Is EPFO the reason your employer isn’t depositing your provident fund? https://the-ken.com/story/epf-defaults-are-off-the-charts-blame-the-epfo/ the EPFO steadily dismantled the systems meant to spot defaults. Internal systems that once flagged defaulters were scrapped, and local offices say even obvious signals like payments slowing then stopping were routinely ignored... The fix was supposed to be technology. Essentially, big data and smarter systems. Much of that tech either doesn’t exist or work, or sits behind opaque processes that field officers can’t actually use.
While some regional PF offices sporadically release names of defaulters, the EPFO does not publish a comprehensive list with the names and amounts in default. But the scale of the problem can be gauged from the “arrears management” section in its annual reports.
Between March 2019 and March 2023, the arrears by employers ballooned over 70% to over Rs 15,000 crore (over $1.6 billion). And in the next one year, it had increased another 70% to almost Rs 26,000 crore. Nearly Rs 10,000 crore of that is thanks to about 2,400 employers, each of whom had arrears of Rs 50 lakh or...
Naturally, there’s a vacuum. Nearly 70% of establishments registered with EPFO are now classified as non-contributory, up from roughly half five years ago. Some may fall outside the law. Many don’t. So, employees usually find out only when they try to withdraw their money, or when their families have to.
A fire at a Goa nightclub recently made all of this impossible to ignore. Twenty workers died, but EPFO officers later admitted they would struggle to secure provident fund, pension, and insurance benefits for the families because the employer had been defaulting for years without detection.
Anand’s story today traces how a drive to end the inspector raj hollowed out enforcement without a working replacement, and how amnesty schemes with token penalties reshaped incentives. It also sits alongside our earlier reporting on EPFO’s other failings, from masked inefficiencies dressed up as high returns to a long-simmering crisis of claim rejections.
The largest island in the world, Greenland (that is not green at all but rather covered by white ice), has in recent months and even several years become one of the hottest geopolitical spots and disputes in world politics and international relations. The island, which has been administratively part of the Kingdom of Denmark for two centuries, has seriously caught the eye of the USA, namely its Trump administration, which firmly claims that the island simply must be under direct control and administration of the USA for its national security, otherwise it will be “swallowed up” by Russia and China (whose [Russian] submarines already operate around the island). The latest statements by NATO leaders support the idea of “Russian occupation of Greenland” as the reason for the increased presence of (small and meager) NATO soldiers on the island, but in essence, this position advocates the transfer of the island under American administration.
Greenland politically belongs to Denmark, i.e., the European Union, and in a military-political sense to the NATO pact. Geographically, it belongs to the North American continent and is closest to Canada, not the USA, and far away from Denmark.
in this whole policy of transferring Greenland to the US, the biggest real winners will be China and Russia, and the only loser, along with Denmark, will be the European Union. The diplomatic moves of Beijing and Moscow on this issue clearly indicate that they are de facto staying on the sidelines, with the US award to Russia likely being a solution to the “Ukrainian Question” according to the Russian will, while the award to China remains a secret, as in many other similar cases so far.
19/01/2026
Abduction in Caracas https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/abduction-in-caracas?pc=1732 Tariq Ali.. To accuse a sitting president, whom you’ve just kidnapped while bombing his capital, of ‘conspiracy to possess’ automatic weapons is grotesque. Bondi is setting up a show trial, but it may not be as easy as she thinks. Without any doubt, some of the best US lawyers will defend Maduro and take up his case.
Rubio himself comes from a distinguished cocaine family, heavily implicated in the drug trade throughout South America. His relatives have been involved in smuggling cocaine into the United States for years. As Secretary of State, he has put drug dealers into every pro-US government on the continent. Unsurprisingly, some are saying that the assault could actually be a Rubio move to defend US-sponsored drug-runners against the more autonomous dealers who also exist in that part of the world.
Another irony is that Delta Force, the US state-terrorist special forces team that abducted the Venezuelan president, is itself widely regarded as operating a drug-trafficking network within the United States.
it’s a travesty to accuse the Chavistas of being anti-democratic from the start. During the Chávez period, the opposition newspapers and television stations blasted propaganda non-stop, attacking the regime – something you could never have seen in Britain or the United States. When people said to Chávez, ‘We should crack down’, he said, ‘No, we fight them politically’.