From the editor

For the first time in India, the economic interests of employers and employees are at loggerheads on such a large scale. Though not deliberately, companies are securing their future by making the future of their employees insecure. The hunt is on to root out "excess" staff from the payrolls and emerge leaner and meaner to take on the challenges of the economic meltdown. Since not all those who are losing jobs are incompetent, identifying and accepting redundancies is getting extremely challenging-for employers as well as for employees. A sacking becomes more humiliating and confidence-sapping when it happens without any fault of the employee. To make matters worse, some of the businesses being shut and the employees being laid off are the ones that were the hottest and most sought after just a few months ago. The irony, the scale, the means and consequences of what is corporate India's biggest season of layoffs form our cover package for this issue.

Though the job cuts won't add up to more than a small fraction of India's total workforce, its debilitating impact will be felt on every income earner. The result? The spending cuts are much larger than income reductions-the classical prescription for recession. Though India isn't getting into an economic recession, it is probably well into an emotional recession. Hopefully, the tide will turn for the better in a few months, but there is one lesson from the current meltdown that will remain relevant forever-that spells of job insecurity will recur and that job security isn't the same as job continuity.

More than 10 years ago, the now-infamous Enron's Dabhol Power Plant was in controversy involving, among other things, its high cost of power. Now, we face the prospects of a controversy over unusually low cost of power-promised by a relative upstart in the sector, Reliance Power. The company recently won the bid to build a 4,000 MW plant in Jharkhand by committing to supply power at only Rs 1.77/ kWh. It has won three other mega power plants by committing similarly inexpensive power. Is it ushering in an era of ultra lowcost power? Or, are we headed into another round of controversies? We attempt some answers on page 94. And finally, amidst all the uproar over whether or not Valentine's Day should be a big deal in India, on page 126 we tell you why it is a multi-crore deal for hundreds of farmers-and that too in a state that is ground zero of the recent uproar, Karnataka.