Indian in Holland

As reported earlier, the plan for cutting subsidies to childcare creches has now been passed by the cabinet. While prices will go up for all income groups, low income families will face an increase of just €5 a month. Households earning over €90,000 face a €65 monthly rise. There is some good news as well A new form of home-based crèche, with fewer rules and a fee of €4 per hour is also being set up. DutchNews.nl - Crèche costs go up to slash overspend Creche costs to rise for all parents

Bus drivers will strike outside the rush hour on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week in support of their pay claim. Talks on a new pay deal have been deadlocked since April. If no deal is reached this week, the unions plan to go on indefinite strike from June. DutchNews.nl - Bus drivers strike outside rush hour

For those who have recently moved here, or have not yet moved from pre-paid (pay-as-you-go) mobile phones to the post-paid (contract) phones, here is some relevant information. When I moved here, I was told that Lebara and Ortel (also Lyca) are the ones that offer the cheapest call rates to India. At least for the calls you make directly from mobiles, it is true. My friend here had Lebara but I found Ortel better. Each call had a start tariff of 7 cents and then there was a per minute charge. It was 12 cents to landlines, both local as well as in a few select countries (likes the US and UK) but the charges to mobiles were high. Charge to India is 21 cents. Even at that time, these charges seemed too high. And they were. I used to see ads of post-paid connections. They used to offer X minutes and/or Y SMSes per month. I was not sure if they were limited to calls to landlines or not (they include calls anywhere in Netherlands, though special numbers cost more). Also, I was not sure...