and industrialists, these included- liberalizing investment procedures, introducing new schemes for workers' associations in the industry, implementing a national permit scheme for road transport, tax breaks to the middle class by exempting anyone earning under Rs. 8,000 from income taxes, and an austerity program to reduce public spending. Trade Unions and Worker's Rights The emergency regime cracked down on trade unionism, banned strikes, imposed wage freezes, and phased out wage bonuses. The largest trade unions in the country at the time such as the Congress' INTUC, CPI's AITUC, and Socialist affiliated HMS were made to comply with the new regime, while the CPI(M)'s CITU continued its opposition for which it had 20 of its leaders arrested. State governments were asked to form bipartite councils composed of representatives of the workers and the management for firms having more than 500 employees, similar apex bipartite committees were formed by the Centre for major public sector industries, while a National Apex Board was set up for the private industries. These were meant to give a veneer of worker participation in decision making but were in reality stacked in favor of the management, and tasked with increasing "productivity" by cutting holidays (including Sundays), bonuses, agreeing to wage freeze, and allowing layoffs. Worker demonstrations during the emergency were subject to heavy state repression, such as when the AITUC organized a one-day strike to protest the slashing of bonuses in January 1976, to which the state responded by arresting 30,000-40,000 workers. In another such instance, the 8,000 workers of the Indian Telephone Industries (a Bangalore-based state-owned company) took part in a peaceful sit-in protest in response to the management reneging its promise of a 20% bonus to just 8%, they found themselves lathi-charged by the police who also arrested a few hundred of them. Coal miners were forced to work in abysmal conditions with irregular pay, collieries were made to run for all seven days a week, and complaints of workers and unions about the abysmal and dangerous working conditions were ignored and met with state repression. These terrible workplace conditions led to the deadliest mining disaster in Indian history on 27 December 1975, at Chasnala coal mine near Dhanbad which claimed the lives of 375 miners due to more than 100 million gallons of water flooding the mine. This was the 222nd such accident that year, the previous incidents having claimed 288 lives. Inflation and