have canceled many flights. “That’s how we were exporting our vaccines,” Verez Bencomo says. Some shipments continue via routes that he declined to discuss out of fear U.S. authorities would intervene. “Every time we find a way to solve a problem, after a week or two it’s blocked,” Valdés Sosa says.

Bleak as things are, key labs are maintaining a scientific pulse. Many have installed solar panels to augment backup generators and keep equipment running. To cope with fuel rationing, “we’re taking lessons learned during COVID and having people work from home,” Valdés Sosa says. Finlay bought electric bikes for staff with long commutes.

CIM, meanwhile, is continuing a phase 3 clinical trial on 400 patients in Havana for NeuroEPO plus, a recombinant human erythropoietin that has shown promise against Alzheimer’s disease. In mouse models, the drug reduced brain inflammation and neuronal death, and in a clinical trial in Cuba it improved cognitive function in people with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s, the team reported in 2023 in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy. And CIM is forging ahead with a trial, launched in January, of an antibody that inhibits an immune checkpoint protein; such drugs have transformed the treatment of some cancers in developed countries—and are far too pricey for Cuba to import. “There’s huge demand from Cuban doctors to get this drug into patients as fast as we can,” León Monzón says.

Cuba’s scientists hope to preserve what they can until better times arrive. Verez Bencomo is focusing Finlay’s energies on vaccine production at the expense of research and asking colleagues abroad whether they can offer havens to some scientists to keep projects afloat. “The future of our institute,” he says, “depends on this.”

by Soumya Dutta

Sixteen years ago in May 2010, the city of Ahmedabad and its surroundings came under an intense heatwave,  marked by “record-breaking” maximum temperatures. This heat wave resulted in a mind-boggling 1344 excess deaths in the Ahmedabad area alone. Excess over the background mortality rate of 3118 deaths normally occuring in the same period and same area – a massive increase.   This was relative to May 2009 and May 2011, approximately a 43% increase in heat related mortality.  The maximum temperature recorded by the meteorological stations was 46.8°C.   This human disaster gave the impetus for India’s first Heat Action Plan for Ahmedabad in the year 2013, lead by Dr Dileep Mavlankar of the Public Health Foundation of India, and with active participation of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. There are pointers to show that that city has coped with subsequent heat incidents much better, largely because of an increased public awareness of what to do and what not to do during extreme heat days, and some basic provisions.

Now, there’s another ‘change in the air’.  Cities like Delhi, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad etc traditionally faced mostly dry heat conditions in summer months, where the maximum day temperatures shoot up beyond 45°C on peak heat days, but the relative humidity or ‘mugginess’ was low.  The human (or animal) body can cool itself ‘naturally’, by perspiration, if you keep yourself hydrated.  But Delhi, my current ‘home town’ for over 30 years, increasingly looks like a City that is learning to sweat, as  it slowly descends into a  Humid Heat environment, from a largely dry and hot summer.

For a tad over three decades, I have lived through Delhi’s summers. I distinctly remember a time when heat here had a certain clarity – harsh, yes, but mostly dry. except the occasional breaks by an ‘aandhi’ or dust storm,   which brought the temperatures down, but left it mostly dry.  The afternoons scorched, the loo winds burned your skin, and yet early mornings and  evenings offered a measurable respite from the high temperatures. Sweat quickly evaporated in the dry air, allowing our bodies to naturally cool down by the loss of heat of evaporation.  Nights cooled significantly, at least enough to let the core body temperature go down inducing sleep – because the dry rocky surface quickly re-radiated heat back to space. And that heat had a much clearer escape route, as the atmospheric  air had much lower moisture, a powerful heat trapping green house gas .

That memory now feels like it belongs to another city, another  climate.  Today, Delhi does not just burn – it suffocates, much like my earlier home town of  Kolkata.  Or the inner parts of on-coast Chennai. Sweat accumulates and drips down the face and arms, and the heat clings to your body.  The air feels much  heavier, wetter.  It is no longer only the simple  thermometer reading that tells the story, but the more complex realities of the  human body itself.  The city has crossed into something new : a hybrid of heat and humidity that was once alien to its semi-arid identity, something called a high heat index environment. But the India Meteorological Department – the apex technical body of the government in matters of weather and climate, still dishes out the headline air temperature most prominently, clinging to an era long gone.  Even it’s ‘Heatwave warnings” are based only on the maximum surface air temperature, as if the human body is a metallic or stone object, without its internal processes being powered by liquid flows .  even though it gives the “Feels like ” temperature, essentially telling how the human body is perceiving the temperature, the heat index, it’s just a side note, without any operational function !

As we all know, Delhi’s meteorological stations regularly registers over 45°C on a few summer days, and the Mungeshpur station registered over 49°C just two years ago. And please take note : Delhi is the ‘Greenest Mega City’ in India, as per reports by Forest survey of India, with about one-fourth of its land area under “forest and tree cover” ! Is this a paradox ? Not really, it’s a slow but  real change that is taking hold .   But the reality remains and should hit us all  hard and centre — The Greenest Megacity of India is also one of the Hottest (in summer) and most polluted cities – not only in India, but in the entire world.  Solid data bears that out.

So a solution to the severe and fast increasing  heat stress in Indian cities cannot be tackled just by the over-simplistic slogans or actions like  “ped lagao, garmi bhagao” (meaning – plant a tree, eliminate heat). Unfortunately, a large number of so-called experts, media groups, administrators and  yes – politicians, seems to believe in that mirage.

This is not to say that having higher tree covers in cities do not affect the temperature under their shades and immediate vicinities – they definitely do.  By blocking a large part of the solar insolation (incoming solar energy per square meter), and even more – by evapotranspiration .  As trees draw in water from the ground and release them as moisture  just above the canopy, part of this water evaporates and absorbs large amount of sensible heat from the air that carries the water molecules. The sensible heat becomes less, though the total  heat energy is not gone. It’s present there in the water vapour, and when and where it condenses as water droplets , it releases that same amount of heat back. That’s simple physics, and no amount of “Trees Cool down the Earth” belief can eliminate that.  And higher heat retention by heavy-built concrete structures combined with higher water vapour concentration in the air above our cities, aided by evapotranspiration, along with a myriad uses of warmer water within the cities – from kitchens to industrial processes to internal combustion engine vehicles –  are preventing night time radiative heat escape to the sky /space — making our nights uncomfortably more warm that they used to be. Heat Island plus moisture dome is a double hit.

And it’s Not Only Delhi. Cities with traditionally dry summer heat, like Hyderabad, Pune etc are undergoing similar transformations.

This transformation is neither accidental nor singular. It is the cumulative outcome of a host of factors – global warming and climate change layered onto intensely local, urban processes.

Climate Change and Rising Heat /  Temperature : the Base layer 

At the broadest scale, Delhi’s changing summers are anchored in global warming, like in all other cities.. Heatwaves across India are becoming more frequent, longer, and more intense, with temperatures regularly exceeding historical norms.  Scientific projections suggest that in cities like Delhi, the combination of rising temperatures and persistent hot nights will dominate future climate patterns. The proportion of “combined hot days and tropical nights” could rise dramatically, approaching near-continuous heat stress conditions for the worst months, in the later part of this century.

The night temperature is crucial : the city is not cooling enough at night anymore. The human body is denied recovery after a long hot day (and we have not yet started noticing the impacts on other animals that live in our cities).

The Urban Heat Island : A City That Stores the Sun

But climate change alone does not explain Delhi’s (or similarly impacted other south-Asian cities )  particular brutality.  The city itself has become a Heat Engine.

Urbanisation replaces moist soil, trees, and water with concrete, asphalt, and glass—materials that absorb and retain heat – both Solar and internally generated – during the day and release it slowly at night. This is the urban heat island (UHI) effect.  In Delhi, studies show that decades of urban expansion have increased temperatures by around 1°C and intensified heat island effects by as much as 5–6°C in some areas.

The mechanism is simple but devastating:

Built surfaces of concrete etc trap solar radiation.  Heat is then released slowly after sunset, disrupting  Night-time cooling . Warmer nights are the result. And for millions of poorer urban residents forced to live in cramped houses or shanties made of heat retaining materials, that failure to cool in the night,  brings longer term diseases and drastic loss of productive capacity.  So it’s not only a loss to the poor workers, but also to the “economy”.

Even within the city, “warm pockets” emerge depending on land use – dense built-up areas absorbs and radiate far more heat than parks or open spaces.

When Heat Meets Moisture : The Rise of  “Humidity or Moisture Islands”

Delhi was never meant to feel like Mumbai, or Chennai or Kolkata.  Yet increasingly, it does.

Researchers have long noted that alongside heat islands, cities can develop “humidity / moisture islands”, where moisture accumulates depending on surface conditions and atmospheric dynamics.

What has changed in recent years is the frequency and persistence of this combination :

Higher baseline temperatures plus  More moisture retention in the air, combined with

Reduced ventilation due to dense urban form.

Humidity transforms heat into something far more dangerous. It prevents sweat from evaporating – the body’s primary cooling mechanism. The result is a higher heat index, where temperatures feel far worse than they are.

There is another, global scale moisture pump at work – record breaking sea Surface Temperatures over the past 3-4 years. As the Sea Surface waters heat up, there’s much more evaporation and the global-warming heated air holds more moisture too. As this moist air is carried inland, this is creating higher relative humidity in many geographies.

This is the “new Delhi summer” I have come to dread : not just hot, but oppressively humid too.

Vehicles, Waste, and the Everyday Production of Heat within the city :

The city is also producing enormous quantities of heat in real time.  Millions of vehicles (well over 1.1 crores, including 2 and 3-wheelers in Delhi, and about 3 crores in Delhi NCR)  moving through Delhi’s roads generate not just serious levels of air  pollution, but direct thermal energy as waste heat through their tail pipes.  Traffic congestion worsens this effect, with idling engines continuously releasing heat into already overheated streets.  And this heat builds up, on top of the “climatic heat”.

On top of this,

Waste burning releases both heat and heat-trapping pollutants in large quantities.  The problem is compounded by the so-called Waste to Energy (WtE) plants, each of which burn thousands of tons of solid municipal waste every day, adding massive extra loads of heat and heat trapping gases (mostly CO2) /particulates, directly into the city’s air.

Industrial and construction activities adds  substantial localized thermal loads too.

Air conditioners, increasingly ubiquitous, expel heat back into the urban environment.

Urban heat is not just absorbed – It is actively manufactured within the city, and there’s hardly any noise about this when we talk about making our cities resilient to climate change.

Studies note that such anthropogenic activities contribute significantly to near-surface temperature increases and amplify the UHI effect.

The Paradox of a “Green” hot City : 

Delhi presents a striking contradiction.

According to the latest assessments by the Forest Survey of India, roughly 25% of Delhi’s area is under forest and tree cover, making it one of India’s greenest megacities.  And yet, this has not protected it from rising heat stress.

Because :

* The Green cover is unevenly distributed,

* Dense built-up zones overwhelm cooling benefits

* Loss of water bodies and wetlands reduces evaporative  cooling

* Fragmented green spaces cannot offset large expanses of concrete

* Even cities with significant greenery can become “heat traps” if urban design is unbalanced and ecological systems are degraded

* Even areas with higher tree cover don’t have relief from high humidity , when that happens.

* Delhi’s dense and haphazard built-spaces don’t allow strong wind to flow in many congested areas.

In other words, it is not just how much green exists – but where and how connected it is, along with a host of other factors.

Losing Urban Water Bodies

The same mechanism that helps tree covered areas cool down, is also very effective in urban “sensible heat” reduction – presence of urban water bodies. Large exposed water surfaces help large scale evaporative cooling in their surroundings. With the continuing loss of water bodies, mostly to ‘real estate development’, cities lose this cooling mechanism.  Same applies for large open grassy areas. one needs to note that this also has the disadvantage – beyond a certain point – of humidity buildup in the neighbourhood.  And in a world increasingly becoming more humid along with being warmer, this quickly triggers uncomfortable heat indexes and health impacts .

The Human Cost : Heat on the Street

For those of us who can retreat indoors, into an air-conditioned environment, Delhi’s heat is uncomfortable, but bearable.  For millions of the city’s poor and working class people, it is punishing, often killing.

Over the years, I have watched construction workers labour under direct sun on flyovers and metro lines  – barely shielded, often without adequate hydration. I have seen (and worked to educate) street vendors, rickshaw pullers, sanitation workers  – people whose livelihoods tether them to the brutally hot and humid open air – endure conditions that are steadily becoming unlivable.

The signs are visible :

* Slower movement by afternoon,

* Frequent pauses in shade,

* Faces drawn with exhaustion,

Research increasingly confirms what is obvious on the streets : heat stress reduces productivity, increases health risks, and disproportionately affects outdoor workers.

This is not just a Climate issue – it is a Labour and Justice issue at its core.

A City Rewritten by Heat :

What has happened to Delhi (and many other similar cities) is not a sudden disaster but a slow rewriting of its climate.  A dry heat has become a humid and more dangerous one, without too many people realising the change.  Hot days have increased, but it has turned to  hotter nights too.

A city that once cooled itself now stores and generates heat.

The causes are layered :

Global warming sets the stage.

Urban heat islands intensify temperatures.

Humidity retention amplifies discomfort and health risks.

Vehicles, waste (including WtEs), and energy use add lots of direct heat.

Fragmented ecology weakens natural cooling.

The result is a new urban climate – one that feels less like a seasonal hardship and more like a structural condition.

A failure of Urban Governance :

While all these changes – local and global – are happening, our city governance seems to be stuck in the early 20th Century framework. The city still plans for more and more heat trapping “developmental infrastructure” and destroys open green spaces, the  technical body – India Meteorology Department or IMD, still determined risk with outdated “maximum air temperature” determinant,…. Simultaneously, our cities are now bursting with millions of migrant workers to fulfill  these construction and maintenance demands, poorly paid and uncared for workers living in highly vulnerable flimsy housing offering little protection from the elements.   It looks like  our governance is asleep on decades long cycle, like a Rip van Winkle.

The Question Ahead : 

Delhi’s experience is not unique.  Across India, cities are becoming “heat traps,” where urban form and climate change reinforce each other.

The real question is not whether cities will get hotter – they will.  There’s a popular saying in the climate science fraternity — “if this summer feels unbearably hot, remember, in 20 years this will be what the coolest summer feels like”.   The real question is whether they can be redesigned to remain livable.

For those of us who have lived here long enough, the change is undeniable. Delhi has (almost)  learned to sweat. The worry is that, increasingly, it may not be able to cool down.

by Ranjan Solomon

“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces.” Karl Marx

India’s growth story is often narrated through numbers – GDP expansion, rising markets, increasing foreign investment, and the steady rise in the number and wealth of billionaires. These indicators are presented as evidence of a thriving economy, a nation on the move, and a system delivering prosperity. Yet beneath this narrative of success lies a quieter, more disquieting reality—one that reveals not a temporary imbalance, but a structural condition.

The workers who sustain this growth are increasingly excluded from its rewards.

In a billionaire-driven economy, labour is not failing; it is being systematically undervalued. Workers today are more productive than ever before. They generate higher output, adapt to technological change, and sustain the expansion of key sectors. Yet their wages do not reflect this rising productivity. Instead, the value they create is funnelled upward – into corporate profits, executive compensation, and the expanding wealth of those who own capital. This is not an incidental outcome, but a defining feature of contemporary capitalism.

Across the world, workers in such economies face stagnant wages despite high productivity, with wealth increasingly concentrated through ownership of capital and corporate profits. Billionaires control major employers—from large retail chains to global technology firms—while workers confront rising costs of living, growing inequality, and persistent job insecurity. The contradiction is stark: workers are more productive than ever, yet the value they create is increasingly diverted away from them.

This phenomenon, widely described as the productivity–pay gap or “decoupling,” is well documented. Since the late 1970s, productivity in developed and emerging economies has grown multiple times faster than typical worker compensation. As of 2026, this trend continues, creating a widening disconnect between the value created by employees and their actual earnings. The economy simultaneously witnesses rising productivity and wage stagnation—a combination that undermines the very premise that growth benefits all.

In India, this contradiction takes on a particularly sharp and complex form. The current economic landscape reflects what can be described as “jobful growth,” where both productivity and employment are increasing, but real wage growth remains subdued. While India is projected to lead global salary increases at around 9.1% in 2026, these gains are often neutralized by inflationary pressures. The result is a “nominal wage trap,” where salaries rise in absolute terms, but purchasing power declines or stagnates.

This pattern is visible across both rural and urban economies. Real wages in rural areas have shown alarming stagnation since 2014, a trend that has persisted through 2023–24 and continues into 2025–26, despite India maintaining a GDP growth rate of 6–7%. In urban areas, households face a similar squeeze, as rising incomes fail to keep pace with escalating living costs, creating a silent but widespread erosion of economic security.

Even where productivity rises, workers are not proportionately rewarded. In the informal sector, Gross Value Added (GVA) per worker grew by 4.54% in 2025, compared to a 3.88% increase in nominal wages. This gap illustrates a broader pattern: productivity gains are not being equitably shared. Instead, they are absorbed into corporate margins and capital accumulation.

Inequality data reinforces this reality. According to recent estimates, the top 10% of earners in India capture 58% of national income, while the bottom 50% receive only 15%. Corporate compensation trends mirror this imbalance. Median CEO compensation in Nifty 200 companies reached between ₹7–9 crore in 2025, reflecting a 12–15% increase, significantly outpacing the average employee salary hike of around 9%. In effect, those at the top capture a disproportionate share of economic gains, while the majority experiences stagnation.

Corporate profits have consistently outpaced wages. Factory output per worker has risen sharply, but worker pay has failed to keep pace. The share of national income going to wages and employee benefits has declined, while a growing proportion is captured as profits, dividends, and returns to investors. This shift signals a fundamental redistribution of economic gains – from labour to capital.

This divergence is not accidental—it is structural. Economic power is increasingly concentrated among a small number of large firms and conglomerates, particularly since 2015–16. As capital consolidates, so does the ability to influence markets, shape policy, and determine wage structures. Companies are narrowing the pool of top performers eligible for significant salary increases, reducing it from 10% to around 7%, and tightening evaluation systems under the rubric of “performance differentiation.” This allows firms to justify limited wage growth for the majority while rewarding a select few.

At the same time, there is a pronounced shift toward skill-based pay. Workers with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cybersecurity command premiums of 30–40%, while those in traditional roles see minimal or no real wage growth. While this reflects changing economic demands, it also deepens inequality within the workforce, creating a divide between a highly paid minority and a stagnant majority.

Technology plays a dual role in this transformation. While increasing efficiency and productivity, artificial intelligence is also enabling the replacement of entry-level roles and reducing demand for certain categories of labour. This creates a bifurcated labour market in which only workers with specialized skills experience wage growth, while others face stagnation or displacement. Without deliberate policy intervention, automation risks undermining a people-centred economy.

The weakening of labour institutions has further exacerbated this imbalance. Trade union density in India has declined to around 6.3%, significantly reducing workers’ ability to bargain for higher wages and better conditions. At the same time, the rise of the gig economy and the expansion of contract-based employment have increased informality. A large proportion of workers are now engaged in precarious, unregulated work with low wages, minimal security, and limited access to social benefits.

Today, approximately 82% of India’s workforce operates within the informal sector. These workers often earn poverty-level wages, lack formal contracts, and remain excluded from social protection mechanisms. The informal sector has also borne the brunt of successive economic shocks—including demonetization, the implementation of GST, and the COVID-19 pandemic – which have suppressed wage growth and intensified economic vulnerability.

In such conditions, labour markets increasingly resemble what economists describe as monopsony structures, where a limited number of employers dominate hiring and are able to set wages below the true value of labour. Workers, constrained by limited alternatives and weakened bargaining power, are compelled to accept these terms. This dynamic results in lower wages, reduced employment quality, and higher profits for employers.

At a deeper level, the accumulation of wealth at the top reflects the nature of capital ownership itself. A significant portion of billionaire wealth is derived not from labour, but from inheritance, monopoly power, or ownership of productive assets such as factories, land, and technology. Economic theory has long suggested that labour generates surplus value, much of which is appropriated by owners rather than returned to workers. This structural extraction lies at the heart of modern inequality.

In a globalized economy, this imbalance is further amplified. Workers in lower-income regions contribute significantly to global supply chains but receive only a fraction of the value they help create. Reports have consistently highlighted how billionaire wealth expands rapidly even as ordinary people struggle to meet basic needs such as food, housing, and healthcare.

In India, these dynamics have produced an increasingly oligarchic economic structure. Wealth and economic power are concentrated among a small group of conglomerates, shaping policy outcomes and reinforcing forms of crony capitalism. The high cost of electoral politics ensures that governance aligns more closely with the interests of financiers than with the broader population. As a result, the welfare-oriented character of the Indian Constitution is gradually undermined.

As economic power concentrates, governance structures have increasingly shifted toward maintaining a cheap and compliant workforce. Labour protections are weakened, and policy frameworks often favour capital accumulation over worker welfare. The consequences are visible not only in economic inequality, but also in the erosion of democratic accountability.

This concentration of power extends into the political sphere, where exclusion operates along both class and gender lines. Women, despite gains at the Panchayati Raj level, face significant barriers in accessing political power at the state and national levels. Electoral politics is shaped by high financial costs, party gatekeeping, and deeply entrenched patriarchal norms. It is often characterized as a “masculine mob” culture, marked by aggression, intimidation, and violence.

Women encounter what can be described as “nomination exclusion,” where political parties prioritize dynastic and elite networks over broader representation. Financial barriers, lack of institutional support, and systemic bias further limit their participation. Even where women enter political spaces, they face targeted harassment, including online abuse, which acts as a deterrent to sustained engagement.

The intersection of class and gender ensures that women – particularly those outside elite circles—remain marginalized within both economic and political structures. Addressing this requires more than incremental reforms; it demands a fundamental challenge to the entrenched systems that define power and participation.

What emerges from this complex landscape is not a set of isolated issues, but a coherent economic and political order – one that systematically transfers value from labour to capital, from the many to the few. Productivity has not failed; it has been appropriated. Wages have not merely stagnated; they have been constrained within structures that prioritize ownership over effort.

This is no longer only an economic issue. It is a democratic one. When wealth shapes policy, when labour is fragmented and weakened, and when inequality becomes normalized, the promise of a welfare state begins to hollow out from within.

India today stands not at the threshold of a crisis, but within one—quiet, normalized, and deeply entrenched. It is a crisis that does not erupt suddenly, but deepens gradually, widening the distance between those who produce wealth and those who accumulate it.

The central question, then, is not whether the economy can grow faster, but whether it can grow more justly. Until that question is confronted with honesty and political will, India’s growth story will remain profoundly incomplete – impressive in its scale, but deeply unequal in its substance, and increasingly unsustainable in its promise.

by Joshua Reaves Charmelus

Photo caption. A farmer in the rice fields in the Maribaroux plain

Behind the Dominican Republic’s assault on Haitian water sovereignty stands an Israeli Occupation apparatus – arming border forces, training police, and designing a thirty-year plan to control their island’s water supply.

For years, Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic has become increasingly militarized. The Dominican Republic constructs an island-spanning border wall, staffed entirely by Dominican troops and military police, to control the flow of people and goods to and from Haiti. Central to this conflict is the resource of water: The Dominican Republic and Haiti share a watershed. The island’s rivers and lakes supply both countries with water for irrigation and drinking, but years of conflict and environmental degradation have made accessing shared waterways a contentious issue between nations.

Dominican president Luis Abinader has presided over an increasingly anti-Haitian set of policies at the border – including mass deportations of Haitian immigrants and large deployments of soldiers to the borderlands. But this is not just a conflict between neighbors. Powerful, international interests have used the crisis as an opportunity for profit and political leverage across the island. In particular, the contentious border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic itself has been engineered by Israeli Occupation megacorporations and diplomats.

The tense relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti goes back to both countries’ founding. After freeing themselves from French slavery in 1804, Haitians crossed over the colonial border into the modern-day Dominican Republic to end colonial rule and declare independence. The Dominican planter class staged a coup d’etat in the mid-1800s, declaring an independent Dominican Republic that aligned itself with its former colonial master and European interests.

Today, these border conflicts have created long-standing tensions over land and water for both Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s shared territory. At Dajabon River in northeastern Haiti, a struggle for water access underscores the shadowy operations of the Israeli Occupation’s national water company.

Dajabon River, otherwise known as ‘massacre river,’ has a deep history in the web of Dominican-Haitian relations. The river was the site of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s infamous anti-Haitian massacres throughout the 1930s. Situated at the border, the river has recently become one site of crossings of Haitian immigrants into the Dominican Republic, where Dominican immigration police routinely arrest and deport suspected Haitian migrants. In 2023, disputes at the river led the Dominican Republic to close and militarize the border crossing; crossings remain militarized to this day.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic have a framework for dealing with such conflicts. In 1929, Haiti and the Dominican Republic agreed to a ‘Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Arbitration’ to manage disputes and share resources. The treaty, following a 1777 treaty between former colonial powers France and Spain, establishes the Dajabon River as a border between the DR and Haiti. Article 10 of the 1929 treatyexplicitly calls for arbitration between Haiti and DR at Dajabon on the issue of water: “because rivers and other watercourses arise in the territory of one State and flow through the territory of the other or serve as boundaries between the two States, both High Contracting Parties undertake not to carry out or consent to any work likely to change the stream of those or altering the product of their sources”. The Dominican Republic defended its unilateral decision to close the border at the 78th United Nations General Assembly, wherein the Dominican president accused Haiti of treaty violations with Haiti’s construction of a canal at Dajabon.

The canal at Dajabon is a first-of-its-kind project. While the Dominican Republic has ten such canals on the Dominican side of the Dajabon River, for the purposes of irrigation and potable water, Haiti has none. Lack of irrigation has turned the soil on the Haitian side of the border arid, and exacerbated the island-wide food crisis. To combat this, Haiti launched a project constructing a canal in Ouanaminthe, along the Dajabon River.

The project was first pioneered by a combination of Haitian civil society, farmers, and engineers from Haiti’s department of agriculture. In compliance with the 1929 treaty, Haiti went to the Dominican Republic to discuss sharing the water of the Dajabon River. Designed in 2011 by the Cuban state engineering company DINVAI, the canal would be Haiti’s first-ever extraction from the river. However, in spite of the Dominican Republic having ten such canals within its own territory, the Dominican government refused each time: in 2013, 2015, and 2017. Undeterred, the Haitian project moved forward in 2018, but was halted in 2021 following the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise.

This did not stop the Haitian people. In August of 2023, a grassroots movement of workers – volunteers, farmers, diaspora donors, and community members – arrived at the construction site.

Dominican response came swiftly: The Dominican Republic launched a project to dam the river in Dominican territory in September of 2023. This dam directly bypasses the 1929 agreement between DR and Haiti, giving the Dominican government a unilateral instrument to enforce its will. If Haiti does not comply with the Dominican government’s directives, the DR can completely shut off water access to Haiti. During the dry season, the river flows 4.2 cubic meters per second, Dominican extractions already total 3.22, and the Haitian canal adds 1.5, meaning total withdrawals would exceed the mean dry season flow entirely. The dam gives the DR a chokehold precisely when water is scarcest.

Haitian farmers were undeterred by border closings and the dam’s construction, and the Haitian grassroots coalition completed construction on its canal in 2024. The project was lauded by Haitian writer Edxon Francisque, claiming that it is “beating all expectations in record time.” The project has sparked economic growth, increasing local farmers’ incomes by over 35% since its completion, and providing home-grown rice to Haiti’s embattled food system. In spite of intense Dominican pressure, the project became a resounding success for the Haitian people’s food and water sovereignty.

Haitian writer Maismy-Mary Fleurant describes the Dominican response to the canal as an example of ‘hydro-hegemony,’ heavyhanded use of force to control natural resources: “If the international custom and the fundamental principles of the international right to rivers and lakes provide for an equitable, reasonable and non-harmful use of common water resources, it turns out that many States that share an international watercourse want to establish a hegemony in their use of the resource for their own benefit, to the detriment of others taking advantage of their geographical position, their economic, political or military power, or even the appropriation of a historical continuum in a logic of first user-owner (Duhautoy, 2014).”The project’s specifications are a clear violation of this international right.

There’s only one problem: the Dominican Republic shares a watershed with Haiti. Unilateral actions on one side of the island’s ecology can have drastic effects on the other side of the island. And the pretext for the DR’s operation is not collaboration, but control.

While this was happening, the Dominican Republic negotiated with an Israeli Occupation-run water corporation to design the future of the Dominican Republic’s water access. Regarded as a ‘first-of-its-kind deal,’ the Israeli Occupation corporation has negotiated a contract that is unusual both in its scope and its implications across the region. Mekorot is an entity wholly owned by the Israeli Occupation, not a private engineering firm; its contract with the Dominican Republic is also an act of diplomacy on behalf of the Zionist state.

The scope of Mekorot’s contract is also unusual. In other countries, Mekorot has negotiated smaller-scoped agreements for desalination, wastewater management, and other water-supply concerns. In the Dominican Republic, Mekorot is responsible for the whole-systems development of Dominican water systems. This includes a thirty-year master plan for Dominican waterways, desalination, wastewater, and civil/government water access. Also irregular is the scope of confidentiality for a public water contract. Several Dominican civil society groups challenged the government’s agreement with Mekorot in court. The legal challenges revealed that the proposal came directly from Israeli Occupation diplomats to the Dominican government, bypassing any bidding process entirely and violating Dominican law. As a result, the contract is in jeopardy, but it is not the only one that the Dominican government has negotiated with Israeli Occupation parties.

This contestation has not stopped collaboration between DR and the Israeli Occupation on the issue of water at the Haitian border. At the southern border, in the Pedernales province of the Dominican Republic, the Israeli Occupation announced in 2024 its donation of a massive water filtration system at the El Banano river to supply Dominican troops at the Haitian border.

However, water is only one element of militarized cooperation with the Israel Occupation at the Dominican border. Zionist military technology and training loom overhead. For the past six years, the Israeli Occupation has offered extensive military cooperation to the Dominican Republic’s brutal anti-Haitian military and police units. In 2019, Israeli ambassador Daniel Biran offered military technologies – including drones, satellite surveillance, and other undisclosed technologies – explicitly to combat Haitian migration.

In November of 2020, the Israeli Occupation Embassy conducted a joint training operation between Dominican national police and special forces of the Dominican military. Further, the Dominican government’s notorious Military Police have been trained and equipped with Israeli weapons. The Israeli regime’s history of selling weapons to the Dominican Republic stretches back decades, wherein Israel reportedly sold weapons to dictators Trujillo and Balaguer, even after the Dominican Republic’s crimes against the Haitian people were exposed to the world. Together, these agreements constitute a security partnership that has deepened significantly under Abinader, placing Israeli Occupation military infrastructure at the heart of Dominican border enforcement against Haiti.

What is happening at the Haitian border, at Dajabon, is nothing short of water apartheid. Both the Dominican Republic and the Israeli Occupation know this from experience. Mekorot has been repeatedly condemned internationally for its practice of draining Palestinian waterways – the Dominican Republic’s plan to do the same coincides exactly with the country’s contract with Mekorot. In addition, the Zionist regime is providing technology, training, and arms to the Dominican Republic with the aim of influencing Dominican border policy. This is more than mere diplomacy – the Israeli regime is exporting apartheid to the Dominican Republic, in a coordinated attempt to assist and profit from the Dominican Republic’s ‘hydro-hegemony’ in the region.

As both Dominican and Haitian grassroots organizations challenge the Dominican military establishment’s hold over resources across the island, the Israeli Occupation works across diplomatic channels to strengthen the Dominican government’s strong-armed tactics. Diplomacy is legally required under both international law and the framework of the DR and Haiti’s 1929 treaty – but while Israel arms, backs, and trains one side for a brutal border confrontation, diplomatic resolution remains out of reach.

Beyond the legal implications of one country weaponizing its water supply against others, the strangulation of a neighbor’s water is a moral problem. In the Holy Quran, water is described as the foundation of all life. “And We have made from every [living] thing water,” Quran 21:50.

Water is a sacred resource to be treasured and shared with neighbors, not hoarded for the sake of greed and manipulation. The Prophet Muhammad SAW once said: “The best charity is giving water to drink.” Ali RA embodied these beliefs during a battle against Muawiya. When Ali’s forces seized a critical well prior to a battle, Ali RA allowed the enemy’s forces to drink from it. Even with one’s enemies, water is meant to be shared.

by Thomas Ultican

Are the Falling NAEP Scores a Crisis?

By Thomas Ultican 5/19/2026

Recently both the New York Times and the billionaire propaganda rag ‘The 74’ ran articles about the National Assessment of Education Progress’s (NAEP) declining scores. For more than a decade reading and math scores have been declining and the authors of both articles postulated that the cause is either social media or the demise of test and punish federal education policy or both. This view was originally put forward this May in a report from the Education Recovery Scorecard titled “From Education Recession to Education Recovery.” Neither proffered answer is likely a bullseye and the falling scores are less meaningful than they appear.

Calling it an “education recession” is a red hearing. Professor Paul Thomas called it “yet another oversell.” This verbiage is an attack on public education and indicates this is not a serious study.

NAEP is often called the national education report card, but it suffers from the common affliction of standardized testing. For years, anyone paying close attention has known that education testing operates in such a noisy arena that it cannot reliably identify good schools or teachers. The only student variable correlated with higher test results is family wealth. When statistical studies of standardized testing data are made, there is only one factor that has an r-value greater the 0.3 (weakly correlated) and that is family wealth which has an r-value of 0.9 (highly correlated).

The people and organizations the report cites for various kinds of help taint this work. They include Brown University economist Emily Oster who gained notoriety for her call to put the kids back in school at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020. She was followed by Josh Bleiberg of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education and Nate Mulkus from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The Carnegie Foundation of New York, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Joyce Foundation and the Gates Foundation were all thanked for funding.

These supporters and contributors have a history of promoting NCLB style testing oversight and punishment. In 2014, The Washington Post wrote that under CEO Arthur Brooks, AEI had emerged as “the dominant conservative think tank,” becoming more influential than the Heritage Foundation. Over at Media Bias – Fact Check, they rate AEI as having a right bias and medium credibility. Tim Knowles at Carnegie Corporation has been working to replace public schools with students at computer terminals earning proof of skills badges. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Joyce Foundation and the Gates Foundation all supported NCLB and school privatization.

NCLB and The Test Score Decline

Whan NCLB first arrived, there were no consequences but by 2005 schools were being threatened with shutdown and having all of the staff fired. As the threats became real and schools were shuttered (all in poverty areas because poor students had poor test results) school administrators and teachers started desperately trying to save their jobs and schools. By 2010, curriculum had been narrowed significantly and there was test prep going on throughout the school year and within a few weeks of the testing window, all students started taking practice tests.

A dive into how test results were being evaluated, revealed students who had just barely failed on previous exams were the best target for score improvements. These students were often pulled out of regular classes to participate in special test preparation classes. It had nothing to do with helping them but was solely to save the school and jobs.

Schools held assemblies to pump the kids up to do well on the tests. The high school kids knew that the testing meant nothing to them and were much harder to motivate.

One major issue with NCLB testing was escalating passing scores became impossible to achieve. In fact, by 2014, the law required 100% of all students to be proficient which was a statistical impossibility. This ludicrous requirement brought the whole thing down when wealthy neighborhoods started having their schools threatened.

The test preparation did bring higher scores but undermined authentic education.

The Obama administration was force to give schools across the country waivers and on December 10, 2015, NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act. Removing the draconian NCLB rules meant schools could concentrate more on education than testing.

As a result, test preparation reduced significantly and authentic education was enhanced. I believe this is the major driver of today’s falling test scores and is clearly a good thing.

Social Media Not Likely the Villain

Smartphones are ubiquitous from middle school on. However, as a teacher, I did not experience a big problem with them in class. Because my classroom was also a science lab with many electrical outlets, sometimes I would have a dozen phones charging during class. From time-to-time students would look at their phones but a simple reminder from me was all it took for the phone to be put away. Of all class disruptions, I found smartphones a minor problem.

The National Bureau of Economic Research studied the of effect of smartphones on students. They concluded, “For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero.”

The big problem I saw undermining student learning was the internet. I taught math and science. By 2013, almost every physics and chemistry problem was on the internet as were step by step solutions to all math problems. To learn math, physics or chemistry students need to struggle with solving problems. With the answers and solution steps on line, striving to learn was severely undermined. I was receiving the most beautifully written homework assignments I had ever seen followed by declining test scores.

My school district bought every student an I-pad and then replaced those with Google laptops. Most veteran teachers were having students store these devices under their desks or in backpacks during class. They were giant distractions that in total were a waste of money but teachers found a work around.

Propaganda Not Reporting

The New York Times article was sort of balanced but they reported the Education Recovery Scorecard report with no push-back. One of their first quotes came from AEI’s Matt Mulkus who stridently claimed, “I cannot be more emphatic: This is an enormous problem that’s not getting enough attention.” And the Times does not provide any counter to this statement or question the report’s use of “education recession” in its loaded title. However, compared to ‘The 74’ their article is very reasonable.

In its lead sentence, ‘The 74’s’ states, “The United States entered a “learning recession” in 2013 that it has struggled mightily — and thus far ineffectively — to escape, according to a report unveiled Wednesday by a group of respected social scientists.” Nothing in this statement is supported or fair, but that is the way billionaire funded propaganda functions.

Harvard economics professor, Thomas Kane, one of the creators of Scorecard, is paraphrased, “student achievement illustrates not merely the enormity of the loss, but also the impressive progress that preceded it.” If there is any real loss it is certainly not enormous.

Another quoted expert is Doug Lemov, former charter school teacher and administrator, who wrote the TFA training guide Teach Like a Champion. ‘The 74’ claims Lemov’s book is a “reference text for educators around the world.” Outside of the privatized charter industry, I am not aware of any schools using Lemov’s book.

Most trained professional educators find his teaching theories regressive. Jennifer Berkshire published a post by Layla Treuhaft-Ali under the title “Teach Like its 1885.” Layla wrote, “Placed in their proper racial context, the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of the Hampton Idea, where children of color are taught not to challenge authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite.”

So here it is. A phony study financed by billionaires is reported to the public by the New York Time and the billionaire propaganda rag ‘The 74’. The reality is decreasing test scores do not indicate much and certainly not an “education recession.” This is simply another billionaire financed attack on public education.

by Bernard Marszalek

Caption: Cover: Photo: Xuthoria, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons. “From the Amazon to the world: End of inequality and environmental racism, climate justice yes!”

The UN declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives. The theme of the year—”Cooperatives Build a Better World”—provided a splendid opportunity for the worldwide cooperative movement to mark its existence as vital to building a better world by limiting the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, that didn’t occur. To be more precise, it didn’t occur with the bureaucrats associated with various top-heavy international organizations that represent the cooperative economic sector on the world stage.

However, the Organization of Brazilian Cooperatives (OCB) did take a stand to support the UN Climate Summit, COP30, held in Belem, Brazil on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. The OCB issued a Manifesto outlining their many projects that support a truly sustainable society.

The main opposition to the International Fossil Fuel Lobby comes from nations that are the least responsible for the devastation caused by a warming planet. These nations for the most part are powerless to oppose the insanity of that Lobby. What is notable about the cooperative Manifesto is that it comes from Brazil, a country that the World Bank lists as the 10th-largest economy in the world. And not surprisingly, according to 2024 data, Brazil ranks 9th in daily oil production.

More importantly, Brazil ranks 6th among countries emitting GHGs, accounting for 2.5% of total worldwide emissions, right behind Russia, which emits 5%. With a population of nearly 216,000,000, Brazil must be recognized as an economic and political power. Likewise, the cooperative sector in Brazil is a significant force in Brazilian society. The latest figures indicate that there are 6,828 cooperatives in the country with 425,318 worker-members. The majority of co-ops are in the agricultural sector. However, if we include cooperative housing, food co-ops, and over 750 credit unions with 9 million members, the total membership in cooperatives rises to over 14 million.

The OCB’s credit union network and its staff of 45,000 combat the effects of climate change by supporting ecological land initiatives such as agricultural restoration and exploring biofuel ventures; they also promote waste management and alternative energy projects.

As we see, the Brazilian cooperative sector is a major economic force, and its Manifesto advances four radical governing principles. The First Principle: the natural economy of photosynthesis has both social and economic value, most apparent in the tropical belt, where rural communities attempt to protect forests and practice eco-friendly agriculture.

The Second: paradoxically, climate serves as a driver of development by promoting innovation. In Brazil, for example, agricultural waste is used to produce bioenergy in the form of ethanol and biodiesel. Where electrical infrastructure doesn’t exist, biofuels function as an expedient alternative to fossil fuels.

The Third Principle: this principle seems most obvious, but unfortunately, it isn’t—communities need to be the focus for action. Funding must directly reach and support local actions to promote economic incentives. A top-down system of financial allocations won’t motivate participation as much as one based on local control of funds.

Most importantly, Principle Four states unambiguously that cooperatives are the means to achieve climate change goals. Why? Cooperatives have an ethical foundation for social inclusion, democratic social organization, and territorial development in the communities where they operate. As the Manifesto states:

Their widespread presence and the reach of their assistance networks promote funding for local initiatives and the implementation of sustainable practices in agriculture, renewable energy, waste management, and conservation.

The Manifesto explores in depth five main points of the cooperative’s Green Program: food security, technology and low-carbon agriculture; the valorization of communities and climate funding; energy transition and sustainable development; bioeconomy as a driver of development; and adaptation and mitigation of climate risks. To review their significance, these areas will be briefly elaborated below.

1. Food security, technology and low-carbon agriculture

With more than 1 million member producers, 71% of whom are family farmers, cooperatives are key players in supplying more than 53% of the national grain harvest to Brazilians.

OCB supports 9,000 technicians (a role similar to the US County Extension Agent system) working with the cooperatives. One benefit of this assistance is the reduction of the agricultural carbon footprint. The cooperative farms reclaim degraded pastures, adopt sustainable soil management, handle agro-industrial waste in sound ways, conserve environmental assets, and foster bioeconomic initiatives. The Brazilian cooperative model can serve as a benchmark for countries where agriculture is a major sector by demonstrating how to combine productive growth, technological innovation, and respect for the environment.

2. OCB climate funding

Brazil’s credit unions are present in more than half of Brazil’s municipalities, offering financial services to about 1.5 million people. This extensive network provides access to credit for small producers and entrepreneurs who would otherwise find it difficult to acquire financial support.

Furthermore, credit unions are receptive to green projects because they are rooted in their communities, which means they are best positioned to assess the risks of sustainable projects. If a project is viable, they can leverage both public and private funding for otherwise abandoned green endeavors. Credit unions, in this way, recirculate money back into their communities and do not, like private finance, extract local wealth.

3. Energy transition and sustainable development

It is notable that the Manifesto discusses the energy transition as one of the most urgent challenges of global climate governance. In 2023, 736 Brazilian cooperatives generated their own energy, a significant increase compared to 2022, when 582 cooperatives generated part of their energy. The highlight for 2023 was solar installations with 3,523 projects.

During COP30, Brazil’s cooperative sector led the debate on the energy transition in a just, orderly, and equitable manner. It was expected that a UN-sponsored roadmap to a planned transition away from fossil fuels would be finalized. It failed. The delegates succumbed to the fossil fuel lobby. What was agreed upon was a voluntary roadmap endorsed by a majority of the delegations.

4. Bioeconomy as a development driver

The Manifesto promotes regenerative agriculture in Brazil not as a mitigation measure, as we find in much of the US discussion of the topic, but as a driver of the bioeconomy, incorporating biofertilizers and biopesticides.

In the Amazon, a range of products can be grown sustainably, that is, in balance with the environment: acai, Brazil nuts, and rubber. Besides native products like babassu oil, which has properties similar to those of coconut oil, and cupuaçu. The pulp of the cupuaçu fruit is used to make ice creams, snack bars, and other products.

The Manifesto advocates for federal funding to prevent land grabbing, deforestation, and organized crime related to drug processing. More importantly, funding is needed to encourage a cooperative bioeconomy that values the diversity of Brazilian biomes. Funding in this manner strengthens the role of agricultural cooperatives to link up with the rest of the cooperative economy to generate employment and income and prevent illegal activities.

5. Adaptation and mitigation of climate risks

The last section of the Manifesto is devoted to an aspect of the climate catastrophe that is missing in environmental narratives in the developed world—adaptation. 94 percent of Brazilian municipalities have been affected by natural disasters in recent decades, directly affecting millions of people.

In this context, cooperatives are an instrument of sustainability and resilience. With their wide reach and operations in strategic sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure and credit, cooperatives have the potential to develop local, scalable responses to climate change. The capacity of cooperatives to lead climate mitigation and adaptation processes is evident in initiatives aimed at the recovery of infrastructure. Cooperatives have also adopted sustainable production systems and developed innovative techniques to deal with extreme weather events.

The primary importance of the cooperative sector in Brazil and elsewhere, where cooperatives are established, lies in their effective embedding in communities. This inherent decentralization encourages local participation in resilience and adaptation projects. The Brazilian cooperatives have initiated, among other things, watershed restoration, massive tree planting, stockpiles of supplies for crisis situations, and have built ecological corridors for wildlife to encourage the occupation of larger ranges.

Indigenous populations, due to the practice of localism, participate in the cooperative movement. For example, the Foresters and Reforesters Work Cooperative of the Pataxó Boca da Mata Indigenous village (Cooplanjé) in Bahia has reforested 210 hectares of Atlantic Rainforest in the Monte Pascoal-Pau Brasil Ecological Corridor.

While the Manifesto was not an official state document, it nevertheless has the heft of a large oppositional movement to capitalist orthodoxy. And further, it’s a movement that has an established economic presence “on the ground,” as journalists like to say.

The Manifesto deserves world recognition not as a statement of hope, of possibility, but, significantly, of strategy.

Its importance, as far as I can determine, has been ignored by the worldwide bureaucratic, cooperative establishment. In fact, one could say that the Manifesto is an embarrassment to that establishment, which has simply mouthed inanities about “sustainable development” which come directly from corporate press releases.

The question about its importance is derived from several points that are highlighted in the Manifesto. First and foremost, the Brazilian cooperative movement is a “Green Movement” incorporating an established and enduring infrastructure of varied economic institutions from a large agricultural sector to an extensive financial network and a varied complement of technical assistance entities. These institutions work together to achieve eco-friendly goals.

The network of cooperatives makes possible plans to mitigate both man-made and natural impediments to sustainable goals. The collaboration of these networked cooperative institutions provides the means to forge adaptations to an environment devastated by climate change. Agricultural seed research, for instance, works to find crops best suited for drought conditions.

The Brazilian Manifesto may be more relevant to countries in the South, where agriculture is a significant economic driver, than to the overdeveloped economies of the North. In any case, the Brazilian cooperative economy isn’t necessarily a model to be replicated. We should see it as a guide to what is possible when cooperative institutions are present in significant numbers and where they search for a post-capitalist response to environmental degradation and resource depletion.

In the US, with both agricultural cooperatives and co-op utilities covering rural America, there exists an infrastructure that could be mobilized to contend with climate change. Already, in a modest way, co-op utilities supply a grid to farms that support local solar and wind generation. If we add in local credit unions that can provide loans to purchase renewable energy sources, then that already in place network of cooperatives can realize a major advance beyond the use of fossil fuels.

The US, unlike Brazil, has many housing cooperatives, from smaller multi-unit residential buildings of the sort found in many college towns, to huge estates like those in New York City. And as with the farming communities, these buildings could be fitted with solar panels purchased with the help of a local credit union. These endeavors could be expanded to forest restoration of the sort practiced for over ten years in the Northwest by the Hoedads in the 1980s. There is a need to catalyze these eco-friendly projects, and fortunately, we have a model in a two-decade-old Canadian research cooperative, Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG). With a staff of 30, it provides a range of services for governments, communities, and other cooperatives. UK’s Coop News reports:

SSG… helps decision-makers confront the climate crisis by providing services that span greenhouse gas inventories, carbon budgeting, climate mitigation and adaptation planning, scenario modelling and implementation support.

The catalyst in this case, SSG, is a worker cooperative enterprise that could be replicated, as in Brazil’s OCB, with 9,000 technicians to aid farmers. The beauty of a decentralized project is that it relies on cooperative institutions already in place across the country. All we need is to convince the siloed cooperative sectors to collaborate on projects to address the socio-economic-cultural catastrophe we have entered.

by Austin C. McCoy

The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Louisiana’s congressional map creating two Black-majority districts continues to remind us of how much the U.S. has backpedaled away from the so-called racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020. The Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais undermines another key plank of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, passed more than 60 years ago with the intent of protecting Black Americans’ voting rights and political representation.

With SCOTUS ruling majority-minority districts as a form of discrimination against non-Black people, Republican-led states are poised to dilute Black political power in a manner echoing the Jim Crow era when white southerners retook power from elected Black lawmakers and neutralized Black Americans’ voting rights for multiple generations. During Reconstruction, hundreds of African Americans won elected office as thousands of newly emancipated citizens engaged in the electoral process. The number of Black officeholders declined following Reconstruction’s end in 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan launched terror campaigns against Black communities in efforts to blunt Black political power. Many whites also justified their attempts at undermining Black power by claiming African Americans were corrupt and thus not fit to participate in self-governance.

White theft of African Americans’ civil rights and economic power accompanied the destruction of Black political influence following the end of Reconstruction. White southerners moved to pass laws instituting segregation in education, public accommodations, and in the private sector. Jim Crow laws also entailed enforcing policies preventing Black Americans from voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests.

One difference between the racial dictatorship of Jim Crow and the burgeoning racial regime is the contemporary manifestation of oppression is grounded in what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “colorblind racism,” or non-racialized actions and policies that reinforce Black and Brown marginalization. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the conservative majority, justified invalidating Section 4b of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder by pointing to the “great strides” in Black participation in electoral politics. Justice Samuel Alito echoed Roberts in his opinion for Louisiana v. Callais: “First, vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.”

However, eliminating minority-majority districts threatens to leave millions of Black Americans without representation that reflects their interests. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed off on a new congressional map which could award up to four more GOP seats. Tennessee Republicans have drafted a new map that would eliminate the only predominantly-Democrat, and predominantly-Black, district. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s call for state Republicans to revisit Alabama’s map is striking because she is framing her actions as an attempt to remain in compliance with the law. Again, this ruling allows Republicans in states to disenfranchise Black voters under the guise of following “colorblind” law.

by Jeremy Miller

The attack on Mali was a coordinated international destabilization campaign, but as is usually the case, any coverage from the Western press hides the full story.

In the early morning hours of April 25, 2026, a very sophisticated and coordinated attack was made against the Republic of Mali.  Armed groups simultaneously struck in Kidal and Gao to the north-east, Mopti and Sévaré in the center of the country, and critically, Bamako, and Kati in the center-west of the country.  Bamako is the national capital and Kati is a garrison town 9 miles north-west of Bamako, the largest town of the Koulikoro region.

These were not random targets.  Reportedly The 1st Military Region and 13th Combined Arms Regiment are based in Gao; the 3rd Military Region is based in Kati; and the 6th Military Region is based in Sévaré.  The FAMa (Forces Armées Maliennes,) or Malian armed forces, are sub-divided into six military regions thus, on one day, a full half of the Malian armed forces main bases were under attack alongside the capital and the residences of the Transitional Government.  In Kati, the Minister of Defense, Sadio Camara was killed at his home along with his wife and two of his grandchildren by a suicide bomber.

The Western press seems dedicated to obfuscating the international nature of these attacks.  They have focused instead on the supposedly surprising collaboration between Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) who have both claimed attribution.  For shorthand, the former is a Salafi movement composed primarily of Tuareg, Fulani, and Algerian elements, formed in 2017, that promptly pled allegiance to Al-Qaeda.  Their primary goal is to replace the Malian state with a more conservative Islamist regime.  In contrast the latter, also a combination of prior formations, is dedicated to the project of carving out an independent Tuareg state in the north of the country.  Allegedly the FLA now controls Kidal, and Mopti is claimed jointly by the FLA, and JNIM.  If true, both of these would be grave infringements on the territorial integrity of Mali.

Even if official collaboration between JNIM and the FLA is novel, it is not surprising.  In the north these groups have been recruiting from the same towns and villages for years.  They have also been informally in communication and coordination with each other for more than a decade if one takes into account antecedent formations.  Additionally, FLA and JNIM both consider the government in Bamako to be an enemy.  Most importantly, however, is that they share some particular interests and sponsorship.

Beyond shared animosity towards the established government of Mali, at a strategic level both the FLA and JNIM stand to benefit if ties between Bamako and Moscow can be weakened. Africa Corps, the successor to PMC Wagner in Mali, has been the most significant international military force supporting the FAMa, maintaining positions in the north of the country and fortifying the defense of the Transitional Government in and around the capital.  Challenging the Mali-Russia relationship then appears to have been a secondary operational goal of the attacks.  Curiously, it appears that instead of a frontal assault on Africa Corps, the rebel forces chose to play the long game through information warfare.  By arranging to broadcast the Russians’ ordered retreat from Kidal, JNIM and the FLA likely banked on three results.  First, they could portray themselves as being humane in the midst of a vicious attack, a legitimacy ploy.  Secondly, the image of the Russians retreating could put pressure on Moscow by attempting to erode Russian domestic support for the deployment.  Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the images of the retreating Russians were likely calculated to have a demoralizing effect on Malians, especially those of the region.  The ultimate success of this information operation remains to be seen, but it is noteworthy that the retreat has received heavy coverage in Western news outlets with France leading the charge.

Speaking of France, early reports have stated that several foreign soldiers were among the terrorists killed by the Malian armed forces on Saturday, including French fighters.  The government of Mali and other independent observers have long maintained that France has at least partially sponsored asymmetric rebel elements in the country.  Additionally, even if one questions French involvement, it is difficult to imagine planning and preparations for such a layered, sophisticated, strike could have completely escaped the notice of the former colonial power’s intelligence services.  Further, the timing of the attack is quite suspicious.

On March 27, a verdict was handed down in the Paramount and Embraer trial where several officials, including the Prime Minister of the (French supported) former government of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, were convicted of corruption offenses in relation to a public contract for the supply of armored vehicles awarded to the South African company Paramount LTD.  A life sentence was requested for former Prime Minister Boubou Cissé.

On April 7th, in Brussels, Belgium, a new alliance of Malian, Burkinabe and Nigerien opposition politicians was launched under the cheeky name, Alliance of Democrats of the Sahel.  Their acronym is ADS, a symmetrical sobriquet for AES, or the Alliance des États du Sahel (Alliance of Sahel States,) the confederation between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.  It beggars belief that this or similar formations (e.g., the National Endowment for Democracy, a known CIA front,) were not on the mind of Burkinabe President Ibrahim Traore when he made his now infamous comment on April 2nd, that “People need to forget about the issue of democracy.  We have to tell the truth: democracy isn’t for us.”

On April 14th, the Mauritanian President, Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ghazouani (a French and Saudi comprador,) turned up in France for an official state visit where enhanced security cooperation in the Sahel was discussed.  The subsequent week saw a spate of increasingly virulent propaganda against the Transitional Government specifically, and the AES more generally.

Finally, on April 23rd, less than 48 hours before the attacks, the National Transitional Council of Mali (CNT) ratified the additional protocols of the AES, previously adopted on December 25, 2025, relating to the coordination of diplomacy, defense and security, development projects, and confederal sessions of parliament.  In other words, the attacks came directly on the heels of the legislative deepening and strengthening of the AES.  For France, this fortification of the AES may have been the sine qua non trigger for an attempted coup d’état.  For the US, the weakening of the Malian/Russian security architecture is also a perennial goal, if for no other reason than to give the Russian Federation a political black eye.  Critically, the assassinated Minister of Defense, Sadio Camara, was the main liaison between Mali and Russia.

On April 28th, Malian President of the Transition, and current President of the Confederation of Sahel States, Assimi Goïta made his first public appearance and remarks subsequent to the attacks.  He underlined the international nature of the strikes stating, “These attacks are not isolated.  They are part of a vast plan of destabilization conceived and executed by terrorist armed groups and external and internal sponsors who provide them with funding and logistical resources.”  He reassured the people of Mali that “[t]he operations will continue until the complete neutralization of the groups involved, and the sustainable re-establishment of security on the entire national territory.”  President Goïta also reaffirmed the strategic relationship between Mali and Russia, with Russian Ambassador Igor Gromyko present to provide a visual image of solidarity.

In the last few days there have been several Malian military operations conducted as well as arrests of alleged internal conspirators to the events of April 25.  Additionally, there has been a flurry of media activity with wildly conflicting claims.  Major news outlets like Al Jazeera, MSN, Reuters etc., have heavily focused on the “fall” of Kidal or Tessalit, whereas videos circulating around social media platforms claim that either or both have been re-taken by the FAMa.  Also, allegedly a joint force for the AES/CES (Alliance of Sahel States or Confederation of Sahel States) has been bolstered to 15,000 troops commanded by Burkinabè Brigadier-General Daouda Traoré and is actively engaged in the fight in Mali.  Many accounts on either side are difficult to confirm in this political environment of endemic confirmation bias.  What is clear is that the full fallout from the attacks of April 25 will likely only be coherent in the moyenne durée, and for the moment we ought to heed the words of President Goïta: “In this time misinformation can become a weapon in the service of terrorists.  Mali needs lucidity, not panic.”  With as much lucidity as can be mustered, we will continue to share reports and analysis from these frontlines of our collective African liberation struggle.

by Utkarsh Mishra

Photo caption.  Javier Milei

There is a phrase that used to circulate in the early twentieth century — ‘rich as an Argentine.’ Not ironic, not nostalgic. Literal. At its peak, Argentina was among the ten wealthiest economies on earth, with a per capita income that rivalled France and Germany. That history matters now because Javier Milei, who took office in December 2023, wielding a literal chainsaw at campaign rallies, is running what he calls a revolution — and the world’s financial press is largely celebrating it.

The question worth asking is: a revolution for whom?

The Numbers the Government Likes

The headline figures are real, and it would be dishonest to dismiss them. Inflation fell from 211 per cent in 2023 to around 31–32 per cent annually by late 2025. Argentina achieved a fiscal surplus for the first time in 123 years. Poverty, which had spiked to 52.9 per cent in the first half of 2024 after Milei’s initial devaluation shock, had eased to roughly 31–33 per cent by late 2025 — a swing that Milei has claimed as vindication.

These are not fabrications. The problem is what they are not telling you.

The Numbers the Government Prefers You, Miss

Between November 2023 and November 2025, around 22,000 companies closed. The economy grew around 5.5 per cent in 2024, but as Economy Minister Luis Caputo himself acknowledged, that growth was concentrated in agriculture, finance, and mining sectors that generate the fewest jobs. Manufacturing and construction remain sluggish. Argentina’s formal private-sector employment is still down by roughly 100,000 jobs from when Milei took office.

More than 63,000 federal government jobs were eliminated in the first 14 months of Milei’s administration — almost 80 jobs a day, every day, for over a year. Among them: 2,208 jobs at Banco Nación, 1,872 at the national airline Aerolíneas Argentinas, 1,730 at the Buenos Aires water utility, and 640 at the national news agency Télam, which was effectively shut down. These are not abstract line items. They are services that millions of people depend on.

The informal sector now accounts for around 45 per cent of Argentina’s workforce, and among informal workers, incomes are insufficient to meet basic needs. Formal sector wages in the second half of 2025 rose only 28.8 per cent — below the 31.5 per cent inflation rate. Workers in formal employment, in other words, got poorer in real terms even during the period the government is pointing to as recovery.

And about that poverty number. Staff at INDEC, Argentina’s official statistics institute, reportedly issued a public statement urging caution, warning that the progress shown may have been ‘overestimated’ and that the figures should be read within a context of increasing labour precariousness, expanding multiple job-holding, rising household debt, and worsening unemployment.

The methodology itself produces the appearance of improvement when monthly inflation slows down — not necessarily because people’s lives have become easier, but because prices stop rising as rapidly as before while wages and income calculations begin catching up on paper. In other words, statistics can start looking better even when ordinary people continue struggling with high costs, falling purchasing power, and economic uncertainty.

Child poverty, by the numbers, still stands at 41.3 per cent. More than 4 in 10 Argentine children live in poverty.

This Has Happened Before

Argentina has been here before, and not that long ago. The IMF austerity programme of the late 1990s and early 2000s produced an economic collapse that is still one of the most referenced case studies in development economics. GDP contracted around 20 per cent. Unemployment crossed 20 per cent. The phrase ‘que se vayan todos’ — get rid of all of them — became the sound of a country that had been promised stability and received catastrophe.

The IMF is back now, with a $44-billion programme tied to the same conditionalities: fiscal surplus, currency controls, market liberalisation. The prescription has not changed much. The people being asked to absorb the adjustment have not changed either.

Why the World Is Watching

Argentina’s significance under Milei is not primarily economic — it is symbolic. It is a proof of concept for a certain kind of politics: that a government can pursue aggressive cuts to the state, eliminate public sector jobs by the tens of thousands, slash subsidies, and still win elections if it controls the inflation narrative well enough.

That is why Argentina matters far beyond Argentina itself. The country is increasingly being seen as a political template — for sections of the American right, for libertarian movements in Europe, and for those who want a real-world example of what happens when a government takes a chainsaw to the state and still survives the first year of economic shock and public anger.

The survival, though, is not evenly distributed. Argentina grew around 5.5 per cent in 2024 in sectors that generate almost no employment. Inflation fell, which matters enormously for people on fixed incomes. But around 22000 businesses closed, formal wages lost ground to inflation, 4 in 10 children remain poor, and staff at the national statistics office issued a statement asking people not to read the poverty data uncritically.

That is not a recovery. That is a country being told its pain is progress — and being asked to be grateful for it.