Khabarnama

SAF football final fixed?

2011-12-11T21:26:00.000-08:00

It appeared from the match that to keep reputation of host India intact a better Afghan team was made to loose

Cost of corruption in telecom department

2009-03-12T01:50:00.000-07:00

Delays and dilutions cost Govt Rs 50,000 cr

TELECOM TALE.

Thomas K. Thomas

New Delhi, March 11 Delays and wrong decisions by the Department of Telecommunications have cost India almost Rs 50,000 crore of revenue.

The delay in going through with the auction for 3G and WiMax spectrum has cost the government close to Rs 30,000 crore. This is because the DoT took more than two years to firm up the policy. As a result, it did not have enough time to get the Cabinet approval.

In addition, according to the DoT itself, the Government would have earned another Rs 5,000 crore had the DoT implemented its proposals to raise spectrum charges. In November 2008, the DoT had decided to impose a one-time fee on all telecom companies that held radio frequencies beyond 6.2 Mhz. However, the decision was not implemented.

In the same month, the DoT declared that spectrum usage charges for all existing telecom companies would be increased by 2 per cent across the board. It had said that this would translate to an income of Rs 1,000 crore to the Centre. The new charge was to be effective from January 1, but it has not been implemented till now.

The decision to go ahead with the ‘first-come, first-served’ policy on spectrum allocation earned Rs 10,000 crore. An auction would have fetched at least twice as much.
Roll-out dilution

The DoT could have earned another Rs 500 crore if it had gone ahead with its decision to impose penalty on operators failing to meet the roll-out obligations. Instead of penalising the operators, the DoT diluted the roll-out norms.

Add to this, the revenue the Government would have got if it had started issuing licences to Mobile Virtual Network Operators and got the new mobile players to start paying revenue share by launching the service; the country’s economy would have been stronger.

Loo visits of our 'impartial' commissioner Mr Nawin Chawla

2009-02-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

Election Commissioner Navin Chawla's excuses and frequent visits to the washroom whenever crucial decisions were taken by the full bench of the Election Commission, is among the instances cited by the Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami [Images] in his letter to the President recommending the former's removal.

In the report to the President, the CEC notes that whenever the full bench meeting was seized of an issue, Chawla will make an excuse of going to the washroom. And soon thereafter, invariably, the CEC would get phone calls from top Congress functionaries even as the meeting was in progress. This amounted to interference in the functioning of the Election Commission, the CEC felt.

In his report, Gopalaswami also elaborated on the visit of the prime minister's Principal Secretary T K A Nair to Nirvachan Sadan, which houses the Election Commission of India in New Delhi [Images], to enquire about the 'notice' being sent to Congress president Sonia Gandhi [Images] on her receiving an award from Belgium.

Gopalaswami felt that inside deliberations and details of the meetings were invariably being conveyed to a political party.

The CEC has cited 12 instances to conclude that Chawla has not remained impartial in his role as Election Commissioner.

The CEC's letter to the President recommending Chawla's removal is just two pages long, and he has dealt with 12 specific cases of partisanship in another 24 pages and annexed more than 800 pages of the Election Commission minutes, internal correspondence, etc in support of the case he has built up against his colleague.

Sources said Gopalaswami also personally apprised the President, the Cabinet Secretary and the PM's principal secretary about Chawla's misconduct with the staff to assert that he is not fit to continue in the Election Commission.

The CEC has conveyed to top government functionaries the complaints of two deputy election commissioners in this regard. Rajashri Bhattacharya, a 1979 batch IAS officer of the Andhra cadre, had even complained to the Cabinet Secretary that Chawla had abused him and threatened to get him arrested. Bhattacharya has since moved to the Planning Commission. R Balasubramanian, an Orissa cadre IAS officer, is the other deputy election commissioner who complained to the CEC in writing against Chawla.

The CEC also received a complaint that Chawla went out of his way to help a pandal owner during the recent Delhi assembly elections by calling up electoral officers to hire material from him.

Though Gopalaswami has not identified the Congress leaders prompted by Chawla to call up and interfere in the Election Commission's functioning in his report to the President, he has named T K A Nair as having visited him.

Gopalaswami says Nair tried to scuttle the notice against the Congress president, pleading that the prime minister has already examined the matter and found that there was no case against Sonia Gandhi. After five months of deliberations, the Election Commission decided to serve notice on Sonia Gandhi. She replied but the Election Commission is not able to firm up its views since Chawla is dragging his feet in submitting his comments, the CEC's report says.

The CEC's report says irrespective of whether Chawla consents to a decision or finds himself singled out by a majority of Gopalaswami and S Y Quraishi, the other Election Commissioner, he appears to be in the habit of conveying all the minutes of their internal meetings to the Congress leadership.

The report mentions the CEC getting a phone call from a top Congress functionary when the Election Commission was debating the possible dates for the Gujarat assembly elections and holding them in three phases as the home ministry was reluctant to provide sufficient central forces to complete it in two phases.

Sources stated that the Congress functionary whom the CEC does not name is none else but Ahmed Patel, Sonia Gandhi's political secretary, who talked to him in Gujarati, but this could not be confirmed. Gopalaswami, who is a Gujarat cadre IAS officer and speaks Gujarati fluently, countered as to how he learnt about the details when the EC's deliberations were still in progress.

Sources said Ahmed Patel reportedly wriggled out, stating that he got it from a source and assured sufficient central forces to complete the elections in two phases. And in no time the home ministry informed the CEC that central forces can be provided to conduct the polls in two phases and so the elections were held in two phases.

In another instance, Chawla found himself in a minority on holding the Himachal Pradesh [Images] assembly elections ahead of the completion of the five-year term of the present House. Even before the minutes were drawn up, the CEC got a phone call from then chief minister Veerbhadra Singh to defer announcement of the elections. Another senior Congress functionary wanted to meet the EC's full bench to plead against the elections three months ahead of the House term.

Sources identified this functionary as R K Dhawan, a senior Congress Working Committee member, who is very close to the Gandhi family. Again, this could not be confirmed.

Other instances cited by the CEC for removing Chawla include those related to the Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh [Images] assembly elections, Bhagalpur by-election, and the controversial BJP CD case during the Uttar Pradesh elections.

Women cab drivers

2009-01-01T01:13:00.003-08:00

New Delhi: Capital’s first set of women taxi drivers get set to hit the road

About two months ago, a group of nine women began their training in driving. Ahead of the new year, as they inch closer to their dreams and get set to hit the roads, there is no looking back for these would-be women taxi drivers.

The women cab drivers are set to hit the streets in the next couple of months, if everything goes as per plans.

Shanno Begum is among the nine volunteers. A widow with two young daughters and a son, it was a challenge for her to make both ends meet for the family. “I worked for over 13 hours a day as an attendant for patients and earned around Rs 4,500,” she says. “At the end of the day, I barely had time for my children.”

“But once I start working as a taxi driver, I will have to put in only eight hours and will earn just as much.”

Saroj too, hopes to support her family through the troubled financial times, and believes steering a taxi will liberate her. “My parents consider me as the man of the family. I have a younger sister and I have to support her education as well,” Saroj says. With a glint of hope in her eyes, she adds, almost as an afterthought: “Maybe, once I start earning, I will also be able to complete my studies.”

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The stories of Ekta Yadav, Hamsheera, Chandni, Jyoti Solanki, Rita, Heena and Nirmala are no different: they all tell tales of grit, personal achievement, and transcending social barriers to step into a world till date dominated by men. “We will be role models for other women one day — maybe we will inspire them to join us in living their dreams,” Jyoti Solanki says. “Driving has till date been seen as a male domain but even women can be swift drivers and, in fact, be more sensitive on the roads.”

Sitting behind the wheel gives them a sense of power, though even during their training sessions they were brushed past by smirking bus drivers and taunting men on the roads. “We have heard so many times that women can’t drive,” Chandni says. “We have now stopped bothering about such barbs. We are confident of our driving skills and have done our homework on roads signs and routes.”

From self-defence and grooming to communication skills and spoken English, the women have been trained to be polished professionals.

The project is an initiative by Delhi-based NGO Azad Foundation, along with Maruti and Shell. The NGO’s executive director, Meenu Vadera, says: “A basic knowledge of self-defence is very important for all women working in Delhi. That apart, they have also been trained to behave with customers in a polite but professional manner and develop a good body language.”

Vadera says the women have undergone two months of training and are now left with another two months of apprenticeship.

The good thing, she says, is that they would start earning during the apprenticeship period itself. “But to begin work as commercial drivers they will have to work for a year as a private driver with corporate houses or households.”

On how she zeroed in on the nine women, Vadera says: “I got in touch with several NGOs and visited slums to recruit women who aspired to make a mark for themselves.

“Initially we received 60 applicants, of which some got shortlisted and others dropped out due to personal reasons. The nine that have been able to complete the training process are now getting their licences.

“They will be on the roads as commercial taxi drivers after completing the apprenticeship period,” she adds.

Mayawati aspires to become PM with army of goons

2008-12-24T00:26:00.000-08:00

उत्तर प्रदेश में मायावती सरकार के लिए उनकी पार्टी के ही एक विधायक ने परेशानी खड़ी कर दी है। औरैया से बहुजन समाज पार्टी के विधायक शेखर तिवारी पर पीडब्ल्यूडी विभाग में इंजीनियर मनोज गुप्ता की हत्या का आरोप है। खास बात यह है कि विधायक के गुंडों ने मायावती के जन्मदिन के लिए धन उगाही के प्रयास के तहत मनोज गुप्ता के घर पर उनके साथ अमानवीय तरीके से मारपीट की।
गंभीर रूप से घायल मनोज को पुलिस भी अस्पताल ले जाने के बजाय थाने ले गई और वहां से अस्पताल ले गई जहां उनकी मौत हो जाने के खबर है। इस पूरी प्रक्रिया में पुलिस की भूमिका भी संदिग्ध है। पुलिस पर विधायक के दबाव में काम करने का आरोप है। इतना ही नहीं खबर के फैलने के बाद से विधायक इलाके से फरार हो गए हैं और साथ ही पुलिस ने दो लोगों के खिलाफ रिपोर्ट दर्ज की है। स्थानीय लोगों में इस घटना को लेकर काफी रोष है।

scale tilts more

2008-12-23T12:15:00.000-08:00

BS/AP) U.S. oil services firm Halliburton Co. is shifting its corporate headquarters and chief executive from Houston to Dubai in a move that immediately sparked criticism from U.S. members of Congress.

Halliburton Chief Executive Dave Lesar, speaking at an energy conference in nearby Bahrain, said he will relocate to Dubai from Texas to oversee Halliburton's intensified focus on business in the Mideast and energy-hungry Asia, home to some of the world's most important oil and gas markets.

"Halliburton is opening its corporate headquarters in Dubai while maintaining a corporate office in Houston," spokeswoman Cathy Mann said. "The chairman, president and CEO will office from and be based in Dubai to run the company from the UAE."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., called the decision to move as "an example of corporate greed at its worst."

"This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years," Leahy said in a statement.

"At the same time they'll be avoiding U.S. taxes, I'm sure they won't stop insisting on taking their profits in cold hard U.S. cash," Leahy said.

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is already planning a hearing on Halliburton's move, Time Magazine reports online.

Lesar's announcement appears to signal one of the highest-profile moves by a U.S. corporate leader to Dubai.

"As the CEO, I'm responsible for the global business of Halliburton in both hemispheres, and I will continue to spend quite a bit of time in an airplane as I remain attentive to our customers, shareholders and employees around the world," Lesar said. "Yes, I will spend the majority of my time in Dubai."

Dubai is an Arab boomtown, where free-market capitalism has been paired with some of the world's most liberal tax, investment and residency laws.

"The Eastern Hemisphere is a market that is more heavily weighted toward oil exploration and production opportunities and growing our business here will bring more balance to Halliburton's overall portfolio," Lesar said.

In 2006, Halliburton — once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney — earned profits of $2.3 billion on revenues of $22.6 billion.

More than 38 percent of Halliburton's $13 billion oil field services revenue last year stemmed from sources in the Eastern Hemisphere, where the firm has 16,000 of its 45,000 employees.

Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995-2000, and the Bush administration has been accused of favoring the conglomerate with lucrative no-bid contracts in Iraq.

Federal investigators last month alleged Halliburton was responsible for $2.7 billion of the $10 billion in contractor waste and overcharging in Iraq.

Halliburton last month announced a 40-percent decline in fourth-quarter profit, despite heavy demand for its oil field equipment and personnel.

As you sow so you reap : communsits in bengal

2008-12-15T06:24:00.000-08:00

कोलकाता। सिर्फ उद्योग के लिए ही नहीं बल्कि उच्च मार्गो के निर्माण तथा अन्य ढांचागत सुविधाओं के विकास में भी भूमि की समस्या आड़े आ रही है। केंद्रीय सड़क व परिवहन राज्य मंत्री केएच मुनियाप्पा ने भूमि के अभाव में कई उच्च मागरें के निर्माण कार्य में विलंब होने पर क्षोभ व्यक्त किया है। उन्होंने कोलकाता में 69वें भारतीय रोड सम्मेलन में भाग लेने के बाद मुख्यमंत्री बुद्धदेव भंट्टाचार्य से बातचीत में सड़क परियोजना के लिए भूमि नहीं मिलने पर नाराजगी जाहिर की। हालांकि मुख्यमंत्री ने पल्ला झाड़ते हुए इसके लिए गैर जिम्मेदार विपक्ष को दोषी ठहराया। सम्मेलन के मौके पर केंद्रीय मंत्री के साथ मुख्यमंत्री की राज्य में कई सड़क परियोजनाओं को मूर्त रूप देने पर बातचीत हुई। श्री मुनियाप्पा ने मुख्यमंत्री को यथाशीघ्र भूमि का अधिग्रहण करने और इसकी बाधाओं को दूर करने की सलाह दी। उन्होंने कहा कि कई उच्च मागरें के निर्माण और विस्तार के लिए पर्याप्त भूमि की जरूरत है। केंद्र राज्य में लंबित सड़क परियोजनाओं को पूरा करने के लिए हर तरह से सहयोग को तैयार है। भूमि उपलब्ध रहने से नयी परियोजना की भी मंजूरी मिलेगी।

श्री मुनियाप्पा ने कहा कि नेशनल हाईवे डेवपलमेंट प्रोग्राम के तहत विभिन्न चरणों में काम शुरू हुआ है। देश भर में एक्सप्रेस वे के निर्माण पर 2 लाख 47 हजार 635 करोड़ रुपया खर्च करने की योजना है। सड़क परियोजना के निर्माण के लिए भूमि उपलब्ध कराना राज्य सरकार की जिम्मेदारी है। 2001 से ही पश्चिम बंगाल में कई सड़क परियोजनाओं के लिए भूमि अधिग्रहण की योजना अधर में लटकी है। सरकार जब तक भूमि उपलब्ध नहीं कराती है तब परियोजना को पूरा करना संभव नहीं है। मुख्यमंत्री ने केंद्रीय मंत्री के इस तर्क पर सहमति जताते हुए कहा कि पश्चिम बंगाल गैर जिम्मेदार विपक्ष से जूझ रहा है। विपक्ष विकास परियोजना से लेकर ढांचागत सुविधा और उद्योग तथा रास्ता-घाट के निर्माण का भी विरोध कर रहा है। सरकार उनके साथ बातचीत कर समस्या का समाधान करना चाहती है। वे नहीं मानते हैं तो राज्य का नुकसान होगा।

लोक निर्माण मंत्री क्षीति गोस्वामी का भी मानना है कि भूमि की समस्या के कारण रास्ता-घाट के निर्माण में बाधा आ रही है। उन्होंने कहा कि भूमि अधिग्रहण से संबंधित 250 मामले कोर्ट में लंबित है। इस कारण कई उच्च मार्ग का निर्माण कार्य अधर में लटका है।

ईमेल करें
मैसेंजर के द्वारा भेजें
प्रिंट संस्‍करण
लेख को दर्जा दें

Another singur in making?

2008-12-11T00:39:00.001-08:00

State Pulse: Maharashtra: Clearing forests for coal
Maharashtra coal mining EIA dumps people, forests - report by Aparna Pallavi

Coal mining is set to replace 3,350 hectares (ha), and perhaps more, of reserve forests in Chandrapur district, Maharashtra . This will affect people who are dependent on such forests for everyday needs like firewood. The Centre has given mining leases to three companies, of which Adani Enterprises has got 1,600 ha for its opencast mining project in western Lohara village.

Adani recently submitted an environmental impact assessment (EIA) report for its 140-million-tonne project and is obtaining other clearances. Two local non- profits working on environment and wildlife examined the EIA and alleged that it did not include the project's impact on the nearby Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve.

The company's plans, they said, had divided Lohara, the only village that would be rehabilitated, and 11 others that don't find a mention in the EIA. The non- profits-Green Planet Society and Eco Pro-listed several irregularities in the EIA and the public hearings on September 11 and November 4. On both occasions the hearings could not be completed because of altercations between project supporters and opponents.

Pointing out the flaws in the EIA, the president of Green Planet Society said Adani had underestimated the extent of deforestation. "Adani will require another 1,750 ha for related activities such as dumping, housing, roads, workshop and so on," said Suresh Chopane, the president of the non-profit. Adani has earmarked 600 ha for dumping, the company's general manager informed those present in one of the failed public hearings. "If this is true, why does the EIA mention that the project has no space for the related activities?"

Asked Chopane. Taking into account the requirements of all three pending projects, the total amount of deforestation would be "to the tune of 10,000 ha", he added.

The Adani project may also affect a 10-ha tank in Lohara, which sustains several natural water sources in neighbouring villages and within the Tadoba reserve. The tank is in the mining area of the project, said Durga Kamdi, also of Green Planet Society. She added that mining activities of Western Coalfields Limited had affected the groundwater table in villages close to mining sites. "The Adani project will intensify the water crisis."

The groundwater table would be impacted only in a 1,078-metre circumference around the mining area, clarified Sanjeev Doke, general manager of Adani's Lohara project. There would be no "competing user" there as the Lohara village would be moved, he added.

Water purification methods have not been addressed in depth either, said Kamdi. The EIA talked about sedimentation tanks as the only method to purify water. "What about acid mine drainage?" she asked. "If the acidic water from the mines is released into the nearby Zarpat and Wardha rivers, as the EIA proposed to do, it will damage the river ecology and impact farms that depend on the river for irrigation."

Doke explained that since acid mine drainage was not prevalent in the area it was not included in the EIA. Kamdi called it a "glib assumption" that acid mine drainage could be ruled out in the future. "With deforestation and continued mining activity, the parameters of the soil are bound to change," she said.

The wildlife survey given in the EIA left out 14 vital fauna categories. "The Tadoba reserve and its neighbouring forests are one of the best tiger habitats in the country. The fact that the survey did not cover mammals is not surprising. The mention of tigers would have made the project impossible because Tadoba was notified a critical tiger habitat in December 2007," said Bandu Dhotre of Eco Pro.

On the omission of a wildlife management plan, Doke said that the information provided was preliminary and it was being prepared again. The Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF) Wildlife, Maharashtra , should get the final report in a month's time, he said.

The EIA had presented false information that the core zone of Tadoba was about 25 km from the mine site, Dhotre said. Maps of the region show that the mining site includes forest compartments of Tadoba's buffer zone, which were declared ecosensitive by the forest department. The buffer zone of the project overlaps some 100 compartments (20,000 ha) of forestland in the buffer zone of Tadoba and touches its core zone, he said.

The mining area of the proposed project is 11 km from the boundary of Tadoba, confirmed Shesharao Patil, chief conservator of forests, Maharashtra . He added that mining would adversely impact it. Legally, land within a 10 km radius of the protected area should be regarded ecofragile, but "we are not in a position to push the issue aggressively because the buffer zone is not notified yet and is merely proposed". Patil has written to the PCCF and reiterated that the project and Tadoba cannot coexist.

Wildlife expert Poonam Dhanwate of wildlife group track in Nagpur , who was part of the survey team for the demarcation of Tadoba's buffer zone, also agreed that mining area of the project was a "fantastic wildlife base". People's response to the project is mixed. Residents of Lohara strongly support

the project but demand that they be paid Rs 20 lakh per acre (0.4 ha) as compensation, against Adani's offer of Rs 2 lakh. Residents of 11 other villages who depend on wage work in the stretch of forest are against it. The EIA makes no mention of these villages. But Doke later promised that Rs 40 lakh per year would be dedicated to "development activities in the village to bring down their dependence on forest".

"We do not want development sops," said Manoj Khante, sarpanch of Ghantachowki village. "The dust from the opencast mine will destroy agricultural land and some 10,000 residents from 11 villages will lose wage work. We do not want the mine here, that is all." But, for Lohara villagers, money is the only lure. "Environmentalists dominated the public hearings," said resident Vinod Domaji Uike. "We want a village hearing with no one but villagers, the collector and Adani representatives." Lohara has seen a lot of easy money as 90 per cent of the village's agricultural land is leased out to three resorts and rich land-owners, said Y Y Doodhpazare of Green Planet Society. "People believe they will get lots of money out of rehabilitation but Adani's promises do not hold water."

The village has been promised 1,600 jobs in the project, whereas the village's working population is around 650. The EIA does not specify the nature of this employment, or the eligibility. The rehabilitation site has not even been decided and there is no mention of compensation. "Oustees from many other projects in the district are awaiting promised rehabilitation," said. "Lohara will suffer the same fate. " But "we are not like the other oustees who lack negotiation skills. We will not leave till all our conditions are fulfilled," said Asif Malak, a Lohara resident.

The village has the backing of local politicians. MP Hansraj Ahir and MLA Sudhir Mungantiwar, who had earlier opposed the project, have now softened their stand and want underground mining to "minimize environmental damage". But they told Down To Earth that power was the state's priority and they would not oppose mining, whether opencast or underground. Maharashtra has 20 per cent forest cover and the only dense forests are left in the two tribal districts of Chandrapur and Gadchiroli. The question that environmentalists are asking is: can the state afford to 10,000 ha of it?

Piracy in Somalian waters

2008-11-30T10:31:00.000-08:00

Are Pirates the Problem, or the Solution?

Two of my favorite writers, Robert Farley and Thomas Barnett, have weighed in on Somali piracy, and while I agree with every point made by both, I disagree with both writers regarding how to manage the issue of Somali piracy. It isn't that I disagree with either of them that building international partnerships to fight piracy is the wrong way ahead, I would just point out that the current actions by the US Navy to in fact do nothing to curb piracy is well aligned with US Grand Strategy, even though working with international partners to curb piracy is also well aligned with US Grand Strategy. The point here is not trivial, the point is that Somali piracy is not counter to US interests in Somalia. Rare will you find a blog committed to Naval discussions make the argument that piracy is not counter to the interests of the United States, but when it comes to Somalia it is important to remember that for this country right now, there are other, more important strategic interests at work.

Dear reader, do not be misled by media reporting. Keep in mind that there are a lot of legitimate business interests not of the United States that are facing a difficult challenge with Somali piracy. However, there are no significant US business interests threatened by Somali piracy, Somali piracy does not represent even a minor economic threat to the United States. Even with the hijacking of a Saudi supertanker, and even if every supertanker from the Persian Gulf has to take the long route around the Cape of Good Hope, this amounts to less than 1 penny per gallon cost for the American citizen. Perspective is important.

The most serious cost estimates of Somalia piracy are suggesting it is having a $14 billion dollar impact, and that is probably a very optimistic guess because I honestly can't find more than $1 billion, and I study this stuff. For context, assuming $14 billion dollars, then that doesn't account for much in a $7.8 trillion dollar global industry. Even at the super estimate of $14 billion dollars, that means piracy is impacting the industry a whole 0.1%.

Economic considerations are secondary though, from the US perspective it is important to remember that JTF-HOA has a purpose, is very active, and has nothing to do with piracy. Somalia represents a major front in the Global War on Terror, and the US National Security Strategy for Somalia is essentially to wait for a government that can manage the nation to emerge. The United States destroyed the Islamic Courts because they represented a future likely Taliban. The United States, and specifically JTF-HOA is working towards building up every nation surrounding Somalia. The United States is essentially allowing Somalia to remain an ungoverned country because the status quo gives us more freedom of action in fighting al Qaeda and other extremist terrorism allies in Somalia. Piracy is a side effect, and not necessarily a terrible side effect, of that strategy.

There are very few people dieing from piracy. The areas that are being governed by the pirate companies are functioning and less violent than areas where piracy does not exist, indeed pirate cities are thriving. The pirates are not only commercial in nature, but they are enemies of the Islamic extremists that represent the enemy of the United States. It sounds crazy to say, but the pirates are essentially the secular, liberal capitalists of Somalia, and the United States would prefer to deal WITH not AGAINST those types of people. Know your history, the Europeans preferred dealing with the Brashaws of the Barbary states than the alternative, the Islamic militant armies. We are essentially allowing the pirates to build themselves as regional Brashaws of Somalia with the ransom money from piracy, while the Islamists who remain violent are struggling for funding.

The symptom of our problem is becoming the rest of the worlds problem, and they recognize that piracy is a symptom of our problem. Now they are realizing the terrible truth we already know: namely that 100 years of legal bullshit has left most of the world with anti-piracy laws that date to the 19th century, and all of the 20th century laws work against solving the problem. The 20th century major legal frameworks are built to fight 3rd generation war, and are ill suited for the 4th generation challenges we are facing, including piracy in Somalia.

We do not have the 21st century rule sets to solve these problems, both the Geneva Convention and the UNCLOS are counter towards solving the problem. Even the Europeans know it, it is why only the French have an evolved legal rule set to actually take pirates prisoners, indeed have you noticed nobody has taken prisoners, even the Indians who 'blew up' a mothership? The legal system is better suited to killing them all than capturing any of them. Clearly any such legal system is broken.

For example, have you ever read Geneva III, Article 22? Look it up. Several EU nations accused the US of violating the Geneva Conventions for putting Saddam Hussain on an aircraft carrier after he was captured. The US policy is so damn confusing because the Bush administration never bothered to address the legal rule sets for 21st century challenges. The rule sets, yes including the Geneva Convention, need to be updated to the 21st century, and the US strategy is to force the rest of the world to see it, deal with the same problems we have already run into this century, and help fix the rule sets. Somali piracy is a very inexpensive, non lethal means towards those ends. Once we achieve that, we can forge international partnerships and stomp out the problem quickly.

Its Grand Strategy, often not well understood but easy to follow if you simply apply the facts as they are. The US Navy is not fighting piracy, they are too busy engaged in the GWOT in Somalia to bother with some of the symptoms of the main problem. The US Navy simply has to keep terrible things from happening and continue to prosecute the GWOT, that is their strategic priority and it is in line with policy. Let the rest of the world deal with the symptoms of our problem, symptoms like piracy, because they can either gather an enormous number of warships and try to fight the symptoms, or they can help us solve the real problem. Long term, I think the United States believes the pirates are part of the solution, not the problem the media is making them out to be. Why? Because they are an alternative to the Islamic Courts, an alternative motivated by something the rest of the world can relate too. Economics

SEZ in Gujarat

2008-11-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

Unravelling the Gujarat SEZ model
Recently the Supreme Court ordered a stay on one of the largest special economic zones (SEZs) in the country. The stay order on the Mundra SEZ in Gujarat's Kutch district came in response to a public interest litigation, which raised several social and environmental issues. The stay was, however, promptly vacated and the case dismissed within a few days with the Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishna remarking: "We cannot look into environment issues of each state. You can approach the High Court".

In spite of this summary dismissal, the case is likely to turn people's attention towards Gujarat's SEZ experience, which many say has been devoid of conflict.

This rosy picture is based on the perception that Gujarat's SEZs have largely been developed on 'barren' and 'wasteland'. So there hasn't been much opposition from farmers. There are several fallacies in this understanding. First, not all wasteland in Gujarat-as in other parts of the country-is barren or waste. In Gujarat most of the land categorized as wasteland was, at one time, pastureland. An example is the Mundra SEZ: revenue wasteland handed over to developers was either grazing land or covered with mangroves, an important part of the marine ecosystem of the Gulf of Kutch. In the strictest sense of the term, local people were not displaced here. But their livelihoods were severely affected and they have found it difficult to determine their rights.

Second, not all the land being used for SEZs in Gujarat is wasteland. A large part of this land was under agriculture and acquired by the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) more than a decade ago using the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. Most such land was acquired near cities, ports or areas where infrastructure was available or could be easily built. But more than 50 per cent of the land acquired by GIDC was lying unused. Once the SEZ policy was announced, the government began handing the land over to private developers-or getting into partnerships with them to develop some of the acquired land. The farmers who lost their lands for little compensation find it difficult to fight for a better deal now. The Dahej SEZ is a case in point.

Third, Gujarat encouraged direct purchase of land by corporate houses long before the central government started talking about it. This has worked against small and landless farmers. Powerful interests, large farmers or political representatives, have often brokered such purchases at the cost of small and landless farmers.

As speculation in the land market increased farmers ended up selling their land. In Por near Vadodara and Hazira in Surat, the government forcibly acquired land when the developers failed to directly purchase the land from farmers.

Since the compensation was not attractive the large land owners decided to bargain better deals with private companies. They sold their own land but also struck deals for the land of others, receiving hefty commissions. The landless agricultural labourers remained without compensation.

Fourth, Gujarat like most of the country, is facing an agrarian crisis. In parts of coastal areas, land which has remained fallow due to poor productivity and salinity has been categorized as wasteland. Causes of low productivity vary but a common thread is the inability of the state government to address the problems. Such land is now being seen as potential SEZs.

The popular belief that in Gujarat SEZ projects have gone unopposed is not true. An SEZ proposed at Positra near Dwarka was thwarted after a struggle by the Waghri farming communities. There have been other anti-SEZ movements in the state. But they did not sustain due to the various factors.

Indian Post rocks

2008-10-19T07:02:00.000-07:00

Britons use reliable Indian post to send X-mas cards
Press Trust of India
Sunday, October 19, 2008, (London)
Christmas is a few weeks away but some Britons travelling to India have started carrying hundreds of cards that they will post in India to friends and family back home in London. The reason?

It is cheaper and more reliable to send cards from India rather than from within Britain, thanks to problems faced by Royal Mail that deals with the annual avalanche of Christmas cards and the high price of postage.

So don't be surprised if you see British citizens queuing up in post offices in India to post Christmas cards to friends and family in Britain.

They have discovered that the doughty Indian postal system - set up during the colonial era - is a more reliable and cheaper alternative.

Kathy Miller, who runs The Neem Tree Trust, a charity organisation focused on disadvantaged children in Tamil Nadu, had a pleasant experience with the Indian postal system when she visited India last year.

She took along her charity Christmas cards designed by the children her organisation supports. Her original idea was to write the Christmas cards there, bring them back to Britain and post them in December.

But while in India, she discovered that if the envelopes were left unsealed, the cost of sending a card from India to Britain was Rs 8.

If the same cards were posted in Britain, one can save 21 pounds for 150 cards.

Miller posted the cards in India, and they duly arrived at their addresses in Britain a week later. Her friends in London were delighted to receive cards from India, and some even suggested that next year she take their own lot of Christmas cards to India to post.

Miller said that her experience was not a criticism of Royal Mail, but she had heard of people going to India for dental treatment and medical treatment, but wondered if others had taken advantage of the "excellent and inexpensive Indian postal system".

Miller added, "I'm intending to visit India again this November and of course will be taking my Christmas cards with me."

There have been several instances when Britons travelling to India for other purposes at this time of the year used their trips to carry their Christmas cards along and post them in India instead of in Britain.

Every year, there is a welter of complaints about Royal Mail losing millions of Christmas cards and parcels. It may not be too long before entrepreneurs come up with the idea of "postal outsourcing" from India.

Every Christmas, Royal Mail delivers nearly two billion items within Britain. Last year were complaints following two million cards and presents being lost by Royal Mail workers.

A sensible analysis of Pak situation

2008-09-21T09:15:00.001-07:00

Time for a reality check

By Irfan Husain

ACCORDING to a press release, Gen Ashfaq Kayani has declared the army’s intention to fight any intrusion across our borders at “any cost”, and “against all odds”. This should reassure all Pakistanis who have been paying enormous amounts for the army to do just that.

But I would like to ask Gen Kayani why the army has not demonstrated the same degree of vigilance and sense of duty where the Taliban and Al Qaeda are concerned. After all, militants, extremists, terrorists, drug smugglers and gunrunners have been crossing the Durand Line that notionally divides Pakistan from Afghanistan for years without being challenged or hindered. Had the army been doing its job these last few years, Pakistan’s survival might not have been under threat as it is today.

However, when a squad of American Navy Seal commandos entered Pakistan to engage suspected militants recently, hawks in Pakistan went into paroxysms of patriotism. Don’t get me wrong: I am not arguing that the Americans are justified in attacking targets on Pakistani soil. But I am questioning the selective defence of our sovereignty. If we denounce the American cross-border attacks, should we not ask why the Taliban are allowed free access to our territory to target us and conduct raids into Afghanistan?

This month has also seen a number of missile attacks in the tribal areas that have killed a number of militants and innocent people. While we all deplore this indiscriminate use of force, should we not equally criticise those who sought shelter amongst innocent families? Knowing they are being hunted by the Americans, to use women and children as human shields is hardly a mark of courage.

The American raid has been followed by a lot of chest-thumping bravado in our media, but little cool analysis. The fact is that this recent escalation should not have come as a surprise: for the last couple of years, there has been a rising crescendo of charges in Washington that we weren’t ‘doing enough’ to combat a resurgent Taliban on our side of the border. The truth of this mantra was reflected in the rising tide of extremist terrorism within our borders.

As casualties among western forces in Afghanistan rise, there is increasing pressure on field commanders to find more effective ways to fight the Taliban. One obvious way is to deprive them of the sanctuary they have enjoyed in Pakistan’s tribal areas these last seven years. But our forces have been unable or unwilling to deny the insurgents easy access to their local allies. To expect Nato and the Americans to endlessly turn the other cheek is to misunderstand the nature of power.

From the American perspective, they have shelled out good money to secure our army’s cooperation in their fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Apart from a massive debt write-off as well as economic assistance, they are also paying around $80m a month to underwrite the cost of deploying our troops in Fata. Since 9/11, the US has paid us around $12bn, and they probably figure this entitles them to a degree of cooperation. With our economy in freefall, these are sums of money not to be sneered at.

However, the Pentagon needs to realise the very real problems our army faces in this war. Firstly, Pakhtun tribes on both sides of the ill-defined border have been going back and forth for centuries, and they regard this as a right. Secondly, the Taliban are indistinguishable from other tribesmen as just about every Pakhtun male is bearded, armed and wears shalwar-kameez. Thirdly, these people are very much part of the fabric of Pakistani society, and so it is difficult to motivate militias and regular army units to fight them. Finally, the army does not want to completely alienate the Taliban whom it regards as future assets once western forces leave Afghanistan.

Even when the army has tried to crack down in the tribal areas, its record has been less than brilliant. It has lost hundreds of troops, apart from the soldiers who embarrassingly laid down their arms. So if our army can’t take on an irregular force like the tribal militants, what makes our generals so confident they can fight the Americans?

The sad fact is that years of interfering in politics have taken their toll on a professional army. Where the high command should have been watching the geopolitical environment for the rising threat from our northwest, it was dabbling in domestic politics. And when our troops should have been training to fight an asymmetrical war in Fata, they were being drilled in fighting yesterday’s battles against our traditional foe, India.

The only people enjoying the rising tension between Pakistan and the US are Osama Bin Laden and his supporters and admirers. Should our army actually kill a number of American troops, the resulting escalation could easily spin out of control very quickly. The Americans currently have two aircraft carrier groups in the Gulf, with a third on its way. Their combined firepower could wipe out Pakistan many times over. So while it’s great fun to fulminate against the Americans before the cameras in TV studios, we do need to get real here.

However, the US needs Pakistan to be on its side if it is to have any chance of winning in Afghanistan. Apart from providing logistical support in the shape of fuel and munitions that are transported from Karachi to the Khyber Pass, Pakistan has cooperated in capturing or killing Al Qaeda operatives in significant numbers. We have also allowed US intelligence agencies to operate quite freely on our soil. Should there be any serious hostilities between the two countries, the democratic government would probably be toppled, thousands of young Pakistanis would join the battle, and many more would be further radicalised.

Clearly, then, both countries need each other, and neither can really afford to alienate the other. This mutual need raises the real possibility of working out an agreement that would satisfy Islamabad and Washington.

But the hawks on Pakistan’s TV talk shows who are stridently urging armed action to counter future intrusions should remember when, just days before the war began in 1971, thousands of Pakistanis drove their cars with ‘Crush India’ stickers. Once the bombs began to fall, their cars were seen hightailing it for distant parts. They also need to consider that whoever wins the American presidential election in November is likely to get much tougher with Pakistan than George Bush has been.

Metro : public or private ?

2008-09-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI: In an attack on the private sector’s direct involvement in building metro rail in India, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) managing director E Sreedharan has hinted at a big political scandal in the Hyderabad Metro, and expressed concern at the slow pace of progress in the Mumbai Metro.

Mr Sreedharan has been credited with building a large metro network in Delhi, which started making operating profit from day one. Besides, he also ensured that all projects, being built at a cost of Rs 29,500 cr, would be completed before the deadline.

While Mumbai Metro-I is a joint venture between Anil Ambani-led Reliance Infrastructure and state-owned Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA), the Rs 12,000-cr Hyderabad Metro project was recently bagged by a consortium led by Maytas Infra.

In a letter to the deputy chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, dated September 11, 2008, DMRC’s managing director cautioned that build-operate-transfer (BOT) mode of building metro rail could backfire.

“The Hyderabad Metro project is being cited as a successful example of BOT approach. Here, I would like to caution that the example of Hyderabad Metro is quite misleading as the negative viability gap funding has resulted solely on account of 296 acres of prime land being made available to the BOT operator for commercial exploitation. This is like selling family silver. Apart from the fact that this might lead to a big political scandal sometime later, it is apparent that the BOT operator has a hidden agenda which appears to be to extend the metro network to a large tract of his private land holdings so as to reap a windfall profit of four to five times the land price,” the letter said.

SundayET has a copy of the letter (No DMRC/89/08) which was also sent to three other officials, including two in the Planning Commission. When contacted, a DMRC spokesperson refused to comment on the issue.

In the letter, the DMRC chief also questioned the private sector’s efficiency in handling metro projects. “World-wide the experience has been that no metro project has succeeded so far on BOT basis. ...Our sole example of Mumbai Metro-I has not given us the required confidence in the BOT route. Even after agreeing to a VGF (viability gap funding) payment of Rs 650 crore plus 26% equity (total government outflow of Rs 780 crore for a project cost of Rs 1936 crore), the project is moving at an extremely slow pace.

Corruption unearthed due to mistake

2008-08-26T18:58:00.000-07:00

All major cases of corruption in India be it Bofors, Volcker, JMM Bribery case or Lakkubhai Pathak came to light because either it involved aforeign party or infighitng amone prepretors of crime.

here is another example : silly mistakes

Cash at judge’s door: Case being handed over to CBI, SC too orders in-house probe
Posted online: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 0151 hrs Print Email

RAGHAV OHRI & MANEESH CHHIBBER

CHANDIGARH, NEW DELHI, AUGUST 26: The case involving the “mistaken delivery” of Rs 15 lakh at the home of a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, in which another judge has gone on leave, will now be probed by the CBI. In parallel, a three-judge committee has been appointed by the Supreme Court to look into the matter.

The decision to transfer the case from the Chandigarh Police to the CBI was taken by Governor Gen (retd) S F Rodrigues in consultation with Chief Justice Tirath Singh Thakur. Former Haryana Additional Advocate General Sanjeev Bansal is one of the three accused in the case.

Sources said that Justice Thakur had, in a letter to Rodrigues on Monday, informed him that he met the Chief Justice of India in New Delhi to discuss the case.

Meanwhile, CJI K G Balakrishnan is learnt to have constituted a committee comprising Allahabad High Court Chief Justice Hemant Laxman Gokhale, J&K High Court Chief Justice K S Radhakrishnan and Delhi High Court Justice Madan B Lokur to look into the case.

The clerk of former Haryana Additional Advocate General Sanjeev Bansal had “mistakenly delivered” Rs 15 lakh at the Chandigarh residence of Justice Nirmaljit Kaur who called the police. The clerk was taken into custody and Bansal too was arrested later. Another judge of the same High Court, Justice Nirmal Yadav, went on leave after her name was said to have figured in the statements of the main accused. Justice Yadav told The Indian Express last week that she was a “victim of a vilification campaign.”

Staged Encounter

2008-08-26T18:54:00.000-07:00

...Meanwhile, neighbours rubbish police claim, say heard no gunshots

Mohit Sharma

New Delhi, August 26 A day after Bunty and fellow biker gang member Rajesh were shot in an encounter at Saurabh Vihar in Badarpur, neighbours of H-211/97 said on Tuesday they did not hear any gunshot late Sunday night. Police sources, though said, the two were staying at the house for a fortnight.

Some of the locals went to the extent of saying it was “impossible” that an encounter took place next door and they remained unaware. Many said they were awake, or had just gone to bed, when the police say the criminals were shot: between 4 am and 5 am Monday.

Shravan Kumar, whose house shares the boundary wall with H-211/97, is still not ready to “buy the argument” that so many shots were fired and he did not hear them — Police Commissioner Y S Dadwal had said on Monday evening that as many as 26 rounds were exchanged.

“I returned home from duty around 1 am,” Kumar, who works with a tent house, told Newsline. “I had dinner and went to bed not before 4 am. Around that time I also went outside to check whether the locks were in place — I did not see any policeman (police claim their team reached the place before 4 am).

“Even if I missed the sound of gunshots, as I was inside the house, my tenant Dharmu, who works with a call centre, also failed to hear it, though he was sleeping on the terrace. He had returned from work around 3.30 am.”

Kumar said the tightly enclosed neighbourhood ensured they hear the sound even when a car whizzes by; “how can we not hear so many shots of bullets even if we were in deep sleep?”

Sarla Seth, resident of H-211/98A, said, “We didn’t hear any sound that night, or early morning. We just saw this huge mass of police personnel and media around our house when we woke up on Monday.

“We were in fact shocked when told later that an encounter had taken place in the house next door, and so many bullets were fired. Our house is so close, and someone in our family would surely have heard if shootings and the encounter had really taken place.”

Seth’s son Vinod said, “No one was staying in the house (where police say they shot Bunty and Rajesh) since work done on it was stopped. The house was locked for the past three days.”

Suman, who stays nearby, also said she did not “hear anything” on Sunday night. “I got to know someone had been killed only around 7 on Monday morning,” she said. “I was clueless till I saw the huge gathering.”

A Delhi Police team today went to the spot for further investigations.

Arjun Singh : Now CBSE is target of HRD minister

2008-08-20T00:49:00.000-07:00

Refer to this news item. It amazes to find that in this country of 1 billion where education is still mostly government controlled they could not find people from governemnt with 15 year experience!!!
is stage being set to appoint some JNU type as CBSE chairman ??

Failing to select CBSE head, HRD Ministry to reconsider guidelines
Anubhuti Vishnoi
Posted online: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 at 0051 hrs Print Email

NEW DELHI, AUGUST 19: With its selection process for the CBSE chairperson coming to a naught due to the absence of a suitable candidate for the high-profile position, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry is considering a revision of the rules framed for the selection of the chairperson to ensure it gets quality candidates in the fray including those from the non-government sector. Last week, Ashok Ganguly finished his tenure as CBSE chairperson and Secretary Vineet Joshi has been appointed as acting director for three months.

The current rules stipulate that a candidate must have approximately15 years of administrative experience and must come from a government organisation among other eligibility criteria. With such clauses hemming in the selection process, the three-member committee constituted to zero in on a candidate this year could not find any suitable names for the top CBSE position and had to scrap the whole process.

This selection committee is said to have come up with six names but none were found suitable to head the CBSE. In fact, some committee members said the names that came up were not only “uninspiring” but “appalling”. The committee as well as the HRD Ministry have found that this problem is a direct outcome of restrictive selection rules.

“These rules for the selection process were framed nearly 20 years back and some are not very applicable now. Hence, the ministry feels that these rules need to be revised to reflect current realities and changes in the academic world as well,” said a senior HRD Ministry official, voicing the view that several able candidates could not satisfy the eligibility criteria because they did not have enough administrative experience and a government job.

Currently, however, the Ministry is not in a tearing hurry to fill the post.

“To do so would also take a couple of months and it is also not a very good idea to keep a vacuum at the head of an important and active organisation like the CBSE. So the acting director may be asked to continue beyond three months. By that time the Ministry will either re-appoint a selection committee or change the rules and then resume the selection process”, added the official.

Incidentally, Ashok Ganguly was appointed the chairperson of the CBSE for five years in May 2000 but when his term ended in May 2005, he was given an extension for another three years. He was given a second extension in May 2008 for another three months.

a new license raj

2008-08-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

Govindraj Ethiraj: The People`s Licence Raj
DOUBLE EDGE
Govindraj Ethiraj / New Delhi August 19, 2008, 0:07 IST

It’s not that Tata Steel has not had a busy year, having concluded a multi-billion dollar acquisition, consolidated at least two smaller ones and in the process of signing or firming up a few smaller mining acquisitions.

And yet disappointment was writ large on B Muthuraman, the company’s managing director when I met him last week. “Not enough has been done for the steel industry in India,” he said, arguing that India has a long way to go in steel consumption from its current low levels and that self-reliance was a critical step in that direction. That in turn necessitated steel capacity to come up much faster than what it was.

Actually, it’s not about capacity coming up faster, it’s just not coming up. Take the case of Tata Steel’s own plans for three new plants. They are Kalinganagar, Orissa, 6 million tonnes (mt); Jharkhand (Seraikela), 12 mt; and Chhattisgarh (Jagdalpur), 5 mt. The beauty is that all three plans have remained mostly that, plans. Now a look at how long they’ve been in the making. The Jharkhand project MoU was signed with the state government in September 2005, Chhattisgarh in June 2005 and Orissa in, guess what, November 2004.

Amazingly, it’s only the old steel plant and works at Jamshedpur that continues to offer a safe manufacturing haven, so to speak. Tata Steel is increasing capacity steadily and will touch 10 mt by 2010, up from 5 mt now. That’s mostly it then, there is no place to grow further here.

Muthuraman refers to the period between the time Tata group founder Jamsetji Tata began producing steel at Jamshedpur in 1912 and the 1990s, in which total capacity created was just 2 mt, give or take. Of course this included the era where an application for expansion in steel capacity by 1 million tonnes was and had to be cleared as part of the Fourth Plan document in 1963!

Last month Steel Minister Ram Vilas Paswan outlined the industry’s ambitious target of going to 124 mt by 2012 from around 60 mt now. In the same breath, he admitted that many states did not have Rehabilitation & Resettlement (R&R) policies and that land acquisition and forest clearances were the biggest hurdles.

Actually, it’s the same story all over, whether steel or power. Almost every major industrial project in the country finds it easy to procure licences and permissions from the Centre and state governments. You can predict, more or less, how long it will take to get a Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) application through, where necessary, and then other permissions. And even, by hook or by crook, the dreaded environmental clearances.

But in the licence raj era, if that was the end of the problems, today it’s only the beginning. The most challenging task is to procure and secure what I would term the people’s licence. From land-owners, villagers, land sharks, interested parties, disinterested parties, the whole bunch. And while in the licence raj, you had to “manage” a few politicians and/or bureaucrats, now it’s a whole melting pot of amazingly diverse groups with multiple agendas, some pretty legit, some not. Tough luck.

Something has changed on the ground. The Tata Group is amongst those industrial houses which have taken great pains to engage the local environment without any real provocation. And by that I mean, the whole gamut of what is now called corporate social responsibility, imparting education, generating jobs, building a workforce, opportunities and so on.

Tata Steel has put money and, more importantly, effort into working with, for instance, the disadvantaged Santhal tribals of Jharkhand — from adult education, nourishing the local languages to creating commercial channels for local artisans. And I have seen enough on ground to conclude that it’s not a lip service effort, either. Many large business houses have similar initiatives.

But that has still not helped Tata Steel, Reliance Power, Tata Power, Posco or Tata Motors get a clean people’s licence in all their upcoming projects. Tata Motors has an exemplary vocational training and employment programme running in Pune for youngsters from the region. An attempt to replicate it at Singur in West Bengal around its Nano car project does not seem to have yielded similar goodwill with the locals. Maybe it will, over time, as the local workforce grows, but the face-offs between the people on one side and the company and state government, on the other, have not exactly generated fond memories.

What hope do the rest have? I don’t know but there is something in this pre-90s approach to industrial investment and growth that is not working. Either there are locals who don’t believe in your (guess even mine) idea of development or there are other forces, like an increasing concern for environment. The people of Kalinganagar and Singur clearly place their own economic, social and maybe environmental interests ahead of a power or car plant.

Working with the state government was thought to be a way out, particularly in the cumbersome process of land acquisition. But the people seem to treat the government on a par with any private land acquirer. The state governments need to work harder, of that there is no doubt. But businesses have to tweak their approach as well and not take the populace for granted. For the people’s licence raj is as potent a hurdle to industrial development as the industrial licence raj. Or maybe worse.

an alternate startegy to address vidarbha crisis

2008-08-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

at least this is better than giving farmers cows which require more fodder than milk they give.

Emu farming picking up in Vidarbha

Nagpur (PTI): Emu farming has gained momentum in Vidharbha and may help farmers in the region as an additional source of monetary support.

"Emu belonged to Kiwi family of New Zealand. Australia is number one in this type of farming followed by American and European countries. In south-east Asian countries, China, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are also into Emu farming," according to an expert Dr Shirish Gode.

Emu happens to be the second largest bird in the world and is an Australian version of Ostrich. It belongs to the ratite group and have high economic value for their meat, eggs, oil, skin and feathers.

Emu farming began in a small Emu farm in Kharanga (Gode) village in neighbouring Wardha district and it has spread its wings across Vidarbha.

It was launched in India around eight to ten years ago and Andhra Pradesh wrested initiative in the project.

The big-sized bird weighing about 40 kg and with a height of five to six feet require separate enclosure.

There are around 120 pairs of birds now in eight farms at Vidarbha. Gode himself owns 80 pairs.

Gode said in the year 2005, he had 40 pairs of birds and egg production started within a year.

Emu's meat is sold at Rs 300 per kg and eggs are sold at Rs 600 per piece. Similarly, oil is extracted from its skin which is used as pain reliever.

Emu gives about 30 eggs in a year weighing about 600 grams each, Gode said. The meat of this bird is fat and cholestrol free, he said.

president belongs to whole nation ?

2008-08-14T11:16:00.000-07:00

Lalu promises President more trains from Amravati
19 Feb, 2008, 2024 hrs IST, PTI
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AMRAVATI: Railway Minister Lalu Prasad has promised to address the demand for a direct Amravati-Mumbai train in the Railway budget this year.

Prasad gave this assurance to the President Pratibha Patil who took up the issue with him recently, district guardian minister, Dr Sunil Deshmukh said.

Deshmukh said the local residents had submitted a memorandum to the President during her tour on September 13, 2007 demanding trains for Pune, Nagpur and new railway route to Washim and completion of Amravati-Narkhed line.

President's office also asked the Railway Board to take necessary action on the demands, he said, a meeting was convened on January 29 to discuss these demands.

During her visit to Bihar the President discussed the issue with Prasad who promised action on all the demands and funds in the coming budget.

currency scam !!

2008-08-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

Terror's Tool
When a thief enters a house, the watchdog barks. If the inmates do not wake up, it barks again, and then again. If the inmates still do not awaken, should the watchdog stop barking? This scribe is facing a similar dilemma... ...
Rajinder Puri
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WHEN a thief enters a house, the watchdog barks. If the inmates do not wake up, it barks again, and then again. If the inmates still do not awaken, should the watchdog stop barking? This scribe is facing a similar dilemma. According to official sources, the threat of terror has reached new heights. The amount of fake Indian currency in existence today is huge. According to one national daily, in UP alone over Rs 40 crore is estimated to be in circulation. The CBI has confirmed that two sets of currency notes with the same serial numbers have been seized in branches of nationalized banks. It has claimed that the fake notes were brought into India through Nepal by Pakistan's ISI. The CBI has also confirmed that the fake currency notes are of such fine quality that they are indistinguishable from genuine notes. That is why branches of the State Bank of India can pass off fake notes as genuine currency. But, all said, can this happen if some bank officials are not complicit with anti-national elements? Elements that use the fake currency for crime and terrorism?

Every single element of this information has been written about explicitly and repeatedly by this scribe: he wrote these facts in March 2000, in June 2000, in March 2002, in July 2004 and in August 2006. All this time, the fake currency racket was expanding, but had not reached its present dimension. It was pointed out that fake currency greatly facilitated terrorism -- that it was masterminded by foreign powers. Indeed, it was pointed out that the sheer volume of fake currency, indistinguishable from genuine notes, could destroy India's economy without terrorism! It was pointed out, too, that the Reserve Bank's admission that it could not authenticate currency notes in a particular fake currency police case meant that, for all practical purposes, there was no legal tender in the country. Finally, it was pointed out that using the same machines to print currency notes and stamp paper was a procedure followed for both fake currency notes and fake stamp papers. The money thus generated in both scams was of course exploited by terrorists.

This scribe's involvement in the subject originated in 1995. A section of the bureaucracy made available to him information regarding the government's decision to purchase inferior and unreliable printing machines for manufacture of currency notes, thereby replacing machines of a tried and tested firm which had served the country well for over a hundred years. He filed public interest litigation against the RBI in the High Court of Judicature in Mumbai to prevent use of the new machines for printing currency notes. His plea was that the proven record of the new machines, Komori of Japan, endangered national security because fake notes not distinguishable from genuine notes could be easily manufactured for deployment by terrorists. To cut a long story short, the RBI accepted every single argument of the petitioner. It conceded that Komori machines presented "a risk factor" and "teething troubles". It admitted that the earlier machines, Giori of Switzerland, which printed currency for ninety per cent of the nations in the world, were markedly superior. It confirmed that the use of Komori machines in Russia had ended in disaster. The machines had to be abandoned for printing currency. Despite these admissions, all on record, the court rejected the petition. RBI's main argument was that the monopoly of Giori needed to be ended! Without a thought for national security, and the facts marshaled by the petitioner's counsel, the court rejected the petition.

An eminent lawyer argued for RBI. This scribe was acquainted with him. The lawyer impertinently suggested that this scribe's petition was in some way linked to those who were contesting the award to Komori on behalf of its Swiss rival, Giori.

When the national security angle was drummed into his ears he said: "Why did you not approach me earlier?" Had that been done would he have changed his view of the case? Was that all that the case meant to him – a clash of sordid commercial interests? My respect for him fell many notches. The judiciary and the legal fraternity failed miserably in this case.

The politicians fared no better. Even before the public interest litigation was filed, Parliament had discussed the government's proposal to buy these new untried machines for printing currency. Among the several MPs who criticized the government's move was Somnath Chatterjee. But once Komori got the award the MPs lost interest. It seemed that they were interested mainly in the commercial aspects of the case. A Kolkata based industrialist was rooting for Giori to get the award. Dr Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister when Komori got the contract to print currency notes. He maintained silence throughout the controversy. When a few years later it transpired that fake notes with the same serial numbers as genuine notes could not be differentiated even by the RBI, rendering the notion of legal tender defunct, Yashwant Sinha was the Finance Minister. He too remained silent on this affair. So, regardless of party affiliation, the politicians as a class failed miserably in this case.

During the decade or so when this scribe fought the case in court and wrote about the danger of fake currency in the media, not one newspaper highlighted the scandalous manner of awarding the contract to Komori for printing currency notes, and how this endangered national security. This scribe personally phoned and requested colleagues better placed than him, and occupying key positions in the media, to take up the matter. Not one obliged. So, the media also failed miserably in this case.

The National Security Adviser has revealed that there are over 800 terrorist cells operating in the country. With this kind of easy money floating around, should that cause any surprise? And with the easy attitude evident in the establishment to matters related to national security, as revealed by the fake currency scam, was not escalation of terrorism inevitable? The government took security steps to prevent exact replication of currency notes. These steps became effective after 2005. The fake currency notes therefore are dated before 2005.

Politicians, experts, retired bureaucrats and media pundits favour the enactment of tougher new laws to fight terrorism. They sound pathetic. Considering the approach to fighting terror revealed by the fake currency racket, do they seriously believe that new laws would help solve the problem of terrorism?

Lack of Management acumen in Bureaucrates or willful negligence

2008-08-14T03:34:00.000-07:00

State Pulse: North-east: Cement out of the bag
Urgent need to re-examine quality assurance of dams in the northeast- Himanshu Upadhyaya

On May 10, the Sangai Express, a local daily from Imphal, reported that parts of the Thoubal multipurpose project had developed cracks. Taking note of the apparent lack of quality construction, Thounaojam Shyamkumar, deputy speaker in the state assembly, said that the dam posed a threat and authorities concerned should explain the cracks.

A team of the state's irrigation and flood control department was quick to respond.

There is no threat, the team of engineers said. The "surface cracks" developed when digging the foundation of retaining walls for the spillway and could be repaired using cement. Activists of course do not buy the explanation.

Demanding a complete review of the project, Jitehn Yumnam, secretary of Citizens Concerned for Dams and Development, a coalition of civil society organizations in the northeast, said cracks had appeared even where slope- protection was done, with grasses growing all over the surface. It reveals how seriously soil tests were carried out, or for that matter, the construction work, Yumnam contended.

More recently, a report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) opens up a convoluted tale of how much attention is given to quality while constructing dams. The report states that the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation (NEEPCO) had suffered losses of over Rs 80 lakh because it had failed to transport 80,000 cement bags to its stated destination, the Tuirial hydropower dam in March-May 2004 because of heavy rainfall, elections and strikes. NEEPCO stored about 30,000 bags in Silchar and the rest in Guwahati.

When the quality of the cement started deteriorating, NEEPCO tried to dispose of the unutilised cement by inviting quotations from interested parties in July 2004. But no major construction agency came forward to take the cement. The corporation even failed to sell it to the local retail outlets by December. NEEPCO then constituted a committee to examine the issue of deterioration in February 2005, which submitted its report in March terming the stock obsolete.

The corporation once again invited quotations for disposal of the obsolete cement in April. Although the highest price quoted for the Guwahati stock was Rs 55 per bag, the bidder withdrew his offer in June 2005 and NEEPCO had to sell about 40,000 bags to another party, after diverting 10,000 bags to another project (Kameng hydroelectric project). The stock in Silchar was sold at Rs 20.50 per bag, after diverting 954 bags to the Tuirial hydroelectric project. The audit reveals, with horrifying precision, how NEEPCO diverted substantial part of the cement stock, about one-third (10,594 bags) of what it had utilized (38,123 bags) on Tuirial during construction season in 2004 to dam sites where construction was in progress, despite knowing that it was obsolete. The auditors should have checked what "quality assurance" NEEPCO provided by diverting the bags to other dam sites.

The CAG report on Manipur has also unearthed how the contractor of the Thoubal multipurpose project, Ansal Properties and Infrastructure, was extended undue favour by the irrigation and flood control department. The department failed to recover Rs 1.80 crore paid for cost escalation from contractors. The department, while admitting the case in September 2007, had assured that the excess amount would be recovered from the contractor in 2007-08.

In another development, the department has come under fresh round of criticism after a breach in the eastern canal of Khuga dam during its trial run on July 8, 2008.

In light of these scathing details, the department needs to answer several questions and not brush aside the appearance of cracks casually. Also, it's about time that construction quality assurance and dam safety are given sincere attention and the state's irrigation and flood control department extends due rehabilitation entitlements to those affected, rather than extending undue favours to contractors.

Let us celebrate Bindra but do not forget jadhav

2008-08-12T23:50:00.000-07:00

His life was tinged with red. But for Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav, independent India’s first individual Olympic medallist, the red mud in which he wrapped himself as he fell in love with the sport of wrestling, stayed truer and lingered longer than the darkened red of the bronze he won.

Post his triumph at Helsinki in 1952, the country allowed this man to rust, corroding his spirit if not his dignity. But as the years went by and the one individual medal shimmered brighter with each passing failure at the quadrennial event until Leander Paes cornered a bronze 44 years later in 1996, the legend reddened with time like good wine.

The wrestler from Karad in south-west Maharashtra won the nascent Indian nation its first individual honour at the biggest sporting stage but never once demanded his share of the prestige-pie. The country, shamelessly, mistook his modesty for muted silence and, as the years passed, forgot about him altogether.

Jadhav never really did speak much. “One for every 10-15 words spoken to him,” says his son Ranjit, sitting at his house Olympica Nivas at Karve Naka in Goleshwar village, Karad. Built from his life’s savings of 75,000 — his last pay-packet was Rs 1,784 and 20 paise after 27 years of service in the police — the wrestler never did get to reside in this house made after a lot of pocket-pinching and heartache. He was killed at age 59 in 1984 when riding pillion on a moped which collided with a truck. The house was then roofless, with just the bare walls.

It is unthinkable that Jadhav would’ve boasted about 1952 sitting in that house. Bragging was one of the many vices which Jadhav, a born pahelwan, avoided earnestly all his life. Mild-mannered to a fault, the only time he spoke up was when, at the Olympic trials in Chennai ahead of Helsinki, brazen officials ruled against him and pushed for their own show-pony in the 125-pound bantamweight category. Writing to the Maharaja of Patiala, he earned a re-trial at Kolkata — and the ticket to Finland.

Snubs weren’t uncommon in his life. But a chance at Helsinki to prove his worth mattered to him more than anything else he ever did.

SMALL IS BIG
Small-statured at 5’5”, Jadhav never inspired awe — and he accepted that. But stripped to his traditional langot — the wrestler-wear — the strength built from his daily 11-mile run and 2000 sit-ups could surprise any challenger who had earlier scoffed at the little man. And there were many who scoffed.

At Nasik, a year before he got noticed and was pitchforked into the wrestling squad that went to the London Games in 1948, Jadhav was pitted into a bout for an insulting sum of Re 1, when stakes ritually started at Rs 51. Jadhav didn’t complain. When an opponent was found, he was pinned to the ground within seconds. The stakes rose to Rs 51 and then Rs 151 at the insistence of patron Manikrao of Baroda, but the time taken to end the bout was the same 5-10 seconds. “They said that he could effect the Multani hold — a move difficult to execute but spectacular when applied — in the small time it took a tobacco-chewing villager to tire of it and spit it out,” says Ranjit.

His trademark Multani was later used to ground many rivals — Australian B Hamms was stretchered out at the London Olympics — but not before he was roughed up at the Lucknow nationals by wrestlers who refused to believe he was a serious competitor.

MAD SCRAMBLE
According to author Sanjay Dudhane, who has penned the biography, Olympicveer KD Jadhav, that small frame would have even cost him his trip to Helsinki, since the then Chief Minister of the state and his officials sized him up and decided for themselves that this wrestler wasn’t big enough to head to the Olympics. They refused to help with government funding — a sum of Rs 3000 of the 12,000 required.

The amount was assembled after Jadhav gave up on the amount he intended to use to build a home for his family of eight children, and the principal of the Shahaji Law College Dabholkar — also the wrestler’s fan — mortgaged his house. The Tilak school headmaster Walavade donated three months of his salary, and his early mentor Belapure Guruji went around Satara collecting Olympic donation receipts from door to door. Finally, the Maratha Sahakari Bank loaned out Rs 3,000 and the deficit was bridged just in time for Jadhav to fly to Helsinki.

“The struggle was phenomenal, though Saaheb never lost hope, nor his focus,” Ranjit says.

Jadhav’s 6th-place finish at London — owing to his poor understanding of instructions in English — pricked him long and hard. The four intervening years were spent building on his strength since a rolling fall at London had betrayed a weakness, and brushing up on spoken English so that he wasn’t left clueless the next time.

CAUGHT UNAWARES
The medal, when it arrived, came in bewildering circumstances. Having qualified for the final phase of competition, after three wins and a bye in the early rounds, Khashaba was wrongly informed by an Indian official that it was a ‘rest day’, when in fact, it was the day of the competition. Bored of sitting at his room in the Olympics Village, the wrestler happened to trudge out to the venue to watch other fights, when his name was announced over the amplified system.
Keeping his cool when a lesser athlete would have raged at the official’s blatant stupidity, Jadhav readied for the bout. Though he lost on a point to Japanese Shohachi Ishi — and was forced to enter the ring against Russian Rashid Mamedbekov within 15 minutes of the first bout as the rules were flouted further — the bronze was won.
As Jadhav stepped onto the podium, hurriedly pulling on his India track-suit, he had fulfilled a dream that was stoked on August 15, 1947 when he saluted the tricolour at his Rajaram College in Kolhapur. “I was witness to a big moment in the nation’s history,” Jadhav said many years later, in his own modest manner.

JOB-HUNTING
The many times he didn’t speak at all were to leave him a harrowed man in subsequent years. Struggling to find employment worthy of his BA-LLB education, Jadhav didn’t have a job for four years after his medal. In stark departure of another cliche tagged to a village wrestler, Jadhav had diligently pursued bookish education in Karad and Kolhapur. He had never ignored it using the excuse of time spent on honing his wrestling, and also had an inclination for the fine arts, being a fine sketcher and writer.

Unlike the taalim-pahelwans of those years, Jadhav neither stayed at the wrestler’s abode gulping down thandaai (almond-rich milk) or gobbling a mutton-butter-date-rich diet, but had gained his early nourishment from a millet-feast, and milk and bananas at the college boarding.

When he did land a job, it was owing to the then Mumbai IG seeking him out on a holiday in Kolhapur and offering him the post of a police sub-inspector. Still, it took Jadhav 12 years to scale up a rank, when others far less qualified were promoted ahead of him.

“I took part in the World Olympic Games held at London in 1948 and stood sixth. (This was the first time that an Indian could secure any place in the Olympic Games in an individual event.) I represented India in the 15th World Olympic Games held at Helsinki (Finland) in 1952 and won the bronze medal. (None from India had secured such honour for his mother land before me and till today it is a record),” was how this Olympic medallist was forced to prove his worthiness, in a letter written to his seniors in 1969, wondering about his role in the police. The position of sports officer was denied to him anyway, and it was only with six months left in service that Jadhav got promoted to ACP. Jadhav spent his last days fighting for a pension, which was denied to him, ironically because they said he was a sports officer, not a policeman.

IGNORED, FORGOTTEN
For someone who remained the lone individual medallist at the Olympics, Jadhav intriguingly never figured on the honour-call of the Arjuna Award, finally given posthumously 40 years after their introduction in 2001. Recognition at home in Maharashtra and the Shiv Chhatrapati award eluded as well till 1994, 10 years after his demise. Little wonder then that Ranjit Jadhav recalls his father being the happiest at receiving Ichalkaranji’s prestigious FIE Foundation award in 1983. That the list included RK Laxman and Vasant Gowariker would’ve made him happier still, as the Indian government didn’t even bother to honour him with a civilian award, if they did indeed think that Arjuna was too small for the medallist.

“His achievement was huge, but the appreciation wasn’t even token,” Ranjit says. “He didn’t go asking for favours from anyone. And after his death, when we appealed to the CM, the response was negative. I think he’d reached the ‘don’t care’ stage and started believing himself to be a common citizen. He’d say, ‘What I had to do I’ve done, I’m not going and begging from anyone’.”

What redeemed this apathy somewhat, was how huge crowds could respond to him. At a function at Yavatmal, where Ajit Wadekar was expected to be chief guest after the cricket team’s twin-triumphs in 1971, the organisers were left sweating after the cricketer was caught in a bandh, and a crowd of 25,000 turned restless. “They hurriedly asked Saaheb. He said, ‘Ok I won’t decline any sporting challenge. If the crowd doesn’t like me, you and me will both face their wrath. Go ahead and announce my name.’” The applause was thunderous.

But what really helped keep the bitterness at bay was that the rewards never excited him as much as the sport. He once wrote, “I’ll quote Johnny ‘Tarzan’ Wesmuller. If I was born again, I’d want to dedicate my life to wrestling. Because this sport gave me the best and happiest moments of my life.”

KD Jadhav never left his love for the red mud. The nation, though, ought to be red-faced at how it ignored its biggest Olympic hero.

One more story on same wrestler

http://www.rediff.com/sports/2000/sep/13jhadha.htm

System does leave some trail : Corruption charges against Lalu

2008-08-12T22:44:00.000-07:00

Lalu, kin got land in exchange for Rly jobs, as gifts: JD(U) to PM
Posted online: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 0157 hrs Print Email

SANTOSH SINGH

PATNA, AUGUST 12: Waving documents to allege that RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, ever since he became Railways Minister in 2004, and his family have acquired property worth Rs 100 crore in Patna and other towns, the JD(U) today asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to remove Lalu Prasad from the Cabinet and order a probe.

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Bihar JD(U) president Rajiv Ranjan Singh, displaying “documents” and photocopies of 20 “sales and will deeds” before the media, alleged that Lalu Prasad, his wife, sons and daughters had acquired plots — with construction in some cases — via three methods: by giving land owners jobs in Railways, awarding them Railway contracts in return or by accepting plots as gifts through “danpatra” by RJD leaders.

While Lalu Prasad was not available for comment, RJD spokesperson Shyam Rajak called the deeds “a publicity stunt by the Opposition before the polls”. “We will study the papers circulated by them to the media and come out with our version,” he said.

Most registries made between 2004 and early 2008 do not show the mode of payment — though sale deeds generally do. “We are giving the Centre 15 days to start an inquiry,” said Rajiv Ranjan Singh.

Documents released by the JD(U) show that among the land “donors” is Union Minister of State Kanti Singh. She “gave” her three-storey house built on a 4,083 sq ft plot at Chitkohra, Gardanibagh, Patna, through a deed of gift on January 6, 2005, to Lalu’s sons Tej Pratap and Tejaswi. The proper value was shown as Rs 35 lakh.

The “deed paper” gives an emotional reason as well: “... The donee’s mother (Rabri) looks after the donor (Kanti Singh) all the time and on account of their services rendered to the donor, the donor now out of love and affection has desired the said property...”.

Another “deed” shows Kanti Singh has leased her plot at Saguna Mod, Danapur, to Rabri Devi for 99 years. The big plot (31.5 decimals) is being used as a cowshed. Kanti Singh’s son Rishi Kumar signed the signature of lease on March 10, 2006.

Another Union Minister of State, Raghunath Jha, is shown to have given his house constructed on over 3,400 sq ft of land at Gopalganj to Tej Pratap and Tejaswi on June 18, 2005. The government value of the property was Rs 8.75 lakh.

Both Ministers of State today justified the “donations”. Kanti Singh said she had every right to gift and lease her property to anyone she wanted and Jha called the “gift” a matter of “love and affection”.

Rajiv Ranjan Singh also sought to know how Lalu Prasad’s father-in-law Shiv Prasad Choudhary, who had otherwise declared himself landless, changed his name to Shiv Prasad Yadav and acquired 10 kathas (1 katha is equal to approximately 1,361 sq ft) and nine dhurs (a dhur is half a katha) from Lalbabu and 10 kathas and 12 dhurs from Kalavati Devi at Gopalganj on September 4, 2004, and gifted both plots to daughter Rabri Devi on February 21, 2006.

The JD(U) released another “deed” showing that Lalu’s son-in-law Prabhunath Yadav had gifted his two kathas to Tej Pratap and Tejaswi.

“Do these transactions suggest Lalu had acquired land plots from some potential job beneficiaries and got its ownership indirectly?” asked Singh.

Another set of documents released by the JD(U) showed how people “gifted” land to Lalu and family to get “jobs in Railways”. Kishundev Roy, a Danapur resident, “gave” his 3,375 sq ft of land to Rabri Devi on February 5, 2008, and got several members of his family employed with the Railways in Central Zone, Mumbai. “Let Laluji explain the consideration as the mode of payment is mentioned,” said Rajiv Ranjan Singh.

Similarly,Dharmendra Roy and Ravindra Roy, the JD(U) leader said, gave their 3,375 sq ft plot to Rabri Devi on February 6, 2008 to “get Railway jobs” for family members in Central Zone, Mumbai.

Other persons who donated land for jobs, alleged the JD-U, are Manoj Kumar, Vinod Kumar, Gopi Krishna and Sushila Devi. They allegedly got their plots registered in the name of Tejaswi Yadav on February 25, 2006, to get a job each.

Lalu Prasad’s eldest daughter Misa Bharti, the JD(U) alleged, got a 1.8-acre agriculture land from Kiran Devi, a Bihta resident, for only Rs 3.7 lakh on December 7, 2007. Tej Pratap is said to have “acquired” 60 decimal land in native village Phulwaria on September 8, 2005.

On the third “mode of exchange” of favours, Singh alleged that one of the owners of a Patna-based hotel registered his two-acre land at Danapur in the name of a private company. The day the property was registered, 2,601 shares of the company went to Sarla Gupta, wife of Union Minister of State Premchand Gupta. “Soon after registry, two railway hotels, one each at Ranchi and Puri, went to the hotel owner. Is it a coincidence?” asked Singh.

JD(U) list of Lalu, family acquisitions

The “deeds” released by the party show new land acquisitions by the RJD chief’s family:

• Rabri Devi: 3,375 sq ft at Danapur (5/2/08)

• Rabri Devi: 3,375 sq ft at Danapur (6/2/08)

• Tejaswi Yadav: 2.5 katha at Danapur (25/2/06)

• Misa Bharti: 1.8 acre at Bihta (26/11/07)

• Misa Bharti: 77.5 decimals at Patna (7/12/07)

• Tej Pratap: 60 decimals at Phulwaria (8/9/05)

• Tej Pratap and Tejaswi: House on 2.5 katha land at Gopalganj (18/6/05), ‘gifted’ by Raghunath Jha

• Tej Pratap and Tejaswi: House in Patna (6/1/2005), ‘gifted’ by Kanti Singh

Renting Private School Buildings for Public Education

2008-07-30T06:05:00.000-07:00

A real success story. I think it can be tried everywhere

State Pulse: Jharkhand: Class act
Elite schools lend campuses to poor children- report by AK Gupta in Ranchi

Every noon a merry bunch of children from low-income colonies of Jamshedpur cross the Subernarekha in a boat to study at the elite Carmel Junior College. They get dedicated teachers, books and a clean campus without paying exorbitant fees.

Some even get vocational training. Five private schools in Jamshedpur have opened up their campus to 8,000 underprivileged children after a little persuasion by the East Singhbhum Jharkhand Education Project (JEP).

Just a couple of years ago these children would loiter around in their bastis the whole day, occasionally attending the government schools. Even JEP did not foresee that it would bring about a turnaround on this scale when in 2004 it proposed an evening school for underprivileged children at Jesuit-run Loyola School because of the paucity of land and soaring prices of raising infrastructure in the posh city.

JEP's programme coordinator Jayant Mishra was quick to realize that he needed to work on the lines of private-public partnership to cut the cost. If he could motivate 45 private schools in Jamshedpur to open their doors to educate the poor residents of the posh city, it would save the project a major part of the expenditure.

Initially, JEP motivated private schools to provide their infrastructure for a few hours. But nothing much changed until the project prepared a blueprint and presented it before the schools along with modest sops and assurances. The blueprint mentioned that private schools' classes get over by afternoon. "We needed the infrastructure for just four to five hours for the children from bastis.

We offered to give an honorarium to teachers and textbooks, stationery and midday meal to children," says Mishra. "We asked for a partnership for a social cause, and they agreed after much convincing."

There was another hurdle in the literacy drive. It had little resources to track slum children. This became easy with the help of UNICEF. "We asked the administration to provide us statistics on the urban poor. Once we got the figures we sent out a team of volunteers to identify the children. We found that rickshaw pullers, auto drivers, hotel workers, domestic helps and labourers were eager to get their children educated. We identified over 10,000 such children," says Sukanya Balasubramanian, education officer, UNICEF, Jharkhand.

The strategy was an instant hit. Imposing buildings of private schools became a huge attraction for poor children. Soon schools started recognizing extraordinary children in afternoon classes. Kerala Samajam Model School transferred some of the bright students to its main English school. It even waived off their fees and gave scholarships. "Two girls, daughters of maids, who were given scholarship, topped our school. We enrol around 5,000 underprivileged children. They work and also study," says Vijyam Kartha, director of the Kerala public chain of schools.

According to unofficial estimates, this unique experiment has saved JEP around Rs 7 crore by opening afternoon schools in Carmel Junior College, Kerala Samajam Model School, DBMS English School, Delhi Public School and Loyola School. Students also get to participate in city-level contests. Students of Loyola School's afternoon classes won three prizes in the inter-school contest Horlicks Wiz-kids.

The students are also getting jobs as office and courier boys, and are being trained to become electricians and drivers, as in Loyola School. Carmel School is giving vocational training to girls in tailoring and making baskets and beads ornament.

"This school is much better compared to my previous government school. Here we have good teachers, books are supplied on time, toilets and classrooms are clean. In our previous school, toilet was makeshift and class lectures not that serious. We want to enrol for a polytechnic course after passing out from here," say Hirok Mahato and Somen Mardi of Loyola School.

In afternoon schools, the dropout rate is low and the attendance of students and teachers high. Project officials think the private-public partnership should be on a bigger scale to improve the state's dismal literacy rate. "The World Bank rated Jharkhand as the worst state in the world for having the highest absenteeism rate of teachers. Its report put us in an embarrassing situation," says JEP director Rajiv Ekka. "We are planning more such partnerships to boost literacy rate in Jharkhand."

The Union human resource development ministry has issued a directive to other states to follow the JEP's East Singhbhum model and UNICEF has accepted it as one of the best practices in the education sector. The state capital Ranchi is trying to emulate the model. It plans to introduce the concept of afternoon schools in six private schools. That's a bench-thumping proposal.

Manjunath memorial award

2008-07-20T02:05:00.000-07:00

Manjunath’s ‘spirit’ travels all the way to Assam’s forest and farmers
Geeta Gupta
Posted online: Saturday, March 29, 2008 at 0033 hrs Print Email
31-year-old Akhil Gogoi gets Manjunath Shanmugam Integrity Award for exposing corruption in govt projects

New Delhi, March 28 : Golaghat district in Assam may be far away from a petrol pump in Uttar Pradesh but the distance between the two disappeared this evening on a stage at IIT Delhi. Akhil Gogoi acknowledged an unusual debt to Manjunath Shanmugam, the IIM graduate and Indian Oil manager who was killed in November 2005 by the petrol mafia for cracking down on adulteration.

Recipient of the second Manjunath Shanmugam Integrity Award today, 31-year-old Gogoi, a farmers activist in Assam, said he didn’t know who Shanmugam was and how he died until he was told by a friend to apply for the award. “It’s only then that I came to know,” he said, that he was a kindred spirit. “So I came to Delhi not so much to receive the award but to pay my respects to his spirit.”

Gogoi, as general secretary of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti of Assam (KMSSA), has been working for the cause of farmers in Assam since 2002, particularly the forest-dwellers in Golaghat bordering Nagaland. According to the citation of the Manjunath Shanmugam Trust — which instituted the award to honour and encourage efforts by individuals and institutions working to uphold values of truth and honesty in public life — Gogoi remained steadfast in his fight against corruption and malpractices inherent in various “development works” of the government.

His work highlighted irregularities in the Panchayat system, Rural Development schemes and the Public Distribution System (PDS).

“It started when over 5 lakh people were evicted from the forests by the department without any provision for rehabilitation. I was a university student then and with two more friends we mobilized the people and took out a rally. It had an effect. That is when my fight started. We keep mobilizing people and that’s the key to our efforts,” he said.

Gogoi, the general secretary of the Cotton College student’s union in 1995-96, left college and took up social service when he was doing his MA in English Literature in 2002. The same year, he married Gitashree Tamuly, who is a college teacher. They have a two-year-old son and the family’s expenses are paid for by the salary his wife gets.

“I was attacked by the local Congress Committee members for my ‘anti-state’ activities, and a case was also filed against me. But I was rescued by the High Court,” says Gogoi. During this period, Gogoi had to go underground, and he was introduced to his son only when he was already six months old.

Gogoi and his KMSSA used the RTI Act to uncover corruption in various schemes like the Indira Awas Yojana and the Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana. This was reported to the Chief Minister and following media coverage, local officials were arrested for alleged corruption.

The two other finalists for the award were the Urmul Jyoti Sansthan (UJS) and its founder Chetan Ram from Bikaner in Rajasthan for their work in health care, rural development and public advocacy. The UJS also used the RTI Act to expose corruption in various public projects. Working under the banner of the Jagruk Nagrik Manch, UJS activists actually coerced many public officials into returning bribes they took from citizens.

“Though our efforts were initially dismissed, government servants gradually started returning the money they took. We have all the receipts with us, wherein the official writes the amount of bribe he took and then returns it back,” said Ram. “I have been dragged to court in many false cases and have even faced physical assault. But now, resistance has declined.”

The fight against corruption led the third nominee, M N Vijayakumar, an IAS officer from Karnataka, to be transferred seven times in nine months. Not allowed to attend the event, he was represented by Jayashree, his wife and an activist herself. His crime? Blowing the whistle on the misuse of Government land and corrupt practices in various PSUs. Said Jayashree: “Vijayakumar keeps getting notices every time he uncovers corruption in the state. But it’s the zeal for bringing about change that keeps us going despite all the threats.”

The nominations were adjudged on the basis of the gravity of the situation in the area of work; corrective measures taken to fight the situation; and the extent of difficulty and challenges faced. What was common to all the nominations was their commitment towards ensuring transparency in the government’s development works.

“The fight against corruption is an uphill task. You’ll be beaten up and dragged to courts for all your honesty,” said Kiran Bedi, the chief guest at the award function. “Justice and integrity mean nothing unless we talk of police reforms. That department is the most corrupt,” she said.

UGC : uniformity is mantra

2008-07-20T01:56:00.000-07:00

In class 9 we had a piece of G B Shaw where he critiqued the education system for trying to enforce uniformity. He gave a tongue in cheek example of a kingdom where all beds were of fixed length so king ordered that all those with height more should get their feet cut and those shorter elongated :)

I was in a state board school and there was this aura around CBSE and ICSE schools so I used to think that what is harm if everyone becomes like them but after spending years in tow of India's most talked about educational institutes it became clear me that uniformity may bring efficiency may be economical also but at the end of it it creates clones which are horribly same.
Even worse things happen with uniformity coupled with centralization all local innovations which could be done by schools and colleges are lost. This article by one of the best thinkers country has today is right on point

One size can’t fit all
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
Posted online: Monday, January 07, 2008 at 0000 hrs Print Email
The UGC proposal to standardise curriculum will destroy creativity.

According to reports, the University Grants Commission is all set to increase its stranglehold on Indian universities. The latest proposal under discussion calls for standardisation and homogenisation of curriculum across all Indian universities. The ostensible rationale for this proposal is that it will make for greater portability across Indian universities. But if followed through, this proposal will squelch the few remaining vestiges of autonomy and creativity left in the Indian university system. It is one more step in the direction of a colossally ambitious centralisation of the Indian university system.

The centralisation is premised on a number of deeply entrenched principles. First, that homogenisation of institutions is better than a diversity of experiments. Second, that the academic community, teachers and students must not shape courses, syllabi and new frontiers of knowledge; rather these should be shaped by a small cabal that controls India’s education bureaucracy (usually statist in their orientation). Third, this centralisation is premised on the thought that accountability has to be vertical, where institutions answer to some top authority. It has no room for the thought that the only way to make institutions more accountable is to foster competition amongst them. Fourth, while recognising the infirmities of India’s education system, this approach harbours the illusion that more control and supervision will somehow produce the pedagogic creativity that Indian higher education needs.

The drive towards a uniform syllabus for all Indian universities is symptomatic of the dangers that afflict the system. Such a move undermines the very integrity of the concept of a university. The very core of the idea of a university vanishes if it cannot, within some constraints, control who it can teach, what it can teach, and how it teaches. It is a community of professionals accountable to students, peers, and a sense of vocation. The worst thing about the UGC’s approach is that it also treats deemed universities on par with state universities, exercising the same degree of control over them. Indeed, it is toying with the idea of even centralising admissions to all deemed universities under its own aegis.

Second, it is an act of colossal hubris to even suggest that all Indian universities should have similar curriculum. Why confine our appreciation of diversity only to identity, rather than a myriad of institutional forms and intellectual experiments? The great wave of creativity in Indian university building, when Delhi University, BHU, Jamia, Shanti Niketan came up, was premised on educational innovators trying out different things. Surely India can have room for the pedagogical philosophies behind a Gandhian institution like Banasthali Vidyapeeth on the one hand, and out-and-out new economy institutions on the other?

Third, the UGC ought to recognise that centralisation impedes rather than promotes curricular updating and innovation in three ways. One of reasons so many Indian universities found it difficult to update curriculum was such updating required negotiation with a large number of actors. This inevitably made the negotiation over curricular change protracted and aimed at the lowest common denominator. Even within the Indian system, the universities that have done better have done so because faculties and departments have more autonomy and control over their courses. In the American system faculty members make up their own courses subject to department approval. This makes for a more supple and innovative system. Now try to imagine what centralisation of syllabus making over a country as large as India would entail: most likely such curricular reform will be done by diktat. Our best teachers will be even more demoralised, because they have to teach syllabi crafted by committees where political compromise more than pedagogical purpose will guide curricular choices. It is also more likely that the quest for homogenising large systems will aim at the lowest common denominator rather than promote distinction. And such revisions will in future be subject to even more protracted negotiation.

Confusing standards with standardisation is a recipe for stifling innovation. All that portability requires is a university recognising that another university can be trusted to uphold certain pedagogical standards; it does not require that they follow the same curriculum. Finally, the idea of standardising curriculum goes against the grain of what our education system needs: more choices for students. Centralisation militates against choice, and Indian higher education needs to err towards the latter rather than the former.

No one doubts that there is an urgent need to reform the governance of Indian universities. But the kinds of reforms that are being contemplated, suggest even more centralisation and erosion of university autonomy. It should not be the UGC’s job, for instance, to prescribe qualifications for vice-chancellors. One proposal doing the rounds is that significant administrative experience be made mandatory for holding the post of vice chancellor. This is frankly a bureaucratic solution designed to perpetuate more of the same; and exclude outsiders who have the energy and passion for institutional innovation: the likes of Madan Mohan Malviya or Ravi Mathai.

The decline of Indian higher education can be traced to that peculiar combination of the Congress and the Left that dominated higher education in the seventies. It killed higher education through a combination of state control, populism, patronage and subordinating universities to every purpose but the cultivation of the intellect. The combination continues: centralisation of syllabus is another way of enhancing state control; the seventies gave us populism in the guise of automatic promotions; Arjun Singh gave it in the guise of indiscriminate increase in retirement age; the last regime was controlled by a small cabal; the men entrusted with curricular and institutional reform now are those who represent the twilight of the old system, not those who are yearning for a new dawn.

The Eleventh Plan will see a massive expansion of Indian higher education. Most of the increased outlays are likely to be wasted, because we are ducking important questions about what ails the university system. Great universities will help build a great society; lack of universities will produce a stagnant society, but bad universities will create a social disaster. It is a pity, that this government, most of all, seems oblivious of the stakes.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research

pratapbmehta@yahoo.co.in

Balaji is for everyone now

2008-07-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

Dalits can’t afford trip to Tirupati, so the Lord goes to them
Sreenivas Janyala
Posted online: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 0152 hrs Print Email
Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam takes idols to Dalit villages where rituals are performed, and a night spent

Thallapaka, July 14: Ostracised and often banned from entering temples, Dalits in Chittoor district perhaps never imagined that one day Tirumala’s Lord Balalji would come right to their doorstep.

In a rare gesture, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) has decided to take idols of the world’s richest God to several Dalit villages in the district not only to provide them a glimpse but also to enable them to worship Him right in front of their homes.

With the disillusioned Dalits of the district increasingly turning to other religions, the gesture, the TTD admits, is also aimed at preventing largescale conversions.

Named ‘Dalit Govindam’, the initiative involves Dalits in prayer rituals and ceremonies without any prejudice or cutting costs. The Lord and his entourage spend the night with the Dalit residents.

Living in abject poverty, a majority of the Dalit families here cannot afford a pilgrimage to Tirumala. Prevailing caste bias means they are not allowed into many local temples.

“The God does not discriminate and this is the message we want to convey to them. Due to poverty, most of them wait several years to make a trip for the Lord’s darshan. We introduced this programme of taking the idols of Lord Venkateshwara and his two consorts to Dalit settlements to eradicate caste discrimination and also to give them an opportunity to pray and worship to their heart’s content and take part in the traditional rituals and ceremonies which they never witness. The priests also give them ‘Vedic blessings’ which only VVIPs visiting the main temple in Tirumala normally receive,” says TTD’s Chairman B Karunakar Reddy.

Pointing out that Dalits are getting alienated from the society and Hindu religion, leading to conversions, Reddy adds: “I hope this will also help bring them back into the mainstream.”

Once a month the idols in all their grandeur are carried by the main temple’s priests and bearers down the seven hills to a Dalit settlement. Normally the procession is taken through the traditional Maada Street of Tirumala only. “The TTD makes all the arrangements in the particular village, including decorations, pandals etc, and no expenses are spared. While entering the ‘Dalitwada’ or the segregated area where the Dalits reside, the priests chant the same Vedic hymns that they chant in the main temple,” informs TTD official Rampulla Reddy, who is closely associated with Dalit Govindam.

The idols are kept on a platform in the middle of the ‘dalitwada’ for the rituals. To make sure that there is no hesitation among the residents, the priests go to each and every household and invite them to join the ceremony and rituals. “Three couples are selected who will join the priests in reciting the hymns and perfoming the various rituals. The ‘prasadam’ and food is also prepared with the involvement of everyone. To clear misconceptions like untouchability and segregation, the priests, TTD officials and the local residents then share the prasadam and food from the same vessels and plates,” Reddy informs.

As far as assuaging the feelings of the backward community, the initiative seems to have worked. “It is very rare that the Lord himself comes to your doorstep. It is rarer still for Dalits to participate in the rituals standing beside the main temple’s priests and amidst people of all castes,” says M Thirumaliah, president of the Tirupati (Rural) Mandal where the first Dalit Govindam was held in Vemuru Dalitwada.

“I never thought I would actually sit in front of the Lord and perform a ceremony. It was such a privilege and I consider myself lucky,” says V Nagaraju, a resident of Thallapaka village where the second event was held recently. The third programme was held in Siddpeta Dalitwada in Medak district.

“For people used to being told to bring their own glasses and plates during public functions, this was definitely a new experience,” says Thirumaliah

Schools of Hope

2008-07-13T23:41:00.002-07:00

CREATIVE CLASSROOMS
Posted online: Sunday, January 06, 2008 at 0000 hrs Print Email
They read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda during the English hour.

READING HARRY POTTER IN CLASS
VAEL'S BILLABONG
HIGH, CHENNAI
Annual fee: Rs 40-60,000

Jaya Menon
They read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda during the English hour. They are asked to create their own world and banking system, just like Gringotts Vault in Rowling’s wizard world. That’s Vael’s Billabong High in Chennai.
Built close to the Neelankarai beach on the outskirts of Chennai, its colourful boards pointing to the swimming pool and administration block, you could be forgiven for mistaking this school for a resort. But step inside and it’s a child’s world. This is a place where they teach children to be ‘‘thinkers, innovators and problem-solvers’’.
It is perhaps the only school in south India to follow the Australian pattern of education, sticking to a syllabus set by the Mumbai-based Kangaroo Kids Education Ltd founded by an Australian, Lina Ashar, in 1993.
‘‘All the play tools and worksheets come from Australia. We have an integrated curriculum that’s child- friendly and is as much fun as relevant,’’ says Arthi K. Ganesh, a management trustee of the school.
Set up four years ago, the school is up to class VI but will extend to class XII next year and will follow both the ICSE Board and the International Baccalaureate system.
The classrooms are colourful, their walls decorated with paintings done by students. ‘‘The objective is to create fun and rewarding learning experiences that would last the children the rest of their learning lives,’’ points out Vael Principal R. Meenakshi. The classrooms do not have more than 20 students each and the stress is more on practical stuff, less on theory. So, the children learn what a cold sensation is in a rather pleasurable way: by visiting an ice cream parlour. A lesson in personal hygiene is given in a beauty parlour and another on fitness in a gym. There are special days like the ‘creepy crawly day’, when children learn about insects and a ‘noodle doodle day’ when they help teachers to make noodles and colour them. Guest lecturers include dentists who talk about dental hygiene, pilots who narrate scary incidents of aircrafts getting caught in air pockets and carpenters to teach them how to make furniture.
‘‘When I returned to India from Bangkok, I didn’t know where to put my child. She was going through a tough transition period,’’ says Anita Shanmuganathan, a classical dancer. Shreddar,9, is now in class IV at Vael’s Billabong High and according to her mother ‘‘quite happy’’.
Parents are equally happy. Viji Chandrasekhar, a television artiste, was stumped when her daughter studying in one of the city schools, insisted she wanted to learn yoga, swimming and play the keyboard. ‘‘It is difficult for mothers to take children around the city for different activities,’’ she points out. Her search ended at Billabong High. Her daughter Lovelyn now combines studies with yoga, swimming and playing the keyboard.

HOMEWORK? WHAT'S THAT?
BALA VIDYA
MANDIR,chennai
Annual fee: Rs 17,000

Jaya Menon
While schools flaunt their performances and compete with each other to have ‘‘brilliant students’’ on their roster, Bala Vidya Mandir in Chennai takes credit for an unusual practice. The school has never advertised its achievements. Bala Vidya Mandir, or BVM as it is called, is activity-based and lays less stress on examinations and academic results and more on extra-curricular activities.
Ever since it was founded in 1988, BVM has gone its own way. ‘‘Our philosophy has always been child-centric. Naturally every school would make this claim. But we teach our children in ways that will make them happy,’’ says BVM principal S.S. Nathan.
Tucked away in Gandhi Nagar, one of the oldest parts of Chennai, close to the picturesque Adyar river, the sprawling school houses about 1,250 students and is popular both with parents and children. ‘‘That’s because our children are not burdened with homework till class VI. This is a big relief for parents,’’ says Madhavan Narayanan, who chose to put his daughter Smriti here. Till class V, there is no uniform for children, they have no exams and are graded for the work they do in class.
But the biggest attraction for parents has been the school’s stress on communication skills and confidence- building. ‘‘Right from the primary section, children are made to perform on stage, which helps them shed their fear of speaking in public,’’ adds Madhavan.
Vijayalakshmi Sankar, an IITian, now a director in an IT firm, Xansa, agrees. An alumnus of the school, she says: ‘‘I interview so many youngsters for jobs in our firm. I find those who have studied in BVM bolder and with excellent communication skills.’’
Little wonder then that she sent both her children there. But she admits to having some anxious moments about her choice. She often wondered how her children would fare in the competitive world after the stress-free environment of BVM: ‘‘I have come to realise that what’s more important are the underlying skills, which the school helps to develop in a student. When I look around me and see friends of mine who studied at BVM with me, having achieved so much in life, I feel confident and proud.’’
The school has been ahead of its time in more ways than one. It set up a remedial centre for children with dyslexia 20 years ago. It’s moving ahead even now. It has set up its own connectivity network, using two service providers (one as a back-up in case the other failed), balancing router, a Wi Fi unit and laptops. Teachers in every classroom have their own laptops and monitors.
Now, that’s taking classroom communication to another level.

ALL ARE WELCOME
REWACHAND BHOJWANI ACADEMY, PUNE
Annual fee: Rs 22,000

Shveta Vashist Gaur
IN the real world people with disabilities live alongside others so why should it be any different in a school? That’s what Pune’s Rewachand Bhojwani Academy believes in. Set up 18 years ago, of its 426 students, about 13 per cent are dyslexic, a number of them have a hearing impairment and many have other medical and emotional problems.
The school’s principal Madhavi Kapoor says she started the school to realise her dream of inclusive education. So at Bhojwani, children don’t just fight their own problems but also learn to accept those of others.
This is also a school without sir and ma’am. The principal is called Adi, the teachers masi, didi or whatever the children want to call them. And English is not the only language of conversation. Unlike schools where you hear only English on campus, here you can jabber away in English, Hindi and Marathi. Students learn early about elections. They hold elections, complete with canvassing, to elect a students’ council that takes decisions on everything. ‘‘We recently had this debate on whether we should tuck in our shirts or not. We held meetings on the subject for a month and finally decided that it was fine either way,’’ says Naveen Devnani, the head boy of the school.
The wings of freedom are not restricted to ideas alone—classrooms are not numbered but named after birds: flamingo, cockatoos, the Indian robin.
Madhavi Kapoor says the school works on Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences and education, paying attention on skills other than academics. The school has three special educators who take charge of the children with learning disabilities. This includes taking special classes of these children separately and exempting them from examinations. Teachers work closely with counsellors and parents. In fact, any parent is free to walk in on Thursday and talk out issues.
The two counsellors on campus spend hours with children and their parents. Say one of them Dilmeher Bharucha Bhola, ‘‘A girl who was a dropout from another school joined us some years ago. When she joined us, she was not just painfully shy but peculiarly quiet. After observing her for some time we decided to exempt her from any academic pressures including tests. We found out that she was good at dance, so we helped her put up a solo performance on stage. That one performance changed her life. Today seeing her so confident gives us great pleasure.’’
The biggest compliment to the school comes from Akanksha Agrawal, a parent, who says the school has put a smile back on her 11-year-old daughter’s face.

WHERE STUDENTS SET HE SYLLABUS
MIRAMBIKA, NEW DELHI
Annual fee: Rs 21,000

Preeti jha
Imagine a school where students decide what they will learn and teachers say they do not teach, but help children unearth what they already know. Add to this roaming rabbits and geese, and a slide that children whiz down to reach the dining hall. No this is not a school conjured up by Enid Blyton, floating on top of the magic faraway tree. But 13-year old Avantika Viswanathan will tell you that her school Mirambika is not far from every child’s fantasy.
Founded in 1980 by Neeltje Huppes, a Dutch woman, Mirambika began with students learning under seven trees at the Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi. Buildings later evolved, but even today very few classrooms have four walls. ‘‘This really helps,’’ says Viswanathan, ‘‘seeing birds, trees, sunlight—it makes you a happy learner.’’
Even more striking than Mirambika’s architecture is its approach to education. ‘‘There’s no ABCD, or counting one to 10,’’ explains volunteer-teacher, Shaifali Chickermane. Abandoning formal drills, at Mirambika, children learn how to read and write themselves.
The unstructured approach works by encouraging and building on a child’s natural curiosity. By looking at pictures in books, children begin to ask questions.
A child-centric system of education is key to the school’s philosophy, which is inspired by the work of Shri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa, also know as the Mother, on education. ‘‘The philosophy of integral education required setting up an entirely new environment,’’ says Huppes.
Take the way in which students form classes. Open to children aged three to 14, the school is grouped by age, but not divided from nursery through to class VIII. Classes are named after colours or qualities —decided upon by students.This year’s classes include aspiration, humility, and perseverance.
Student autonomy extends to what is learned in class. There are do no timetables or study sharply demarcated subjects, instead Mirambika has an innovative class called project. During a project on panchayats (village councils), the school set up their own elections. ‘‘One year there was even a project on pirates,’’ says Avantika, ‘‘it might seem unimportant, but through it we learned about history and folk tales.’’
Now in her final year at Mirambika, Viswanathan wonders if she will enjoy formal education. Vikrant Abrol—the first student on Mirambika’s rolls— says even after 18 years, adjusting to the wider world ‘‘is still difficult at times’’. Suddenly faced with a system bent on evaluation was tough, he says.
But the Mirambika experience was worth it, and now working as a social entrepreneur, Abrol is keen for his son to study at the school. Ratna Viswanathan, Avantika’s mother, thinks it is a common misperception that the school leaves students unable to contend with the wider world. ‘‘Instead it develops critical thinking at an early age. At Mirambika there is competition, but with oneself rather than against others.’’
Avantika is considering going to Mother’s International or Sardar Patel in April. ‘‘From Mirambika, I know textbooks aren’t the only way to learn. This will stay with me wherever I go,’’ she says.

CLASSROOMS WITHOUT WALLS
RISHI VALLEY SCHOOL, CHITTO0R, ANDHRA PRADESH
Annual fee: Rs 1,10,000

Johnson ta
The Rishi Valley School has literally knocked down the walls of its classrooms. Here an outdoor expedition is as much a class as a formal lesson is. Today, the classroom is under the banyan tree; tomorrow it could be a geography lesson on a hillock. The oldest and the best known of the six schools run across the country by the Krishnamurti Foundation, the Rishi Valley School is at the heart of the Rishi Valley Education Centre that also includes a rural education project and rural healthcare effort. A residential school set up 76 years ago, it’s spread over 250 acres on the Rishi Konda hill in Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh, about 133 km from Bangalore.
The school still follows its founder J.D. Krishnamurti’s philosophy. Teachers are friends who can be questioned relentlessly and students are individuals who are not judged by their academic, artistic or sporting credentials. On the playgrounds, invectives don’t fly to improve performance—only polite encouragement.
‘‘In the junior classes children are sometimes fickle with their choice of activities, flitting between craft, painting, music and drama but in higher classes, we expect more commitment from students,’’ says principal Dr A. Kumaraswamy, an IIT-Madras alumni who has been with the school for 25 years. Teachers at Rishi Valley have a lot of freedom in deciding curriculum, teaching methods and evaluation, especially in the junior classes and they share a close bond with students.
The average teacher-student ratio here is 1:9 and at present there are 360 students (from formal Class IV to class XII) and 60 teachers on campus.
‘‘As students we did not address our teachers as sir or madam. We were encouraged to address them as anna (elder brother) or akka (sister). This allows a great deal of informality,’’ says V. Nanjappa, a journalist and alumnus of the school. The school counts former president Neelam Sanjiva Reddy among its well-known alumni.
But life after Rishi Valley can be a bit hard. ‘‘The students mostly miss the rapport they enjoyed with their teachers. But in the long term they however do well,’’ says Kumaraswamy.

One point often missed in Nuclear debate

2008-07-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

Jerry rao amazes me with his perceptible comments every now and then. Infact just after 1998 blasts I remember seeing cyclotran at CAT indore dysfunctional because some camera to capture radioactive particles was banned by USA. This was as late as 1999. But I guess science and industry in India has lsot all interets in getting high tech i.e. why no murmer from them on these points which Jerry is raising

The ghost of '74
Jaithirth Rao
Posted online: Monday, July 14, 2008 at 2330 hrs Print Email
The merits of the Indo-US nuclear deal are not limited to energy

Jaithirth Rao

Everyone is focused on how important nuclear energy is going to be in the future and that’s the stated reason why we need the agreements with the United States, the IAEA and the NSG. While this is doubtless important, this is not the only gain and in a near-term perspective other gains may outweigh the nuclear energy part of the deal.

One item that just does not get sufficient attention is the “scientific and technological apartheid” that India has been subject to since 1974. The non-proliferation zealots in the US came up with an absolutely ingenious way to “punish” India and its impertinent leader Indira Gandhi for having had the temerity to explode a bomb which the Chinese had quietly exploded 14 years earlier. The mandarins of Washington, DC came up with a theory that not only should export of nuclear reactors or uranium or heavy water plants or nuclear turbines to India be banned, but innumerable other devices, instruments, machines, designs, drawings, software that had nothing remotely to do with nuclear energy should also be banned. The convoluted logic used was that a switch or a circuit board that may be used in a medical monitor, a large computer, a satellite launcher or a weather-tracking instrument could theoretically have a “dual” use. It could apparently, by some stretch of the imagination, be used in “directly or indirectly” supporting the development of a nuclear device.

Hence all of these arbitrarily classified “dual-use items” were also banned for export to India. Even something as basic as software encryption was considered a sacred item to be kept away from us. This disastrous development has set back Indian science and technology considerably in all sorts of areas — communications, medical technology, advanced computing... you name it.

While it is not the only reason, it is definitely an important factor in India’s failure to become a major electronics hardware producer like South Korea or Taiwan. To add insult to injury, the US passed laws that effectively arm-twisted others (the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Japan) from also supplying us with any of these mysterious “dual-use” technologies.

The Chinese continued to get access to Soviet developments for a long time which they successfully leveraged. And, after last year, when they have signed their own 123 with the US, they are sitting quite pretty. Ironically, since Pakistan did not explode a bomb in 1974, it escaped these rigorous restrictions. We were not so lucky. President Carter talked insultingly and condescendingly to our Prime Minister Morarji Desai. For the benefit of historians, these brusque expressions have been captured on a recorder. Until the intrepid Senator Pressler came along and insisted on Pakistan coming up on the radar screen not only as bomb-makers but also as bomb proliferators, our unpredictable neighbours got a free ride. Despite the senator’s persistent efforts, many pro-Pakistani denizens of the State Department kept insisting that Pakistan had no nuclear ambitions. They had to eat their words in 1998. But that’s small comfort for us.

We used to very occasionally get “exemption certificates” for dual-use exports as if these were great favours being bestowed on us. To get one exemption certificate needed sign-offs from a dozen departments and agencies in Washington, DC and trust me bureaucratic signatures are as difficult to get out there as they are in the corridors of New Delhi. And usually, by the time these exemption certificates came through, the exporter and the importer had lost interest. Business has to move on and cannot wait for the linguistic quibblers to decide what is dual or for that matter single use!

It is to the credit of the Bush administration that they have ensured, as part of the nuclear cooperation deal, that the patently untenable embargo on dual-use technologies is ended. This gives our scientists access to cutting-edge world-class technologies in a variety of spheres and will ensure that India makes its deserved contribution to the further development of knowledge in these areas. I suspect that more than anything else the US establishment realised that restricting access of key research to Indian scientists might in fact hurt efforts of all scientists around the world. So despite there remaining irrational non-proliferation advocates in Washington, DC who want to continue to “hurt” India for the temerity of 1974, better sense has prevailed. They have also noted that India has been a scrupulous non-proliferator, something which can hardly be said about our neighbour to the west. They did not blast a bomb like we did in 1974, but for four decades now, they have been busy buying and selling nuclear and missile hardware and software in markets that can be characterised as white, black, grey, red and positively dangerous. Clearly, the members of the “punish India” school lost ground and the members of the “let’s deal sensibly with India and leverage India’s Talent Base” school has prevailed.

As a betting man, I would take the position that the single biggest short and medium term gain for India is entry back into the halls of legitimate scientific and technological research in areas where we quite frankly are pretty good. It will take three (five?) years to get environmental clearance to agree on a site for a nuclear power plant; it will take three to five more years to build and commission a reactor. It would be safe to assume that new nuclear power generation is at least seven years away after the date all agreements are completed. “Dual-use” technologies are another matter. I see immediate benefits in building larger computers, in improving communication devices, in oil and gas exploration, in mineral extraction and so many other areas.

So the next time you meet your financial advisor and he or she is pushing nuclear power stocks, please do make the point that while that looks like a good seven-year bet, there might be more short-term returns in many of these lesser-known but very valuable dual-use plays. And remember you picked this up from this column!

The writer divides his time between Mumbai and Bangalore jerry.rao@expressindia.com

Did you say kabuliwala?

2008-07-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

INDIA IN KABUL
Manu Pubby
Posted online: Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 1236 hrs Print Email

From the CEO of a TV channel to a one-man placement agency, Indians are making their presence felt in Kabul. Security concerns may have restricted their social life to occasional evenings at Indian restaurants and visits to gurdwaras and temples, but attacks like the recent one still don’t deter them.

THE word ‘Hindustani’ works like magic in Kabul. It opens welcoming doors, brings out smiles and an odd hug, and even reduces the haggling cab driver to a Bollywood music showoff. For the small Indian community in the Afghan capital—mostly professionals working on major developmental projects—the respected Hindustan tag is reason enough to stick on to Kabul despite an upscale of violence.
Of course, the more than comfortable pay packages offered to Indians—more than twice what they would get in the Gulf states—also helps. Kabul is a city being rebuilt from scratch and Indians are deeply involved in its emergence as a democratic capital. Television channels, road construction companies, internet service providers, hotels, civil engineering companies, all have a significant Indian presence.
While the embassy blast on Monday sent shockwaves throughout the community, no one is yet thinking of moving back to India. They still feel safe in the capital primarily due to the warmth of the local people. However, most have not brought their families here due to lack of educational facilities or a vibrant social life.
Indians employed here are top of the line professionals tasked with setting up new businesses. When a venture capitalist decided to put in money in the upcoming television sector and take on the leading local network, he was adamant on recruiting and Indian to head it. After all, India has the most vibrant television industry in the region and Indian soaps already the rage in Afghanistan.

NAVED Sarosh, who is the CEO of this channel in Kabul, worked for over two decades in Doordarshan before deciding to move on. Roped in to begin the channel at the earliest, he is busy juggling the schedule for soap operas, news stories and movies on the network. His task, he says is “planning and execution of the complete programming of the channel” at the earliest.
“We are looking at a complete channel with news and entertainment that will cater to all sections of life. I want to showcase the new face of Kabul to the world. This is no longer a place of rockets and guns,” Sarosh says. Impressed with his way of working, the TV channel has asked him to get eight more senior technical hands from India to jumpstart the programming.
While Kabul is changing, the heavy security cover he has— including several AK 47 totting guards—underlines the ever looming threat of kidnapping for ransom that is prevalent in the country. However, Sarosh says there is nothing to fear from the common Afghani due to the traditional cultural link between the countries.
“Though Pakistan shares a larger border, their heart is with India. Kabul is a very beautiful place and with a little caution, life is good,” he says, adding that it is a great advantage that Delhi is just a two-hour flight away. “With the short flight, it is possible for me to spend weekends back home whenever I want,” he says.

SUCH luxuries may not be possible for 26-year-old Harita Sunder—dubbed as the only single Indian female working in Kabul by colleagues at the Kainaat Construction Company—but she is happy with biannual visits and the significant amount of savings she is building up for the future.
“Compared to what I would earn in Dubai, we are getting at least three times more. My parents are asking me to come back (after the embassy blasts) but now we are habituated to such incidents,” says Sunder, who is heading the IT department of the construction company.
Sunder has been in Kabul for almost two years but has not yet seen the city or roamed around the market places. The only places she visits are her guesthouse and her workplace. This, she says, doesn’t bother her much as she has friends at work and the internet has cut down distances and there is regular communication with family members back home.
Her colleague, civil engineer Vijay PSR from Andhra Pradesh, is a bit more frank. “It is just the money. Earning money is a dangerous addiction like drugs or drinks. Someone who has worked here, will always come back to earn more,” says the engineer, who works on US military camps and other projects.
Vijay, who has travelled throughout the country since he started work here in 2004, has some scary experience to share, including how he got chased by armed miscreants while returning from a project, but says that the real threat is only to government workers like personnel of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO). The embassy blast too, he maintains, is not the handiwork of the Taliban. “We get to hear from locals that this is not the Taliban but Pakistan’s ISI. They do not want us to work here.”

THE view is echoed by the Project manager of the largest Indian construction company in Kabul, which has already completed more than 500 km of roads in some of the most difficult terrains of the country. While the private company has finished projects in South Afghanistan, including the Herat-Kandahar link, it has not come under any major attack unlike the BRO, which has faced three suicide attacks this year itself.
“There is a threat perception but we have not had any major trouble,” says Rajeev Wadhawan, Project Manager of the BSC-C and C Company that has just taken on a project in Khost, near the Pakistan border. Work has just started on the 104 km project that will link Gardes and Khost near the border. The work order was won by the Indian company despite pressure from Islamabad to award it to a Pakistani corporation.
While work takes up most of the time, it helps to have an easy communication link with his family back in Delhi. Video chatting, Wadhawan says, ensures that he speaks to his two girls studying in the Indian capital at least once a day.
The Indian company, one of the first to start work in Afghanistan, has also started a diagnostic centre in the capital as a good will gesture. “We brought the first MRI scanner in Afghanistan to the capital as a goodwill gesture. The idea is to give something back to the country,” Wadhawan says.

THE only regret most Indians in Kabul have is that their social life is restricted to house visits and the odd evening out at a restaurant. Indian food is available in a few Indian restaurants, including the Delhi Durbar and Namaste India, and most employers don’t want their staff to move around openly due to a fear of abduction.
However, this does not deter Kabul’s maverick ‘one man company’ from wandering around the streets without the mandatory ‘protection’. Col (retd) A.S. Mankotia came to Kabul in 2004 after putting in his papers from the army. A dazzling four years later, in which he juggled jobs, hit rock bottom and tried his hand at various businesses, the former army officer is running his own HAAIC consultant company that helps Indians get jobs in Kabul.
One of the most vibrant faces in the Indian community here, Mankotia is the ‘god father’ of several engineers and professionals that he has helped place in various Afghan companies. A veteran of Kabul, he knows his way around town better than Delhi where his family is based.
Afghan companies, he says, are desperately looking to hire professionals from India and are keen on recruiting civil engineers and IT experts. “Afghan employers just love Indians. They are impressed by the hard working nature of Indians and always want more. Indian companies working here are much more respected than those from Iran, Pakistan or China,” he says.
The only problem is that the demand in Kabul by far exceeds supply from India. “A company wants me to bring in 15 engineers. But with the embassy blast, it will be very difficult to convince people to work here, even though the city is as safe as Delhi,” Mankotia says.
The larger issue, he says, is the fear psychosis of people living in India who think that Afghanistan is a war zone. “If an attack happens in South Afghanistan, a person sitting in Delhi feels that Kabul is under fire,” Mankotia says, adding that attacks carried out by the Taliban or other forces are not targeted against common people but are directed at specific targets like embassies or Western convoys.
While most Indians do not have much of a social life, Mankotia makes it a point to visit the two Gurdwaras and Hindu temples in Kabul every week. The small Sikh and Hindu community in Kabul does not largely belong to the affluent class but are a strongly knit set of families practising their ancient trades of Unani medicine, cloth manufacturing and spice trading. “I learnt the trade from my father and it has been passed down for generations. Close to 25 Sikh families here practise Unani and it is very popular to cure sickness. People come from far away to get cured,” Ravel Singh, who lives in a rambling joint family home next to the Karteparwan Gurdwara in the capital.

WHILE many families have Afghan citizenship, they maintain strong ties with India, mostly through close relatives who migrated back after the Taliban came to power in the region. Some returned after the situation came back to normal after the US came in.
One such Sikh is Suraj Singh, who says he was an army commander before the Taliban came in and helped defend the hills of Kabul. He came back to Kabul last month after an 18-year exile in India. The reason, he says, is primarily the bad weather in India. “The weather is really bad and the heat is unbearable. I just love Kabul and have grown up here, playing with snow in the mountains. Ludhiana was just too hot for me,” the fast speaking ex-army commander, who also practises Unani in the Afghani Capital says.
Life is tough in Kabul—the average wage of a policeman in $50 and most government employees are paid below $100 a month besides the fact that the employment rate is very poor—but for most Indians, working in Kabul is cushy even though their social life is rather dull. “The money they get is purely for the security threat. It is the ‘danger pay’ that is most attractive,” says Mankotia.

Andha Bante revari....

2008-07-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

So my first post is about first person of India.
I remember seeing an interview of an old man of the village from where Dr Rajendra Prasad hailed. The village still has no facilities and the reason was that despite being president Dr Rajendra Prasad did not use his influence to get extra funds for the village and let the things happen at their own pace. Contrast this with out current president.

Moreover when government is converting primary schools even in villages this lady wants an exclusive women IIT!!!
Someone please tell her she is president of whole India

India's first 'women-IIT' being set up in Maharashtra
25 Jun, 2008, 1440 hrs IST, IANS

NAGPUR: Even as there is talk about starting new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and increasing the number of seats in the existing ones, a move is afoot to open the country's first all-women engineering and technology-oriented institute in Amravati, President Pratibha Patil's hometown in Maharashtra.

Sources said the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry has sent a proposal to this effect to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) via the planning commission and that the PMO, at whose behest the HRD ministry moved the matter, is all set to clear it once the plan panel grants its approval.

The suggestion to start India's first all-women IIT at Amravati near Nagpur in Vidarbha had in fact been mooted by Saint Gadgebaba University vice-chancellor Kamal Singh. Patil followed it up when she became the country's first woman president last July.

"A recommendatory note from the president's office was attached to the reminder of the suggestion sent to the HRD (ministry) but we don't know what happened after that," Devi Singh Shekhawat, Pratibha Patil's husband who heads an education society in Amravati, said.

"To my knowledge, the president's office doesn't keep prodding government departments about individual files but if this (women IIT) is happening without that, it is certainly gratifying", Shekhawat said.

Sources said Patil, concerned about fewer girl students making it to the IITs, personally talked to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and HRD Minister Arjun Singh about the proposal, which apparently led to the speedy progress in the matter.

The 'daughter-in-law' of Vidarbha is also being credited for expeditious sanction of funds for up-gradation of Amravati airport and introduction of three trains in Vidarbha.

Kamal Singh confirmed that she had strongly recommended setting up of the IIT in Amravati though it would be completely outside the domain of her university or even the state government.

"I received a few queries then but was not aware what happened next", she said expressing happiness about the expeditious progress in the matter.

A global research institute on traditional Indian wisdom in science, technology and community management was among several other innovative proposals sent by the vice-chancellor to the HRD ministry and the University Grants Commission, she said.

NREG death in Bengal : Not covered by media extensively

2008-07-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

Mystery death of Bengal officer who exposed NREG fraud
Bidyut Roy
Posted online: Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 0019 hrs Print Email
Officials say BDO hanged himself but parents say he complained of pressure after he got CPM Panchayat leaders arrested and fined for withholding NREG wages of poor villagers

Daspur (West Midnapore) May 10:The mysterious “suicide” of a 30-year-old Block Development Officer in West Bengal who blew the whistle on corruption by the CPM-led panchayat in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has come as a severe embarrassment to the state government ahead of Panchayat elections beginning tomorrow.

On April 8, according to police records obtained by The Sunday Express, the body of Kallol Sur was found hanging from the ceiling fan of his two-room house adjoining the BDO complex at Daspur II in West Midnapur district. The death was called a suicide by local officials but Sur’s 72-year-old father Dilip Sur is knocking on all doors asking for a probe.

Yesterday, he met Chief Secretary Amit Kiran Deb claiming his son had told him about “immense political pressure” he was under following the complaints he filed. The father has alleged that the local administration didn’t hand over his son’s body to him but “hurriedly cremated it.” The post-mortem report, too, hasn’t been given to the father.

What led to his death isn’t clear but police records, FIRs and official complaints obtained by The Sunday Express make it clear that Sur brought several powerful local leaders — of both the CPM and the Trinamool — under the scanner for alleged corruption in a slew of schemes, including NREGA, flood relief and illegal felling of trees.

Consider the sequence of events:

• On January 6 this year, three months into his job, Sur filed an FIR with the Daspur police station with the police when 10 poor villagers in Daspur Block - II complained that they had not got their wages as per the NREGA. They alleged they received payments for just two days while the job supervisor, appointed by the Panchayat Pradhan, got them to sign the muster roll for seven days. After his probe, Sur complained: “The Pradhan of Nischintapur is held responsible for the offence equally as the said job supervisor forced the paymaster to pay less than what was stated in the muster roll.”

• Sur’s FIR named CPM panchayat pradhan Kartik Mondal and job supervisor Ajoy Bhowmik, also a local CPM leader.

• Both were arrested and when the case reached the magistrate’s court, the Panchayat Pradhan and the job supervisor were fined Rs 5,000. The court ordered the BDO to collect the fine and distribute it among the ten “aggrieved labourers.”

• Local CPM leaders, angry at the BDO’s “audacity,” claimed the BDO was acting at the behest of the Trinamool Congress. They complained that some Trinamool Congress leaders of a neighbouring village in the same block had siphoned off money meant for reconstruction of huts/ homes after floods. After investigating their allegations, Sur promptly filed another case, this one against three Trinamool Panchayat members of Benai.

• Now it was the turn of Trinamool to harass the BDO. On March 24, they picketed his office for five hours asking him to withdraw the case but Sur refused.

• Five days later, the local CPM surrounded his office, held demonstrations alleging that he was a “Trinamool broker.”

Days later, on April 2, Sur went home to Kolkata complaining of illness. Sur was advised bed rest for two weeks but his immediate superior, Sub Divisional Officer (SDO) Ghatal Gautam Majumdar rejected his leave.

• Sur returned to work on April 4, this time accompanied by his worried father who went back to Kolkata on April 7.

• The next day, Kallol Sur was found dead.

His father, in a letter to West Midnapore’s police chief, quoted his son as saying: “My SDO thinks I will give up my job and will leave this place being unable to bear his torture but he does not know me, I will never give up and I will break the evil nexus between the SDO, panchayat, and police...He has actually paid the price of being honest.”

When contacted, Mondal, the accused in the NREGA defalcation case said: “I saw right at the beginning that the BDO was mad...It was because of him that I had to pay Rs 5000 out of my pocket. He is dead, but I don’t know when I will be able to shake off this case.”

State Home Secretary Asok Mohan Chakrabarti said: “An Additional District Magistrate rank officer is investigating. After getting the report the government will take action.”

Said R Rajsekharan, SP of West Midnapore: “Sur was suffering from schizophrenia...our primary investigation shows it is a case of suicide.” When asked about the police cases filed by Sur against local political leaders, the SP said: “All is speculation.” Told that the court had fined the Panchayat, Rajsekharan declined to comment. Said SDO Majumdar: “An inquiry is on. I shall not comment on the issue.”

For the family, grief has been replaced by a determination to get to the truth. Dilip Sur, who retired from Jessop as an accounts assistant in 1995, has another son Ujjal Sur, 33, who is working with a company in Taiwan. He is on his way home after news of his brother’s death.

Kallol Sur’s head teacher in Tollygunge-Bangur High School in south Kolkata Monoranjan Roy said that Kallol used to be in constant touch with him. After he got the BDO’s job, Roy said, Kallol came to donate Rs 5000 for the “school’s development.” Even during his last visit on April 2, Kallol met Roy and repeated what he had told his father — that he was facing tremendous political pressure. “I have never seen any indication of an illness let alone schizophrenia,” said the teacher.