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New Zealand school teaches Sanskrit and claims it helps children understand English

2012-01-30T22:29:00.001+05:30

ANI – Fri 27 Jan, 2012 (from Yahoo news)
Nevada (US), Jan 25 (ANI): A school in New Zealand has a 'Sanskrit Language Studies' program and claims that learning Sanskrit accelerates a child's reading ability.
Ficino School in Mt Eden area of Auckland (New Zealand), calls itself a 'values-based academic institution' and offers education for girls and boys from year one to eight. It says about Sanskrit: "It has a wonderful system of sound and grammar, which gives the child an excellent base for the study of any language. Children love its order and beauty."
Distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed has applauded Ficino School for fostering universal virtues and encouraging Sanskrit studies and adds that Sanskrit has a close relationship with other classical languages like Latin, Greek, French, German, etc.
According to Peter Crompton, principal of this school founded in 1997, where curriculum includes "food for the mind, food for the spirit, food for the body", "Sanskrit with its almost perfect grammatical system...provides children with a roadmap for understanding English." Sanskrit not only gives young learners a clear understanding of the structure of language, it also heightens their awareness of the process of speech, creating a greater understanding of and ability to, enunciate words clearly, Crompton adds.
Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, pointed out that Sanskrit should be restored to its rightful place. It needed to be brought to the mainstream and hidden scientific truths in ancient Sanskrit literature should be brought to light, he said.
Rajan Zed strongly criticized India Government for not doing enough for Sanskrit language. He asked India Government to do much more for the development, propagation, encouragement and promotion of Sanskrit in India and the world, which was essential for the development of India and preservation of its cultural heritage. Sanskrit also provided the theoretical foundation of ancient sciences.
Besides Hindu scriptures, a vast amount of Buddhist and Jain scriptures were also written in Sanskrit, which is known as "the language of the gods". According to tradition, self-born God created Sanskrit, which is everlasting and divine. The oldest scripture of mankind still in common use, Rig-Veda, was written in Sanskrit, Zed added.
Mahatma Gandhi said, "Without the study of Sanskrit, one cannot become a true learned man." German philologist Max Muller added, "Sanskrit is the greatest language of the world." (ANI)

MYSTERY OF CHINA'S WHITE DESERT LINES SOLVED?

2012-01-23T01:03:00.000+05:30

A space researcher has offered what he believes is the correct solution to a mystery that's been flying around cyberspace for the past week: A strange tangle of white lines in China's Gobi desert discovered in Google Map images. Military pundits, armchair investigators, and conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the strange set of lines.

It's a UFO landing strip!

It's a mockup of the streets of Washington, D.C., constructed for nefarious military purposes!

It's a top-secret military installation doing experiments in controlling the weather!

It's a nuclear testing range!

It's a hoax: the Google Map images themselves are fakes, and the lines are not actually there!

A previous Discovery News piece concluded that it probably had some military connection (such as target practice range, based in part on the fact that other similar sites in the area had airplanes sitting in them), and now a NASA scientist thinks he’s got it figured out.

NEWS: The Ethics of Revealing Secrets

According to a story on Fox News the latest (and most plausible) theory is that “they are almost definitely used to calibrate China’s spy satellites. So says Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during NASA’s Mars missions.”

The satellite calibration target solution seems as good an answer as any, and better than most. China, like many countries including the United States, is known to have spy satellites in orbit.

There's been no official explanation from the Chinese government—which is not surprising, since China doesn't need to "explain" some white lines in its desert to anyone, including NASA and President Obama. Of course even if Hu Jintao, the President of China, publicly offered a clear and complete explanation of the mysterious lines, conspiracy-minded folks wouldn’t believe him anyway.

NRI woman delivers 'Jhatpat' on US train

2012-01-23T00:11:00.003+05:30

TOI (PTI | Jan 18, 2012)

NEW YORK: An Indian-origin woman gave birth to her first child during the train ride from New Jersey to New York, in what would be her most unforgettable journey.

At first, Rabita Sarker, 31, of New Jersey said she thought she was experiencing false labour pains as she boarded the train run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in Jersey City. But as the Manhattanbound train entered New York, Sarker knew her baby could nor wait any longer.

As she went into labour, few passengers helped her panicked husband deliver the baby boy they nicknamed "Jhatpat" - the Hindi word for "fast", a report in the New York Daily News said.

"He decided to come and that was it. Nothing could stop him. Nothing could keep him inside for longer," the report quoted Sarker as saying.

She was later admitted to a New York hospital. "I don't think anybody could actually dream of such a delivery," she added. Sarker and her 30-year-old husband, Aditya Saurabh, were already on their way to the hospital for a medical check-up.

"We were coming here to check if it was false labour or not," she said. "I was like, 'Okay, I'm just doing it for peace of mind'". Wanting to avoid the always-crowded Lincoln Tunnel, they decided to take the commuter train 'PATH' that runs from New Jersey to New York.
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Interesting chain of comments follow the online news item.

reproducing a few:

"Both are intelligent and rich people. Rabita Sarkar is from IIT Kharagpur and MS from Rutgers University. Aditya Saurabh works at Amazon and is from University of Texas."

"congratulations my friends, May God be with you and my Best Wishesto you both and family. Do come to california as my guest -Air tickets are on me 408 621 3314..Best of Luck"

"something else happened which tells u how US treats its ordinary residents/citizens. It was instantly decided by the train driver as soon as he was informed of this to make this an EXPRESS train..this is actually a kind of mumbai local but this was considered an emergency and the train stopped only at Manhattan hospital stop where there were scores of ambulances and cops waiting to greet and take care of them! (of course with everything computerized-i am sure the trains control center had approved this instantly)"

"Also please tell everybody about the $900 bill for each ambulance that is on the way to the new born's family. lol"

"We heard about ‘it’s happen only in INDIA’ really right INDIAN will do everything possible anywhere everywhere........hahaha"

"NRI will go to any level for saving $$$ enjoy ur life in USA"

"There should be Free for Life pass to this Child Jhatpat on this Railway rout !!"

"Haha .. While going through the comments I forgot the about the actual news... funny/ Crazy ppl... BTW congrats to the new mommy and dad .."

Captain of capsized cruise ship Costa Concordia “cried like a baby”

2012-01-22T23:56:00.001+05:30

Paris, Jan. 21: The captain of the capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship “cried like a baby” as he hugged its chaplain just hours after the boat hit rocks, the luxury liner’s priest revealed.

Father Raffaele Malena said he was among the last to leave the ship at around 1.30am local time last Saturday and then stayed “close to the injured” in the tiny harbour of Giglio.

“I descended on the rope ladder. I was picked up by a little lifeboat,” he said. Around an hour later, the captain, Franceso Schettino, appeared.

“I spoke to the captain. He embraced me for about a quarter of an hour and cried like a baby,” Father Malena told French magazine Famille Chrétienne.

“Of course, it’s a case of human error because shouldn’t have been so close to the island,” he said of the disaster, in which 11 people died 21 are missing. “But it’s not for me to judge. The experts will see to that.” But he staunchly denied some reported claims that the crew had been incompetent and unhelpful in helping terrified passengers escape to lifeboats.

“These boys, my boys, are not only heroes, they are super heroes,” he said. “My boys knew they were going to die but they didn’t abandon their posts.”

“There were heroes of all nationalities… They were shaking with fear. They were threatened. They were telling people to stop boarding lifeboats which were full but people were getting in anyway,” he said. “(The press) can throw as much mud as they want on their faces, but they can’t say the boys didn’t work, that they weren’t trained.”

At one stage, he saw a little girl fall down. “I took her in my arms, reassured her and returned her to her mother further back. They got into a lifeboat.”

Recounting the crash, he said that he was returning to his cabin after dinner when “I felt a big shock, a noise. I fell to the ground, as the boat rocked from side to side … The electricity cut out”.

A few minutes later the boat turned violently. “The captain cast the anchor,” he said. “Some — who consider themselves experts — say he made a mistake; for others, he did the right thing as the boat turned on itself and thus we didn’t hit the rocks.”

Body found, toll 12

The body of a woman was found on board the Costa Concordia today, bringing the total death toll to at least 12 people, a spokesman for the rescue workers said. Twenty people are still unaccounted for.

(The Telegraph, Calcutta, Sunday , January 22 , 2012)

Barack Obama and Steve Jobs argued over outsourcing

2012-01-22T23:46:00.000+05:30

Economic Times, 22 JAN, 2012, 10.13PM IST, ANI

WASHINGTON: Barack Obama and the late Steve Jobs had a terse exchange last February, over Apple out-sourcing the manufacturing of its famous products.

The New York Times had reported on this matter last February, and had said that when Jobs was about to give an answer, Obama interrupted him with a query and asked 'what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?'

It wasn't long ago that Apple used to brag about its products being made in America, but nowadays almost none of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products sold last year, are made in America.

According to an insider, Obama had asked, "Why can't that work come home?" and Jobs' reply was clear-cut, "those jobs aren't coming back".

That wasn't the first time that Obama and Jobs had a standoff. Jobs' biography says that the Apple founder had told the US President that he was "headed for a one-term presidency", mainly due to his administration's business policies, the Politico reported.

According to the biography, written by Walter Isaacson, Jobs was an admirer of Chinese business practices and was a critic for the US regulations as well as labor rules.

In 1988, a rising novelist penned an open letter to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi

2012-01-22T23:26:00.001+05:30

The following are excerpts from the open letter, published on October 19, 1988 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), from Salman Rushdie to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi:

Dear Rajiv Gandhi,

On Oct. 5, the Indian finance ministry announced the banning of my novel, The Satanic Verses, under Section 11 of the Indian Customs Act. Many people around the world will find it strange that it is the finance ministry that gets to decide what Indian readers may or may not read. But let that pass, because at the end of the notification of the ban, an even stranger statement appeared.

The ministry — I am quoting from The Press Trust of India’s report — “added that the ban did not detract from the literary and artistic merit of Rushdie’s work”. To which I can only reply: Thanks for the good review.

The book was banned after representations by two or three Muslim politicians, including Syed Shahabuddin and Khurshid Alam Khan, both members of Parliament. These persons… have attacked me and my novel while stating that they had no need actually to read it. That the government should have given in to such figures is profoundly disturbing.

A further official statement was brought to my notice. This explained that The Satanic Verses had been banned as a pre-emptive measure. Certain passages had been identified as susceptible to distortion and misuse, presumably by unscrupulous religious fanatics and such. The banning order had been issued to prevent this misuse. Apparently, my book is not deemed blasphemous or objectionable in itself, but is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good!

This really is astounding. It is as though, having identified an innocent person as a likely target for assault by muggers or rapists, you were to put that person in jail for protection. This is no way, Mr Gandhi, for a free society to behave.

Clearly, your government is feeling a little ashamed of itself and, sir, it has much to be ashamed about. It is not for nothing that just about every leading Indian newspaper and magazine has deplored the ban as, for example, “a Philistine decision” (The Hindu) or “thought control” (Indian Express).

It is not for nothing that such eminent writers as Kingsley Amis, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard have joined International PEN and India’s association of publishers and booksellers in condemning the decision. The right to freedom of expression is at the foundation of any democratic society, and at present, all over the world, Indian democracy is becoming something of a laughing stock.

The question raised by the book’s banning is precisely whether India, by behaving in this fashion, can any more lay claim to the title of a civilised society.

Let us try to distinguish truth from falsehood in this matter. Like my zealous opponents, you will probably not have read The Satanic Verses. So let me explain a few simple things. I am accused of having “admitted” that the book is a direct attack on Islam. I have admitted no such thing, and deny it strongly.

… I have tried to offer my view of the phenomenon of revelation and the birth of a great world religion; my view is that of a secular man for whom Islamic culture has been of central importance all his life.

Can the finance ministry really be saying that it is no longer permissible, in modern, supposedly secular India, for literature to treat such themes? If so, things are more serious than I had believed. From where I sit, Mr Gandhi, it looks very much as if your government has become unable or unwilling to resist pressure from more or less any extremist religious grouping; that, in short, it’s the fundamentalists who now control the political agenda.

You know, as I know, that Mr Shahabuddin, Mr Khurshid Alam Khan and their allies don’t really care about my novel. The real issue is the Muslim vote.

I deeply resent my book being used as a political football; what should matter to you more than my resentment is that you come out of this looking not only Philistine and anti-democratic but opportunistic.

Mr Prime Minister, I can’t bring myself to address finance ministries about literature. In my view, this is now a matter between you and me. I ask you this question: What sort of India do you wish to govern? Is it to be an open or a repressive society?

Your action in the matter of The Satanic Verses will be an important indicator for many people around the world. If you confirm the ban, I’m afraid I, and many others, will have to assume the worst. If, on the other hand, you should admit your government’s error and move swiftly to correct it, I will be the first to applaud your honourable deed.

You Get what you Give...

2012-01-20T01:20:00.000+05:30

This is a true story that had happened in 1892 at Stanford University.

Its moral will always be relevant.

A young, 18-year-old student was struggling to pay his fees. He was an orphan, and not knowing where to turn for money, he came up with a bright idea. A friend and he decided to host a musical concert on campus to raise money for their education.

They reached out to the great pianist Ignacy J. Paderewski. His manager demanded a guaranteed fee of $2000 for the piano recital. A deal was struck. And the boys began to work to make the concert a success.

The big day arrived. Paderewski performed at Stanford. But unfortunately, they had not managed to sell enough tickets. The total collection was only $1600.

Disappointed, they went to Paderewski and explained their plight. They gave him the entire $1600, plus a cheque for the balance $400. They promised to honour the cheque soonest possible.

"No." said Paderewski. "This is not acceptable." He tore up the cheque, returned the $1600 and told the two boys "Here's the $1600. Please deduct whatever expenses you have incurred. Keep the money you need for your fees. And just give me whatever is left" The boys were surprised, and thanked him profusely.

It was a small act of kindness. But it clearly marked out Paderewski as a great human being. Why should he help two people he did not even know? We all come across situations like these in our lives. And most of us only think "If I help them, what would happen to me?" The truly great people think, "If I don't help them, what will happen to them?" They don't do it expecting something in return.
They do it because they feel it's the right thing to do.

Paderewski later went on to become the Prime Minister of Poland. He was a great leader, but unfortunately when the World War began, Poland was ravaged. There were over 1.5 million people starving in his country, and no money to feed them.

Paderewski did not know where to turn for help. He reached out to the US Food and Relief Administration for help.
The head there was a man called Herbert Hoover - who later went on to become the US President. Hoover agreed to help and quickly shipped tons of food grains to feed the starving Polish people. A calamity was averted.

Paderewski was relieved. He decided to go across to meet Hoover and personally thank him. When Paderewski began to thank Hoover for his noble gesture, Hoover quickly interjected and said, "You shouldn't be thanking me Mr. Prime Minister.

You may not remember this, but several years ago, you helped two young students go through college in the US. I was one of them."

The world is a wonderful place.
What goes around comes around!
Sometimes we notice it, sometimes we don't !!!

Taxi-refusal score: 26 out of 35

2012-01-19T19:42:00.000+05:30

Taxi-refusal score: 26 out of 35
They dare you to complain More misses than hits in taxi hunt
by TAMAGHNA BANERJEE, SREECHETA DAS AND ZEESHAN JAWED,
The Telegraph (Metro), Calcutta, January 19 , 2012

If you have never faced taxi refusal, chances are you have never tried hailing one in Calcutta.

An ongoing campaign by Lalbazar to rein in the incorrigibly rude Calcutta cabbie by posting plainclothes cops posing as passengers in parts of the city has barely skimmed the surface of what is now a badge of notoriety for this city.

To know how rampant the taxi-refusal menace is, a three-member Metro team went around town between 7.30 and 9 on Tuesday evening looking for rides to and from some prominent destinations. Of the 35 taxis we approached, as many as 26 refused to drive us to our destinations — either without giving any reason or after demanding twice the fare. A few snapshots from our close encounters with the Calcutta cabbie.

Place: Esplanade

Destination: Thakurpukur

Driver: (Thinks for a moment) I will go if you pay the up and down fare.

Metro: But why should I pay you so much?

Driver: Because I won’t get any return passenger. Move aside if you can’t pay.

Taxi speeds away

Taxi No: WB04D 2354

Place: In front of Metro cinema on JL Nehru Road

Destination: Behala

Driver: I need Rs 50 more than the meter reading.

Metro: I will pay by the meter.

Driver: Okay, pay me Rs 30 extra.

Metro: No, I won’t pay more than the actual fare.

Driver: Then you stay right here.

Taxi leaves

Taxi No: WB04D 9592

Place: The JL Nehru Road-Lindsay Street crossing

Destination: Thakurpukur

Driver: I won’t go by the meter, pay me Rs 450.

Metro: But the fare is hardly Rs 170 from here.

Driver: The route is full of traffic snarls and I will have to return empty. Hence the extra fare.

Metro: I will complain to the police.

Driver (Starts laughing and points to number plate) That is the taxi number. Note it down and do whatever you want to.

Taxi No: WB04F 4460

Place: Same as above. We approach the second taxi in the queue.

Destination: Thakurpukur

Driver: If the taxi ahead of mine doesn’t go, I can’t.

He gets off the car and shares a laugh with the other driver

Metro: What is your name and the number of your taxi?

Driver: Take down the number….There is a sergeant at the Esplanade crossing. You can go and complain to him.

Taxi No: WB04C 0125

Place: Park Street-JL Nehru Road crossing

Destination: Kasba

Metro: Will you go?

Driver: Doesn’t say anything; shakes his head and looks the other way. On seeing Metro approach a sergeant standing nearby, he revs up and speeds away towards The Park

Taxi no: WB04E 1346

Place: In front of The Park, Park Street

Destination: Kasba

Driver: Where in Kasba? Near the Bypass?

Metro: No, Rathtala, near Bijon Setu.

Driver: Okay, get in, but I will take the Bypass.

Metro: Why should I travel so much? It is a shorter route via Gariahat.

Driver: Then I won’t go.

Taxi No: WB04C 6744

Place: In front of Music World, Park Street

Destination: Gariahat

Driver: I won’t go that way.

Metro: But you are supposed to take passengers wherever they need to go at any time of day.

Driver: Don’t irritate me, find another taxi.

Taxi No: WB04B 2315

Place: In front of Olypub, Park Street

Destination: Joka

Driver: I can go till Taratala, you take another taxi from there.

Metro: You are supposed to take me wherever I want to go.

Driver: Keep standing here. No taxi will take you till Joka.

Taxi No: WB04A 5607

Place: In front of St. Xavier’s College, Park Street

Destination: Behala

Driver: Behala Chowrasta?

Metro: No, near Behala Tram Depot.

Driver: That will be Rs 300.

Metro: Why? It is more than double the fare.

Driver: Sit if you can pay or walk.

Two girls approach the taxi for a ride till Jadavpur. The driver demands Rs 300, the girls agree.

Taxi No: WB04E 6462

Place: Deshapriya Park

Destination: Nagerbazar

Driver: I won’t go.

Metro: Why?

Driver: Because I am going home now.

Metro: But you aren’t going anywhere, you are looking for passengers!

Driver: My wish, I will go when I want to.

Taxi No: WB04E 8674

Place: Rashbehari crossing

Destination: Shyambazar

Driver: I will take you there if you pay Rs 350.

Metro: But why so much extra?

Driver: Are you new to the city? This is the rule at night.

Metro: Maybe you don’t know the rules?

Driver: Damn the rules! Pay extra or don’t waste my time.

Taxi No: WB04B 2466

Place: In front of SSKM Hospital

Destination: Kankurgachhi

Driver: We will take the Bypass, right?

Metro: Why? We will go through Sealdah.

Driver: You will go by the meter, you will not take the Bypass. Do you expect everything to happen your way?

Grumbles and drives away

Taxi No: WB04A 4660

Place: In front of Rabindra Sadan Metro station

Destination: Howrah

Driver: That will be Rs 100 extra.

Metro: But why? It is not even 9pm.

Driver: Okay, give me Rs 50 extra.

Metro: I will pay only the legitimate fare.

Driver smirks and moves away

Taxi No: WB04E 9447

Place: Chandni Chowk

Destination: Salt Lake

Driver: Where in Salt Lake? Near City Centre?

Metro: No, I will get off at PNB.

Driver: Then I won’t go, try someone else.

Taxi No: WB25A 1302

Place: Government Place North

Destination: Hospital on the Bypass

Driver: Waves his hand to say no and parks taxi at a distance

Taxi No: WB04E 0116

Place: Mission Row-Bentinck Street crossing

Destination: Bypass

Driver: Slows down, cranes his neck to hear where we want to go and speeds away, not bothering to reply

Taxi No: WB04E 9319

Place: Ganesh Chandra Avenue

Destination: Salt Lake Karunamoyee

Driver: I won’t go that side, I will go to Behala.

Accelerates and drives away

Taxi No: WB04D 0260

Gujarat moves SC over Lokayukta ruling by HC

2012-01-19T19:41:00.001+05:30

New Delhi, Jan 19 (PTI): The Gujarat Government on Thursday approached the Supreme Court challenging a High Court order upholding the governor’s decision to appoint Justice R A Mehta as the Lokayukta of the state.

While upholding the appointment of retired judge Mehta as the Lokayukta, Justice VM Sahai of the high court had said that Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s “pranks” had sparked a “constitutional mini crisis”.

Justice Sahai, who was hearing the petition against Justice Mehta’s appointment after a two-member bench came out with a split opinion on October 11, said Modi's ”questionable” conduct of “stonewalling” the appointment threatened the rule of law.

There was no good reason to reject the name of Justice Mehta once the Chief Justice had overturned the objections of the Chief Minister, he said.

Modi had insisted that Justice J R Vora be appointed as Lokayukta but the Chief Justice had pointed out that the judge had been appointed as the Director of the Gujarat State Judicial Academy. If the Chief Minister's choice had been accepted, it would have set a “pernicious trend” and would have propitiated the public functionaries who were likely to fall within the scanner of Lokayukta and destroyed the integrity of the institution as envisaged, Justice Sahai said.

Gujarat Governor Kamla Beniwal had appointed Justice Mehta to the post of Lokayukta on August 25. The post had been lying vacant for the last eight years.

Home beckons Japan war martyrs

2012-01-19T19:39:00.000+05:30

Japanese team arrives in Guwahati to exhume soldiers & take them back
The Telegraph, Calcutta, January 19 , 2012

Guwahati, Jan. 18: A Japanese team today stood in Gauhati War Cemetery trying to exhume the remains of 11 compatriot soldiers who were killed and buried in this foreign land during World War II over 60 years ago.

If and when they find the remains, they will return home, conduct their last rites and give the soldiers their final resting ground.

“According to our records, the remains of the soldiers were buried here in wooden boxes but we have not found any remains till now. If we find anything we have been instructed to take them back to Japan for rituals. Digging is not complete and will continue tomorrow,” a Japanese team member said at the cemetery, which was set up by Commonwealth War Graves Commission during World War II.

The team comprised Ken Miyashita, deputy director of office of foreign affairs, planning division of War Victim’s Relief Social Welfare and War Victim’s Relief Bureau, ministry of health, labour and welfare of Japan, Kiju Matsubayashi, first secretary of embassy of Japan in India and Masahiro Takeda of the planning division of War Victim’s Relief Bureau.

The team reached here yesterday and will stay here till January 23 to carry out research and forensic examinations of the remains, if required.

None of the team members spoke English and communicated only through an interpreter, who explained that the officials were unwilling to speak to the media.

That left a lot of questions unanswered.

No one, for instance, could explain why the Japanese government wants to exhume the remains of the soldiers over 60 years after they were buried.

The 11 graves dug out today going by the epitaphs included those of 10 soldiers and a lance corporal of the Japanese forces who had died during World War II from 1939 to 1945. Hachivetsuyoshi (buried in 1944), Urata Yotaka (1944), Ishiwara Hiroya, Shotasabaro (1944), Ikdimiraisao (1944), Kito Zwao (1944), Komatsutomoshige (1944), Morata Doshu (1944), Yamado Kesakti (1941), Okamoto (1945) and Miyata Kotsuo (lance corporal), buried in 1944, were on the officials’ list.

Most of these soldiers must have been involved in the World War II’s “China-Burma-India theatre”, since 1944 saw the battle of Kohima and the battle of Imphal, two of the major battles in the region.

The Japanese team reached here yesterday on the exhumation mission following a request from the Japanese government to New Delhi.

The state home department received a letter on December 14 last year from the ministry of external affairs and the Japanese embassy seeking help for carry out the exhumation and examination of the remains.

The graves were dug in the presence of the district magistrate, forensic experts and an official from the state archaeology department. When asked if they would carry the soil from the graves, the team said, “We have no such instructions.”

According to the regional manager of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Salew Pfotte, there are 486 graves in the Gauhati War Cemetery, of soldiers belonging to the UK, Japan, China, besides 18 unknown soldiers.

The cemetery was established during World War II for burial of soldiers brought from various military hospitals in the pre-Independence eastern region, including Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Later, other coffins were brought in by the Army Graves Service from Amaribari Military Cemetery, Sylhet Military Cemetery, Mohachara Cemetery, Nowgong Civil Cemetery and Gauhati Civil Cemetery, where permanent maintenance of bodies could not be assured.

Coffins were also brought to the cemetery from isolated sites in the Lushai Hills (now Mizoram) and from civil cemeteries in Badarpur, Cooch Behar, Darjeeling, Dhubri, Dibrugarh, Dinjan, Katapahar, Lebong, Lumding, Shillong and Silchar, in 1952, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

SINNERS AS LAMENTERS - What was the PM doing at the Indian Science Congress?

2012-01-16T13:15:00.001+05:30

Ashok Mitra, The Telegraph, Calcutta, January 16 , 2012

The Indian Science Congress had its annual session in Bhubaneswar as the old year was ending. The prime minister was there; India, he was heard lamenting, lagged way behind China in the pursuit of scientific and technological development. His comment has diverse implications.

Comparisons are supposed to be invidious. Politicians in, or aspiring to, power nonetheless find it difficult not to succumb to the weakness. They dearly love their people to rouse the latent animal spirit and try harder so as to win greater laurels for the nation in different spheres. This, in a way, is also the mantra of the market. President Obama wants American children to concentrate on their studies in order that they might succeed against competition from Chinese and Indian students. Our prime minister does not ask our scientists to do better than their American counterparts; that will be lèse majesté. But it is all right for him to refer to China: is it not a matter of shame we should fall behind China in the field of science? Something has to be done about it.

The more squeamish ones may not feel comfortable with either the propriety or the aesthetics of the prime minister’s dragging in a neighbouring country when his overt concern is over what is happening or not happening in our own midst. Values and systems differ between countries, circumstances vary; comparing dissimilar categories, it will therefore be suggested, is neither here nor there. But leave that issue aside. The more important thing surely is to unravel the factors underlying the relative lacklustreness of scientific achievements in India. We need not travel far, nor does the prime minister, in this quest. One of the possible reasons for our backwardness is staring glaringly at our face.

Pray, why was the prime minister at the Science Congress, what earthly business did he have there? An annual session of the Science Congress, one would have thought, is an intensely internal affair of the scientists, where they assemble to talk shop, that is, discuss themes and puzzles that challenge them. It provides them a forum for exchanging, in their own code and lingua franca, thoughts and ideas. Instead, the Indian Science Congress, like several similar other congregations of the academia and the cognoscenti, has increasingly assumed the character of a jamboree.

The Bhubaneswar session, for instance, was reportedly attended by, hold your breath, as many as 16,000 delegates. If true, nothing could be more grotesque. A fair number of this crowd, it is worth suspecting, had perhaps not even the remotest connection with science and technology, quite a few of them were drawn in the manner of tourists, or persuaded to be there as tourist attraction. Those attending included two Nobel laureates whose spheres of interests are quite some distance from science and technology. It was no Science Congress, but a public-relations event.

Besides, once a technical concourse assumes the features of a carnival, anything goes. It does not take long for a carnival to turn into a racket either. The atmosphere gets spoiled, scientific pursuit tends to lose its focus, genuine scientists begin to lose ground to hucksters, the inevitable consequence is a pall of shadow over the quality of scientific research, achievements shrivel.

Such intrusion of waffle has a bit of ancient history. Way back in the 1930s, the Indian National Congress was the most formidable platform from where nationalist leaders would spit fire. Most of it was pure froth. But, in the mêlée, Jawaharlal Nehru stood out for the kind of things he said and the manner he said them. He did not talk the diction of a run-of-the-mill politician. He sounded rational, extolled the scientific spirit and gave evidence of an earnestness to harness the wonders of science for the social and economic progress of a future India. The Indian scientific community was bowled over. Here was the man of destiny for them, he was bound to understand the problems confronting science and scientists in the country about to see the dawn of freedom. The nationalist lobby in the Science Congress moved fast. Nehru, no scientist by any definition, was elected president of the Indian Science Congress. He made a beautiful oration, at the annual session, which was on schedule, but whether his imposture served the cause of either science or India remains an open question.

Those who sponsored him knew what they were doing though. Nehru was the future, he was soon going to take over the governance of the country. His patronage would mean access to funds and an escape route from encountering bureaucratic hurdles. In many respects, these enthusiasts were dead right. Without Nehru as prime minister, it would have been most improbable for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the whole chain of national science laboratories, or the atomic energy department to get established that quickly. But patronage, particularly where the milieu is overwhelmingly feudal, a written constitution with democratic pretensions notwithstanding, has other fallouts. It leads to cronyism, a natural enemy of rationality and, in the long range, a corrupting influence vitiating the system.

It also means subtle, and not so subtle, imprest of the government’s priorities on the mindset of the scientific community. The concept of tied grants seeks to attain sovereign power. Funds flow for scientific investigations, but funds flow relatively more generously to areas where the government is intensely desirous of a scientific or technological breakthrough for purposes of the State, not so much for purposes of science.

The government is in a hurry. It wants scientists to deliver, pronto, an invention or a product or a datum which will have immediate application in military strategy or the making of foreign policy. The emphasis in the allocation of funds accordingly develops a built-in bias. For instance, the overwhelming accent in nuclear research in the country in the immediate past few decades has been more specifically on the development of delivery mechanisms. This has affected research all the way down the academic stream, including re-drafting of courses, syllabi.

In any event, in the frenzy of achieving scientific and technological breakthroughs in a fiercely combative global framework, the tendency grows to dub those who love to stick to basic research as idlers, dreamers or lotus-eaters. That is precisely it. Science advances because individuals — or at most a close group of individuals — while away time to think and dream and speculate. They play with puzzles in their mind. With some puzzles, they reach a dead end. They do not, however, like to give up. They weave another puzzle and keep toying with solutions.

There is a huge waste of resources involved, resources that are a burden on society, but perchance if a magic result comes up, the face of human civilization can get changed. This is how science has progressed past the citadels of history. There is enormous outlay in terms of thought, time, financial resources. All this has to be considered as investment in the cause of science and human progress; waste of this kind is the other name for investment.

All this apart, is it not ironic that so-called received knowledge desists from regarding as waste the continuous piling of nuclear weapons, embodying trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars? The mounting stockpile is judged as indispensable for national security and transcends desiccated cost accounting. The criterion is different for basic research, which is often treated as akin to idling. It tends to be forgotten that had not one or two odd scientists once upon a time indulged in idle speculation over the mysteries of basic particles, there would have been no ushering in of the nuclear era, and the luscious enterprise of nuclear weaponry would not have seen the light of day.

The Republic of India has been sucked into the nuclear delirium. The State’s priorities have become priorities of the scientific community. It is not an unfair question to raise whether this has not stunted the growth of science in the country. Politicians hanging about in academic gatherings, where the agenda ought to be severely scholastic, are no help to the advancement of science. The prime minister was sorrowful over the state of science and technology in the country. He was actually incriminating himself and his tribe. They themselves are the prime sinners.

A PRIME MINISTER IN PERIL - Ramachandra Guha

2012-01-15T01:18:00.001+05:30

A PRIME MINISTER IN PERIL - From warm welcome to disappointing failure
Ramachandra Guha, TT, December 31 , 2011

Soon after the general elections of 2004, I heard a sociologist and an economist exchange stories about the new prime minister. Back in the early 1990s, the sociologist was asked to write a recommendation for one of Manmohan Singh’s daughters. Since he knew (and admired) her work, he agreed readily. When the young lady’s CV reached him, he found that she had gone to some considerable trouble to hide the fact that her father was finance minister. She was staying with her parents in their large Lutyens bungalow; yet had chosen to use as her mailing address a friend’s flat in East Delhi.

The economist said he had a better story. In the late 1970s, when Manmohan Singh was a secretary in the finance ministry, the two had lunch at the India International Centre. After the meal, the economist asked Singh: “Do you mind if after dropping you at South Block, your car drops me at my office on Ring Road?” “Do you mind if it didn’t?” answered Singh, a brush-off as gentle as has ever been delivered or received.

When he assumed office in 2004, Manmohan Singh was by some distance India’s best educated prime minister. He was the most widely travelled since Jawaharlal Nehru. He was the most honest since Lal Bahadur Shastri. He had a wide range of experience in government, having served as, among other things, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and finance minister.

There were great expectations of Singh as prime minister; few of which have been fulfilled. Those who thought that the co-author (with P.V. Narasimha Rao) of the first generation of economic reforms would further free entrepreneurs from State control have been disappointed. So have those who hoped the experienced administrator would modernize the civil service by encouraging the lateral entry of professionals, those who believed that the former secretary general of the South Commission would adopt a foreign policy independent of Western (more specifically, American) pressures; and most of all, those who imagined that a person of rectitude and personal honesty would promote probity in politics and administration.

This last failure explains, among other things, the appeal of Anna Hazare, a man whose intellectual vision is as confined as Singh’s is large. In the early part of 2011, as the evidence of cabinet collusion in the Commonwealth Games and 2G scams accumulated, the prime minister continued to shield his corrupt ministers. After Anna Hazare’s fasts, a popular, countrywide movement against corruption began to take shape. Singh still would not act. In the popular imagination, the prime minister was now seen as indecisive and self-serving, his fellow septuagenarian, Anna Hazare, as courageous and self-sacrificing. It is a mark of how disappointing Manmohan Singh’s second term has been that it has allowed an authoritarian village reformer — with little understanding of what Mohandas K. Gandhi said, did, or meant — to claim the mantle of the Mahatma.

About 18 months ago, Khushwant Singh wrote that Manmohan Singh was the best prime minister India has had. Khushwant is reliable on some matters: such as the history of the Sikhs, the attractions of Scotch whisky, and the poetry of Muhammed Iqbal. He is a man of enormous charm, with a large fund of good and bad jokes. But in so far as politicians go he has a disastrous track record. He once saw in the ruffian Sanjay Gandhi the redeemer of the nation.

Even at the time, Khushwant’s praise of Manmohan Singh seemed excessive. Now it seems ludicrous. But why has this honest, intelligent, experienced man, whose appointment as prime minister in 2004 was so widely welcomed, been such a disappointment in office? Here are four reasons, roughly in order of importance:

1. His timidity, bordering at times on obsequiousness, towards the president of the Congress. Singh is evidently so grateful to Sonia Gandhi for having made him prime minister that he yields to her on matters which are within his preserve rather than hers — such as the appointment of ministers, governors and ambassadors, and the framing of public policies and laws.

In truth, Sonia Gandhi needs Singh almost as much as he needs her. She did not become prime minister in 2004 because she knew she was plainly unqualified — never having worked in government, how could she conduct cabinet meetings, have official meetings with visiting presidents and prime ministers, participate in international conferences on climate change, and so on? Sonia Gandhi had bestowed on Singh an unexpected gift; however, by accepting it, he had done her a favour too. He should have made more of this reciprocity — by, for example, insisting that incompetent or malevolent ministers be replaced.

2. His timidity in not contesting a Lok Sabha seat. Singh was, by my count, the fifth person to be sworn in as prime minister while in the Rajya Sabha. The other four sought election to the Lower House at an early date. Surely in the 2009 elections, at least, he should have asked for a Lok Sabha seat, from a safe constituency if need be? This is a major source of the prime minister’s weakness, of his inability to assert his authority over the cabinet, or garner respect from the Congress, from its coalition partners, and, perhaps above all, from the Opposition.

3. His lack of judgment when it comes to choosing key advisers. The two principal secretaries in the prime minister’s office have been a notorious intriguer and a Gandhi family loyalist respectively. Unlike their predecessors, neither commands respect within the civil service at large. His two media advisers have been PhD’s turned editorial writers, with little experience of on-the-ground reporting, and scant understanding of the power of television to make and unmake images. A less intellectual media manager might have insisted that the prime minister go out often into the countryside, to meet and mingle with the aam admi.

4. His keenness to win good chits from Western leaders. Singh is reluctant to travel to most states of the Indian Union, but always happy to fly between continents for G-20 meetings and the like. As is well known, the one time he asserted himself was when canvassing for the Indo-US nuclear agreement. This treaty will do little to meet our energy needs in an efficient or sustainable manner. And Indo-US relations were on an even keel anyway. But, as when he told George W. Bush that “the people of India love you”, his campaign for the nuclear deal suggested that for him a good press in the West sometimes mattered more than focused action at home.

In his first term as prime minister, Singh did not notably enhance his reputation; nor, however, did he seriously diminish it. If he had retired from office in 2009, history would have judged him more kindly. If he thought himself able to carry on, then he should have sought election to the Lok Sabha. He did neither — to find his credibility steadily eroding. It was still possible, in the winter of 2010-11, for Singh to have retrieved some lost ground, by sacking Suresh Kalmadi and A. Raja as soon as the scale of the scandals they oversaw became evident, and by insisting that the Congress break its ties with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, even if that meant the fall of the United Progressive Alliance government in New Delhi.

These successive failures signal a character trait that one does not usually associate with upright and intelligent individuals —namely, a rather desperate desire to cling to office, at whatever cost to one’s reputation, one’s party, and one’s nation

China's own Twitter 'Sina Weibo'

2012-01-14T23:44:00.000+05:30

Press Trust of India, January 12, 2012

Beijing: Notching up the likes of Bill Gates, Tom Cruise, IMF Chief Christine Lagarde and Indian Embassy, China's own Twitter 'Sina Weibo' is gaining popularity world over, having attracted 250 million subscribers.

Sina Weibo has said that it now has about 450,000 users in the United States out of its total of 250 million as of late November.

There is no official record of the nationality of the US users. They could be US citizens, Chinese students or people from other countries, state run China Daily reported.

Its users included philanthropist Bill Gates of Microsoft, International Monetary Fund Chief Christine Lagarde and actor Tom Cruise, who started using it to step up interaction with Chinese public, the report said.

Lagarde made her Weibo debut in early November, posting her first message which reads: "Hello Sina Weibo, looking forward to sharing updates here."

By the end of the day, Lagarde's account had drawn about 40,000 followers and had more than 1,000 comments. She currently commands 150,000 followers.

Gates is a popular Sina Weibo user, currently with 2.19 million followers.

Recognising Weibo's importance, almost all foreign missions here including the Indian Embassy have started their Weibo tweets to highlight their activities and policies of
their countries.

The site also helped politicians like San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, a Chinese-American, to reach Chinese audiences during the recent mayoral elections.

During the election day in November, Lee posted messages calling for support. Later that day the first elected Chinese-American mayor posted to his followers on the site: "Thank you San Francisco!"

Kenneth Wisnefski, founder and CEO of WebiMax, a US-based search engine optimisation firm, said Sina Weibo is following the same development pattern as Twitter, which took about two years to be fully accepted before it became the dominant social media platform it is today.

Weibo's overseas users mostly utilise the service to reach Chinese audiences. And for celebrities, their reason is quite simple: to promote themselves or their programme in China.

China's total Internet users hit 450 million early this year - larger than the whole US population - and that number is expected to grow.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/chinas-own-twitter-weibo-goes-global-gates-cruise-sign-up-166288&cp

China's total Internet users 450 million - larger than US population

2012-01-14T23:43:00.001+05:30

China's total Internet users hit 450 million early this year - larger than the whole US population - and that number is expected to grow.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/chinas-own-twitter-weibo-goes-global-gates-cruise-sign-up-166288&cp

Indian bureaucracy worst in Asia, says HK survey report

2012-01-13T00:43:00.000+05:30

The Statesman, January 13, 2012
PTI (11 Jan 2012)

SINGAPORE, 11 JAN: Indian bureaucracy is the worst in Asia with a 9.21 rating out of 10, according to a report by a prestigious consulting firm based in Hong Kong.
India fared worse than Vietnam (rated at 8.54), Indonesia (8.37), Philippines (7.57) and China (7.11), said the report by Political & Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd released today.
Singapore remained the best with a rating of 2.25, followed by Hong Kong (3.53), Thailand (5.25) Taiwan (5.57), Japan (5.77), South Korea (5.87) and Malaysia (5.89).
The report said India's inefficient bureaucracy was largely responsible for most of the biggest complaints that business executives have about the country.
The complaints included inadequate infrastructure and corruption, where officials were willing to accept under-the-table payments and companies were tempted to pay to overcome bureaucratic inertia and gain government favours, the report claimed.
The report also highlighted onerous and fickle tax, environmental and other regulations that could make business in India “so frustrating and expensive”.
It said dealing with the court system in India was an unattractive option for companies, and would be best to avoid it.
The bureaucrats were rarely held accountable for wrong decisions and it would be extremely difficult to challenge them when there were disagreements, it said. “This gives them (bureaucrats) terrific powers and could be one of the main reasons why average Indians as well as existing and would-be foreign investors perceive Indian bureaucrats as negatively as they do,” said the report.
But there were plus points when India was compared to countries within the economic development group.
In the 2011-12 Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, India ranked behind China but ahead of Russia and Brazil for the burden of government regulations as well as for the burden of Customs procedures. India was also second to Brazil but well ahead of China and Russia for the quality of regulation and supervision of the securities exchange, said the report.
India was also better than Brazil, Russia and China as the fastest place to set up a new business and to deal with construction permits, and was the second fastest place to deal with export and import procedures, the report said.

Doomsday Clock Moved to 5 Minutes to Midnight: Focus on Global Warming & Energy

2012-01-11T18:21:00.003+05:30

Zachary Shahan, Clean Technica, January 10, 2012

The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic clock focused on how close we are to tremendous global catastrophe… or doomsday, was moved from 6 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight today.

Reasons for Moving the Clock Forward
A handful of reasons were provided for moving the Doomsday Clock’s hands for just the 20th time since it was unveiled in 1947, including increasing worry regarding the original topic of the clock’s concern — nuclear proliferation. One of the growing concerns over the years, however, has been global warming, and our inaction on this topic, combined with some politicians complete rejection of science on this matter, was a key factor in moving the clock forward today.

“The scientists also noted how Republicans seeking the GOP nomination were trying to outdo each other in denying climate science,” The Guardian reports.

“It is five minutes to midnight,” the scientists said. “Two years ago it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed.”

“A cross-cutting issue through the entire discussion is the worrisome trend to reject or diminish the significance of what science says is the characteristic of a problem,” said Robert Socolow of Princeton’s Environmental Institute. “There is a general judgement among us that we need the political leadership to affirm the primacy of science.”

Additionally, the nuclear disasters in Japan last year contributed greatly to the clock’s most recent tick.

“They warned that the Fukushima meltdown once more exposed the dangers of nuclear power – not just because of technology but because of management failures.”

Suffice it to say, we here at CleanTechnica agree with the scientists, and it is largely why we do what we do.

In addition to the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuel energy and the concerns of nuclear energy, the unsustainable nature of reliance on oil, coal, and other limited resources was also cited. If only we could harness power from the sun, wind, and water….

History of the Doomsday Clock

For those interested in a little more history, the clock was first put into use in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. They have maintained the clock ever since. The clock has ticked forward or backward 20 times in those 65 years. The furthest it’s ever been from midnight was 17 minutes (after the break-up of the Soviet Union 20 years ago) and the closest it’s ever been is 2 minutes from midnight (in 1953, after the US’ and Soviet Union’s testing of their first thermonuclear devices). In 2010, the clock was moved backwards to 6 minutes to midnight out of optimism over global leader’s positions on key issues, but lack of action has led to greater concern.

More history on the Doomsday Clock, including all changes, can be found on Wikipedia, of course.

Source: Clean Technica

Tears rolled down my eyes when I saw Indian soil: Trinidad and Tobago PM Kamla Persad

2012-01-11T01:12:00.001+05:30

Srikant Tripathy & Saurabh Sharma, TNN & Agencies | Jan 10, 2012

JAIPUR: They may have been away for generations and grown up thousands of miles away, but it appears that the emotions attached to the country of forefathers gets passed down through the genes and is kept alive through the culture. This was more than evident during Trinidad and Tobago PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar's visit to India this week. From a family which had migrated from Bihar, she rose to become the first woman head of the Caribbean nation. In an interview to TOI on Monday, she talks of her roots and deepening the bonds with India. After attending the Pravasi Diwas in Jaipur, she flies to Bihar to visit her ancestral village. She touched the feet of President Pratibha Patil when they met.

Read the TOI interview here: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/pravasi-bhartiya-news/Tears-rolled-down-my-eyes-when-I-saw-Indian-soil-Trinidad-and-Tobago-PM-Kamla-Persad/articleshow/11431099.cms

70% of milk in Delhi, country is adulterated

2012-01-11T01:01:00.000+05:30

TOI, Jan 10, 2012 (Kounteya Sinha, TNN)

NEW DELHI: Beware, your daily glass of good health could actually be doing you harm. As much as 70% of milk samples picked up from the capital by a government agency failed to conform to standards.

Of the 71 samples randomly taken from Delhi for testing by the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), 50 were found to be contaminated with glucose and skim milk powder (SMP), which is usually added to milk in the lean season to enhance volumes.

Elsewhere in the 33 states and UTs study, milk was found adulterated with detergent, fat and even urea, besides the age-old dilution with water. Across the country, 68.4% of the samples were found contaminated.

Only in Goa and Puducherry did 100% of the samples tested conform to required standards. At the other end were West Bengal, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Mizoram, where not a single sample tested met the norms.

Other prominent states fared just a shade better. Around 89% of the samples tested from Gujarat, 83% from Jammu & Kashmir, 81% from Punjab, 76% from Rajasthan, 70% from Delhi and Haryana and 65% from Maharashtra failed the test. Around half of the samples from Madhya Pradesh (48%) also met a similar fate.

States with comparatively better results included Kerala where 28% of samples did not conform to the FSSAI standards, Karnataka (22%), Tamil Nadu (12%) and Andhra Pradesh (6.7%).

The samples were collected randomly and analysed from 33 states totaling a sample size of 1,791. Just 31.5% of the samples tested (565) conformed to the FSSAI standards while the rest 1,226 (68.4%) failed the test.

A study conducted by Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) across 33 states has found that milk was adulterated with detergent, fat and even urea, besides the age-old practice of diluting it with water. Across the country, 68.4% of the samples were found contaminated.

These were sent to government laboratories like Department of Food and Drug Testing of Puducherry, Central Food Laboratory in Pune, Food Reasearch and Standardization Laboratory in Ghaziabad, State Public Health Laboratory in Guwahati and Central Food Laboratory, Kolkata, for testing against presence of adulterants like fat, neutralizers, hydrogen peroxide, sugar, starch, glucose, urea, detergent, formalin and vegetable fat.

Detergent was found in 103 samples (8.4%). "This was because milk tanks were not properly washed. Detergents in milk can cause health problems," FSSAI official told TOI. The non-conforming samples in rural areas numbered 381 (31%) out of which 64 (16.7%) were packet milk and 317 (83.2%) were loose samples.

In urban areas, the number of non-confirming samples were 845 (68.9%) out of which 282 (33.3%) were packed and 563 (66.6%) were loose.

The most common adulteration was that of fat and solid not food (SNF), found in 574 (46.8%) of the non-conforming samples. This, scientists say, is because of dilution of milk with water. The second highest parameter of non-conformity was skim milk powder in 548 samples (44.69%) which includes presence of glucose in 477 samples. Glucose could have been added to milk probably to enhance SNF.

The report asked state enforcement authorities to check whether the new FSSAI rules are being complied with. An earlier first-of-its-kind study of milk boiling habits that involved 2,400 women across eight major cities had found that Chandigarh leads the pack in boiling milk, doing it more than three times a day. While 84% women in Kolkata boiled milk for more than five minutes, about 46% of women in Pune preferred to boil milk in high temperatures. The study, by the Indian Medical Academy, said, "About 49% boil milk more than thrice before consumption. Around 56% boil it for more than 5 minutes, and 73% don't stir while boiling," said Dr Pawan Gupta, IMA.

The 87-crore dalit CM

2012-01-11T00:56:00.002+05:30

TOI (IANS) Jan 10, 2012

NEW DELHI: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati has topped the list of chief ministers in the five election-bound states with maximum assets: worth Rs 87 crore, according to the National Election Watch and the Association for Democratic Reforms.

"RTI responses from five states showed Mayawati has the highest assets at Rs.87 crore," said the study. " Chief minister of Manipur Okram Ibobi Singh has the lowest assets worth -- just Rs.6 lakh."

Punjab's Parkash Singh Badal is the only chief minister who has got a criminal case, related to cheating and forgery, against him, said the study. He has assets worth Rs 9 crore.

In comparison, Uttarakhand Chief Minister BC Khanduri has assets worth Rs 1.69 crore and Goa counterpart Digambar Kamat has assets worth Rs 3.2 crore.

All five chief ministers are graduates. Khanduri is a post graduate.

Up above the world so high

2012-01-09T02:00:00.001+05:30

From The Telegraph 8 Jan 2012

On June 5, 1921, on a windswept plain in Tibet, Lt-Col. Howard Bury, the leader of the Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition, had a very unhappy task to perform. He was to preside over the last rites of Dr Alexander Mitchell Kellas, 53, who was the first casualty of the expedition and died before the team could reach the foot of Mount Everest. So, with Bury reading from Corinthians, surrounded by his team of Everest climbers and the Sherpas, Kellas was buried near the Tibetan fortress of Khamba Dzong in the shadow of the three mountains which he alone had climbed — Kangchenjau, Pauhunri and Chomiomo. As the team made its way to the Rongbuk base camp, one of the finest mountaineers of his generation passed into oblivion.

Kellas was no ordinary mountaineer. He was a Scottish doctor of chemistry, an expert in high-altitude physiology and, above all, a Himalayan explorer. He was the first to promulgate the theory that it would be possible to ascent Everest without artificial oxygen in his pioneering paper A consideration of the possibility of ascending Mount Everest. Fifty-eight years later, in 1978, Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler proved Kellas right when they made that epic first ascent, the climbers gasping for breath and crawling on all fours along the final summit ridge.

Kellas was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1868 and studied at University College, London. He travelled to Heidelberg, Germany, for his PhD and returned to take up a lectureship at Middlesex Hospital, where he was highly regarded as a chemistry teacher. But his first love remained mountaineering and exploration.

Kellas was reclusive to a fault and wrote very little about his exploits. He undertook eight Himalayan expeditions between 1907 and 1921. Six of them were in Sikkim, where he made the first ascents of Pauhunri (7,128 metres), Chomiomo (6,829 metres), Sentinel Peak (6,470 metres), Langpo (6,950 metres) and Kangchenjau (6,920 metres), assisted solely by Sherpas. On his first Himalayan expedition in 1907, Kellas had hired Swiss guides, but he soon realised he preferred the Sherpas from Darjeeling. “Really, they are the most splendid fellows,” he wrote. “They are strong, good-natured if fairly treated and since they are Buddhists, there is no difficulty about special food for them — a point surely in their favour at high altitudes.” It was primarily due to Kellas’s pioneering efforts that links were formed between British mountaineers and the Sherpas, which became the backbone of all Everest expeditions since 1921.

In 1920, Kellas undertook an expedition to Kamet in Garhwal where, along with Henry Morshead, he tested oxygen equipment at high altitudes in preparation for the first Everest expedition the next year. Kellas would possibly have climbed Kamet had it not been for a porters' rebellion. Morshead later climbed up to 7,650 metres on Everest in 1922 accompanied by Mallory, Norton and Somervell.

In 1921, as a run-up to the Everest expedition, Kellas and a team of Sherpas made an unsuccessful attempt on Kabru (7,338 metres) in the Sikkim Himalayas. Nine days later, a weary Kellas started out on the Everest expedition to Tibet, which would be his last.

Tom Longstaff climbed Trishul (7,120 metres) in 1907 and supposedly held the high altitude record until 1930. But it was later proved by Kellas's biographer Ian Mitchell that the record belonged to Kellas, as Pauhunri, which he climbed in 1911, was eight metres higher than Trishul.

In 1930 the Kangchenjunga expedition led by Gunther Dyrenfurth had named a shapely 6,680-metre peak north of Jonsong as Kellas Peak. This peak, interestingly, is unclimbed till date and in 2009 a team of British mountaineers including Graham Hoyland and George Rodway, were able to reach the Kellas Col at 6,380 metres, where avalanches and crevasses prevented them from making a summit bid.

Kellas has always been overshadowed by the likes of Mallory, Smythe and Shipton, but Everest historian Walt Unsworth in his epic Everest - A Mountaineering History, wrote: "In terms of Himalayan experience he [Kellas] was the greatest of all."

Kellas’s years in anonymity may now end. The story of his life has been documented in Prelude to Everest: Alexander Kellas, Himalayan Mountaineer, by Ian R. Mitchell and George Rodway, published in 2011. It should finally give the explorer his deserving place in the annals of mountaineering.

Sujoy Das (The writer is a Calcutta-based photographer and trekker)

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

2012-01-09T01:42:00.003+05:30

LOOMING LARGE - Gentlemen without oxygen

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest By Wade Davis, The Bodley Head, Rs 699

From the outset, the British adopted a proprietory attitude towards Mount Everest, particularly after the Great Trigonometrical Survey revealed it to be the world’s highest peak. This persisted after World War, or the Great War, as Wade Davis — the author of this dense, packed, but fascinating book — insists on calling it. Britain’s successful record of exploration in the 19th century had been challenged by Robert Peary reaching the North Pole (1909) and Roald Amundsen (1911) its opposite. Amundsen’s vastly better organized expedition beat the national hero, Robert Scott, whose incompetent leadership resulted in his death and those of his companions — but who then became a hero in glorious failure. (1912 is the centenary of Scott’s death).

Davis does not make this point, but the iconic figure of George Mallory, whose walk into mountaineering myth with his untrained companion, Sandy Irvine, seems just another glorious failure celebrated for the manly virtues of the English upper-middle class, sought to be inculcated in its single-sex public schools. But Davis is not out to simply recapture an era when exploration was supposedly more “pure” or “untainted” by commercial concerns. He has focused on the first three expeditions — 1921, 1922 and 1924. In his view, the quest for Everest may have begun as a “grand imperial gesture” to redeem the failure to reach the Poles, but it became a national exercise to assert national pride after the carnage of the Western Front.

Of the 26 climbers on the first three expeditions, 20 had seen service in the war. Six had been severely wounded — John de Vars Hazard’s wound had never healed completely, which severely limited his usefulness on the mountain. Others had lost siblings and close friends. Three as army surgeons had had to deal with the horrific consequences of sustained artillery fire and poison gas. Among them, Arthur Wakefield lost his religious faith, while Howard Somervell spent the rest of his life in a mission hospital in South India. To the mountaineers, Davis writes, Everest was “a sentinel in the sky, a place and destination of hope and redemption, a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad”. Davis chooses to begin with the memorial service on Great Gable, for climbers lost in the Great War — ironically on the same day that Mallory and Irvine disappeared — and that sets the tone for the rest of the book.

There may have been a search for some sort of transcendence, but Davis does not neglect the less elevated aspects of the expeditions, relating them to the social milieu, the attitudes and the human frailties of the day. What comes across is just how badly prepared and poorly equipped these expeditions were, for the technical and physical challenges that climbing Everest presented. (The discovery of Mallory’s body in 1999, clad in tweed, wool and hobnailed boots, with a hemp rope around his waist, only underscored this point.) There was a question of whether it was “gentlemanly” to use oxygen, with Arthur Hinks — dominant figure of the Everest Committee, with no climbing experience — arguing against its use. (Mallory eventually came round to its use, and most climbers use it today.) Still worse were the xenophobia and snobbery that deprived George Ingle Finch — arguably the best ice climber of his day — of a place on the final expedition because he was an Australian, outside the public school climbing fraternity, and because of his complicated private life. Climbers like Frank Smythe, one of the great figures of the inter-war period, were left out (he would climb Kamet and re- discover the Valley of Flowers). Men like Harold Raeburn, physically and mentally unfit, were included.

What add both length, but also human interest, to the story are the detailed biographies of the members of each expedition, particularly those who had lived with the constant threat of death during their war service. These potted biographies are included, the first time one of the major players enters the scene. The war becomes the unspoken backdrop. These men had seen so much of death that “life mattered less than the moments of being alive”. True to their upbringing these men never spoke of the war, but it was always present.

Inevitably, Mallory looms large, both because of what Davis calls his “unprecedented level of athleticism” and “a mental focus utterly modern in its intensity”. According to Geoffrey Keynes (brother of John Maynard Keynes), Mallory had a premonition of death, but could not resist the lure of the mountain. Yet he could be untidy, forgetful and technologically incompetent — his decision to take Irvine on his last climb rather than the more experienced Edward Norton or even Noel Odell, may have been because of the young man’s technical expertise with the oxygen cylinders.

Other figures, who have had a somewhat shadowy existence in the literature of the period come to life in this telling. Wade Davis is partial to Oliver Wheeler, a fellow Canadian, who later became surveyor general of India. It was Wheeler, the competent and gritty surveyor who found the northern approach to Everest, while Mallory simply flailed about on the first expedition. Davis is rightly critical of Mallory’s rather superior attitude towards this “colonial”, as he is about the outlook displayed by many of the sahibs towards the sherpas. Here, too, there were differences. For Mallory, Tibet was “a hateful place”; Somervell grieved at the death of the sherpas in 1922, and saw the beauty of the landscape (he was a talented artist).

The book’s subtitle gives a sense of its scope. Davis has succeeded in bringing together a vast amount of disparate material, although some may feel overwhelmed by its wealth of detail. (Among the many things that this, somewhat overlong, book explores is the culture of the public school and the homo-erotic atmosphere of early-20th-century Cambridge, the Bloomsbury group, Jallianwala Bagh, and the Younghusband expedition.) The book ends with an annotated bibliography, which is well worth reading. He is sceptical of claims that Mallory and Irvine reached the summit. But, in his words, “they did on that fateful day, climb higher than any human being before them….That they were able to do so, given all that they had endured, is surely achievement enough.”

DAYITA DATTA (A review from The Telegraph, 6 Jan 2012)

Accused dragged to court violating human rights norms

2012-01-09T01:11:00.002+05:30

The Statesman
7 January 2012
DURGAPUR, 7 JAN: Blatantly violating human rights norms, police dragged a youth with a rope fastened around his waist in front of hundreds of people in Durgapur Town this morning and that too to produce him before the magistrate who was attending a programme in an auditorium located about 200 metre away from the court compound.
Mr Amit Dey, who was accused of attempting to commit an offence under Section 109 of Crpc, was arrested last night and while taking him before Mr Biswajit Samaddar, the executive magistrate, who was attending a Voters’ Day programme in an auditorium, about 200 metres away from the Durgapur Sub-divisional Court compound, police officials forcefully put the rope in his waist.
Two police constables were guarding the accused from the court lock-up to the auditorium. Mr Dey was arrested by the New Township police from the Biddhannagar locality last evening. The magistrate said that police did a mistake in bringing him to the place where he was attending a government programme.
The state law minister, Mr Malay Ghatak, condemned the act saying the matter needs to be investigated properly.
Mr Ajay Nand, commissioner, Asansol-Durgapur Police, said this is a major violation and he has asked the concerned officer to file a report on this incident. sns

Anatomy of a cover-up - I

2012-01-09T01:08:00.001+05:30

Statesman Special Article
7 January 2012

Anatomy of a cover-up~I
CBI’s Handling Of The Jain Hawala Case

By Rajinder Puri

THERE has been much talk about the way in which CBI probes are subverted because the agency is not independent. One popular solution is to make the CBI accountable to a newly created Lokpal. Do most people who glibly offer solutions have a realistic idea of the problem? They should first acquaint themselves with how corruption is really covered up. They would know then that the challenge is much bigger than they realise. They would know then that the crisis is not just about corruption but about culture. They would know then that the problem is not just about the CBI but about the system. They would get some idea of this after recalling what happened in the Mother of all cover-ups ~ the Jain Hawala Case. This briefly is what happened in that case.
In 1991, a terrorist funding case was being investigated by the CBI. On 3 May 1991 a special investigating unit conducted searches in several places. One belonged to SK Jain from where Rs 58 lakh and a huge amount of foreign exchange were recovered. Along with these, proper books of accounts, as described by the Supreme Court, later popularly described as diaries, were also seized. The accounts revealed Rs 64 crore from abroad and their disbursement in India. It transpired that top politicians and bureaucrats were recipients of these foreign funds.
Among the top politicians and others were: Rajiv Gandhi, LK Advani, Devi Lal, Pranab Mukherjee, Yashwant Sinha, RK Dhawan, Arif Mohammed Khan, Kalpnath Rai, Balram Jakhar, Shiv Shankar, Moti Lal Vora, Har Mohan Dhawan, Rajesh Pilot, Natwar Singh, MJ Akbar, Jaffar Shariff, Lalit Suri, Rajesh Pilot, VC Shukla, Madhav Rao Scindia, Chiman Bhai Patel, ND Tewari, Arun Nehru, Kamal Nath, Arjun Singh, Ashok Sen, Kalyan Singh Kalvi, Ajit Panja, AK Antulay, Dinesh Singh, Madan Lal Khurana, Buta Singh, Sharad Yadav, Tajdar Babbar, Purshottam Kaushik, Krishan Kumar and many others.
There were three categories of recipients. A few received big amounts which were in fact their own monies stashed abroad brought into India by availing of the Hawala route. Secondly there were a few who received big amounts that were kickbacks paid by the Jains. But the vast majority were recipients of sometimes small amounts who accepted donations for the impending elections. In fairness, they were most likely unaware of the foreign source of the money. By accepting cash for elections they were merely acting by the prevailing political practice ~ legally wrong but morally accepted. Indeed Mr Devi Lal and Mr Sharad Yadav in the beginning were not at all secretive about having received the donations. However, after knowing the foreign source of the donations would not the recipients have felt vulnerable to blackmail? These VIP names remained outside public knowledge because the CBI did not leak them. The agency was vigorously pursuing the terrorist funding angle.
Mr OP Sharma, DIG, was in charge of the investigation. There was quick progress and seven people were arrested, among them Mool Chand Shah known as the Hawala King of Bombay. London and Interpol were contacted and foreign sources such as Mohini Jain in London and Tariq Bhai in Dubai were identified. But 20 accounts in the diary remain unidentified even till today. They could belong to anyone, including terrorists. Then something happened to derail the whole process. On the last working day of Prime Minister Chandrashekhar, 16 June 1991, one LK Kaul complained that OP Sharma had demanded a bribe from SK Jain for not arresting him. On behalf of SK Jain, Kaul claimed to have delivered Rs 10 lakh to Sharma. LK Kaul was neither an accused nor a witness.
It transpired that SK Jain later said he never knew Kaul, nor OP Sharma and he was never asked for a bribe nor did he pay one. Without contacting SK Jain the CBI quickly registered a case against DIG OP Sharma. It was the news of a top CBI officer being accused by the CBI which first attracted national media attention. Only after that gradually the details about the so-called Jain Diaries also surfaced in the media. After that operation cover-up proceeded rapidly.
With Sharma out of the probe five out of the seven arrested were released on bail. Only two Kashmiris were kept in jail. Subsequently not a single accused person was arrested and for all practical purpose they were all given amnesty. They included Mool Chand Shah who many years later was arrested by the Mumbai police for his role in funding the city’s bomb blasts in 1991! The entire investigation was buried and the public was kept in the dark. But a leak from the CBI found its way into the media. The Hindi daily, Jansatta, gave the whole story of the Jain Diaries written by Mr Ram Bahadur Rai. This was followed by exposure in Blitz weekly by Mr. Sanjay Kapur. This was followed by public interest litigation by Mr Vineet Narain and others in the Supreme Court (SC) demanding a proper probe. The petition was drafted under the direct supervision of noted lawyer Mr Ram Jethmalani. But before the court hearing he left on an urgent foreign visit. Later against established convention he appeared for one of the accused, Mr LK Advani. Did personal friendship prove too strong for observing professional norms? In Mr Jethmalani’s absence his named substitute Mr Shanti Bhushan wanted to withdraw the case from the Supreme Court and introduce it in the High Court. The petitioners disallowed this and eventually Mr Anil Dewan represented them. The SC admitted the petition and criticized the CBI for inaction stating: “This revealed a grave situation posing a serious threat even to the unity and integrity of the nation. The serious threat posed to the Indian polity could not be under-scored.”
The Jain Diaries were deposited with the Registrar of the SC. The CBI probe was subject to “continuous mandamus”, meaning that the agency had to periodically report to SC all progress in the probe. SC for all practical purpose was monitoring the investigation. Similar “continuous mandamus” is being followed by SC in the current 2G Spectrum probe. I opposed this move in the light of the experience gained in the Jain Hawala Case. Fortunately I was proved wrong. The SC in the present case is giving a better account of itself than it did in the Hawala case. What went wrong with the SC in the Jain Hawala Case?
(To be concluded)
The writer is a veteran journalist and cartoonist

SC notice on judges exam fraud

2012-01-03T15:20:00.000+05:30

The Telegraph, Calcutta, Tuesday , January 3 , 2012
New Delhi, Jan. 2 (PTI): The Supreme Court today issued notice to the Chhattisgarh High Court registry on a PIL alleging manipulation and irregularities in the conduct of a civil judges examination in 2008 to favour candidates related to certain judges, bureaucrats and politicians.

A bench of Justices R.M. Lodha and H.L. Gokhale issued the directive after counsel Prashant Bhushan, appearing for Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL), submitted that no action had been taken on the allegations even though the matter was brought to the notice of the then Chief Justice of India in 2008.

“The entire selection process of the exam is vitiated by favouritism and malafide, as candidates are close relatives of the senior judges and bureaucrats. The intelligent and suitable candidates have been sidelined to favour certain candidates related to senior judges and bureaucrats.” the petition said.

Bhushan alleged that a number of relatives and associates of sitting judges, bureaucrats and politicians have been selected by employing fraudulent means such as manipulations of answer sheets and serious irregularities in their evaluation.

The scrutiny of the answer sheets of two successful candidates, siblings of Radhey Shyam Sharma, the legal secretary of the Chhattisgarh government, indicates that the marks have been awarded only in numerals, not in words, thus disobeying the Chhattisgarh High Court’s order, the petition alleged.

The answer sheet of another candidate was also allegedly manipulated by altering marks to favour her, the petition said.

Scientists grow sperm in laboratory dish

2012-01-03T15:14:00.000+05:30

The Telegraph, Calcutta, Tuesday , January 3 , 2012

Jan. 2: Scientists have made a major breakthrough that could soon see human sperm grown in the laboratory.

The development opens up the possibility of infertile men being able to father their own children rather than using donor sperm.

Researchers in Germany and Israel were able to grow mouse sperm from a few cells in a laboratory dish.

In a world first a team headed by Prof. Stefan Schlatt, at Muenster University in Germany, were able to grow sperm by using germ cells. These are the cells in testicles that are responsible for sperm production.

Scientists grew the sperm by surrounding the germ cells in a special compound called agar jelly to create an environment similar to that found in testicles.

Prof. Mahmoud Huleihel, who also grew the sperm at Israel’s Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, said: “I believe it will eventually be possible to routinely grow human male sperm to order by extracting tissue containing germ cells from a man’s testicle and stimulating sperm production in the laboratory.”

The findings of the sperm trial have been revealed in a major scientific journal published by Nature.

Now the scientists who made the discovery have begun experiments that will hopefully lead to the “Holy Grail” — human sperm grown outside a man’s body.

Stephen Gordon, a leading NHS male infertility consultant, praised the breakthrough.

He said: “This is an amazing development that could revolutionise fertility treatment and allow every man to be a natural father.

“Infertile men naturally want to be the father of their child but at present have to accept that can’t happen. With the mouse discovery, that could now be a possibility.”

Prof. Richard Sharpe, one of the UK’s top fertility scientists based at Edinburgh University, who hopes to work on the project, said: “This is a significant step forward towards making human sperm.”

The problem of male infertility has grown over the last 50 years and has been matched by huge decrease in sperm counts in men. Some of this has been attributed to environmental factors such as pollution and female hormones appearing in plastic packaging.

Gordon, a urologist, who practises at Epsom Hopsital, Surrey, said: “Even with our latest microsurgical techniques there are still thousands of men — who are otherwise healthy — who can’t naturally father babies and rely on sperm donation.”

How India missed being Einstein home

2012-01-03T15:05:00.000+05:30

The Telegraph, Calcutta, Tuesday , January 3 , 2012

Thiruvananthapuram, Jan. 2: Seven years after fleeing Nazi Germany for Princeton in 1933, Albert Einstein took US citizenship. India can only rue what might have been.

Around 1937, the then fledgling Travancore University in Kerala had apparently invited the great physicist to become its first vice-chancellor for a monthly salary of Rs 6,000, a huge sum those days. Einstein had declined, saying he wanted to be at Princeton University, whose “liberal atmosphere” he had earlier praised.

It’s a regret that Travancore University, now renamed University of Kerala, would be nursing as it gears to celebrate its 75 years.

The platinum jubilee has breathed fresh life into the claim, which had gained currency after the late historian, A. Sreedhara Menon, authored the history of the university. Menon wrote that inviting Einstein was the idea of the Diwan (prime minister) of the princely state of Travancore, the scholarly C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar.

Another writer and historian M.G. Sashibhushan says: “An invitation to a genius like Einstein to a tiny state like Travancore is truly amazing, but CP was an astute administrator who would try to make impossible things possible.

But Sashibhushan added: “I have heard people mention CP’s public announcement about the proposal at the state council.... Unfortunately, the copy of the letter to Einstein is yet to be traced.”

Some historians, though, believe that CP had floated Einstein’s name only to pre-empt local academics from pulling strings and lobbying for the post. The university was born on November 1, 1937, with the Travancore prince as chancellor and CP as vice-chancellor.

CP, a politically controversial figure often attacked by nationalists and communists, later tried to bring many brilliant academics to the university but without much success. Among those who declined the pro-vice-chancellor’s post were Nobel-winning physicist C.V. Raman, philosopher S. Radhakrishnan (who later became India’s President) and physicist Meghnath Saha, Menon wrote.

“It was also said that CP once made a similar request to eminent biologist Julian Huxley, who too declined,” Sashibhushan said.

Einstein, who had no weakness for high office, declined Israel’s presidency in 1952. In Princeton, he developed a deep friendship with the great Austrian logician-mathematician Kurt Godel, a fellow immigrant with whom he took long walks discussing science and philosophy.

Perhaps it does not matter where Einstein lived, as a drawing by the US cartoonist Herblock after the scientist’s death in 1955 suggests. It shows planet Earth and simply says: “Albert Einstein lived here.”

262 officials booked under RTI Act in Bihar

2011-12-31T15:12:00.003+05:30

Amarnath Tewary | Patna Daily Pioneer

When the Bihar Government set up State Information Commission to provide information to seekers under RTI Act through Jankari on telephone a year ago, it was first of its kind in the country, prompting other States to emulate it. Again, another achievement: 262 Government officials were punished in a year for not supplying information, willingly or unwillingly, to RTI applicants.
In recent times several reports have come up when Government officials had demanded huge sums of money up to Rs 74 lakh in the name of miscellaneous charges from RTI
applicants.
The State Information Commission took notice of such cases and others before cracking
the whip against the erring officials.
While addressing a seminar on Sunday, Secretary of State Information Commission SK
Mishra said in the last one year altogether 262 officials have been charged under RTI
Act. “Besides, during the last three years, altogether 12,000 cases were brought to the
notice of the commission and around 1.35 lakh people sought various kinds of information from different departments,” he said.
“The RTI Act has become a potent tool in the hands of the common people and more and
more are using it for their purpose,” said Mishra.
The given information even surprised a team of young researchers from the US and
China who had visited the State recently. The visiting team wondered why so many
Government officials from top to bottom were punished for not providing the required
information within stipulated time.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had launched the Jankari scheme, through which one can
get information by making a phone call.
“This system has worked wonders and the Government has been taking action against
those officials who were found guilty of not providing the required information on one pretext or other,” said Nitish Kumar. “There should be transparency in the functioning of
the Government and everyone has the right to know what he wants to know,” he said.

‘Information Commission is the biggest threat’- Shailesh Gandhi, Information Commissioner

2011-12-31T15:02:00.001+05:30

Business and Economy, 10/11/2011
Shailesh Gandhi, Information Commissioner, Central Information Commission (CIC)

B&E: Right To Information has completed 6 years recently. What would you term as its biggest achievement so far?

Shailesh Gandhi (SG): I think the biggest achievement is that it has started empowering ordinary citizens. It’s just beginning, but people have begun to see the power of using Right to Information. In a small way, government servants have started getting used to the idea that they will have to be transparent. Though it’s not happening from the heart in most cases, the acceptance that they have to respect citizens is slowly creeping in. Earlier, the ordinary citizen just didn’t matter to anybody. I personally feel that what we saw in the Anna movement is part of a reflection of the aspirations that RTI has raised. My guess is that such a movement would not have been possible before the RTI came. Transforming a defective elective democracy to a truly participative one is the base achievement of RTI.

B&E: The RTI Act has seen some staunch criticism by the political class. Would you agree with statements that RTI has inbuilt weaknesses and that it adversely affects the deliberative process of the government?

SG: I personally don’t subscribe to it. The fundamental question is do we have a strong commitment to think that we want a good, vibrant democracy or not? If you have a conviction that democracy is good and it is not negotiable, then one says more transparency is good as citizens own the information. Then if it (work) slows down – so be it. If you have this belief that those in power know best and that citizens are an unnecessary hindrance, then transparency, RTI et al are just impediments. If you believe in democracy, all these discussions are irrelevant. We call ourselves a democracy because we have a constitution and elections. But these are necessary conditions for a democracy and not sufficient ones.

B&E: Do you think these reactions from the political class due to the impact that RTI has begun to show now?

SG: In July 2006 (after being passed in parliament in May 2005 and operationalised on October 12), the government had decided that the RTI Act was not something worth handling. The cabinet had already passed amendments that they wanted to introduce in parliament. Civil society began demonstrating and then the government backtracked. At that time, 10 exemption clauses that existed in the RTI act were to be made 13. In the definition of information, they (cabinet) had said that file notings is not information and the role of the commission was to be made recommendatory. In 2009, there was a similar call by the President in her first address to the parliament. DoPT took it forward but as pressure mounted unanimously, the government again backtracked.

B&E: Despite assurances by the government that there was no plan to relook the RTI Act, do you think the proposed debate poses a threat to RTI?

SG: Let’s take it in a broader context. There are three major threats to RTI. One is the government diluting the Act, which is serious but citizens have been resisting it fairly consistently. I think in real politik terms, the government will not be able to do much. Another major threat to RTI is the judicial system. Today, just the central commission has got around 800-1000 decisions in courts. Most of them get stayed and the way that our judicial system is, it may take two decades for the file judgements to come from the courts. Slowly, we may see a major threat from the delays in the judicial system. The largest and most vicious threat of all, which unfortunately most people are not aware of, is the Information Commission itself. The central commission today has a pendency of over 20,000 appeals and complaints which means an average backlog of over 10 months. If it continues like this, in the next 3 years we might see a backlog of two to three years. If things continue this way for the next five years, the Information Commission will become more like our judicial system. B&E: Why is this happening? How do you propose to deal with this?

SG: There is no accountability and this is a malaise or disease across all judicial and constitutional bodies in India. Nobody feels that we need to deliver to citizens. The concept that “I am accountable” just does not exist. Everyone thinks we will do things at our own pace. What’s more unfortunate is that even citizens are not demanding it. They have also got used to the fact that judicial and constitutional bodies will do what they want, when they wants and the citizens just wait. What we call the aam aadmi, in whose name we do most of the things in the country, will be completely left out. Dealing with it, on the other hand, is not very difficult. To my mind, first people (Information Commission) have to commit that we will deliver to citizens. Then we need to look at our needs and work things out. Problem is that this need is not being felt – neither by the bodies nor by the citizens. Our commissions are actually our checks and balances of democracy and they have become completely unaccountable.

Full disclosure

2011-12-31T14:59:00.001+05:30

The Indian Express, Tue Oct 11 2011,

The Right to Information Act, brought in after decades of civil society pressure in 2005, has been one of the UPA’s biggest achievements. It is an enforceable right of public access to official workings, a radical switch that assumes government and governed have the same interests. In its brief life, RTI-enabled investigations have shed light on large matters like the Commonwealth Games corruption, the Adarsh scam and the 2G debates within government, apart from exposing land scams and misuse of public funds, even forcing the higher judiciary to declare assets. Confronted with the clamour for a Lokpal office, the RTI is the government’s most convincing proof of its commitment to accountability. So it is both predictable and disappointing that the RTI should now be viewed as a liability, in the wake of all these revelations. The finance and telecom ministries have demanded the PMO be kept out of its remit. Others claim the joint parliamentary committee investigating the 2G matter should have first dibs on this information. Ministers like Veerappa Moily and Salman Khurshid have also questioned the RTI, calling it an obstructive force, and one that impairs “institutional efficiency”.

It is only natural that the RTI should be unloved and unwanted by much of the executive and administration. It has been criticised for causing disruptions and wasting official time with “frivolous” petitions. It has been alleged that RTI would end up gagging official opinion, make civil servants more cautious with file-notings. Despite the fact that Section 8(1) of the RTI provides exemptions for material likely to threaten security, strategic, scientific or economic interests, information received in confidence from foreign governments, or information that will impede investigations, among other heads, many corners of the government have asked to be left out. If it was made to the government’s specifications, RTI would be reduced to meaninglessness — the requests considered not too frivolous, not too motivated, and not too threatening to institutional efficiency, could end up being a rather slender range of things.

The government must be reminded that the RTI’s recent embarrassing disclosures have only reflected the embarrassing actions within government. It has revealed the cross-purposes and the confusion within the government. However, if these developments are used as an excuse to roll back the RTI, the UPA would be diluting its obligations towards democratic accountability.

Indira Awas whistle-blower shot dead

2011-12-31T14:53:00.000+05:30

Indira Awas whistle-blower shot dead
- Note beside body in Latehar village claims PLFI role, police sceptical

The Telegraph, Saturday , December 31 , 2011

Ranchi, Dec. 30: An RTI crusader, who exposed misappropriation of Indira Awas Yojana funds two months ago, was shot dead in a Latehar village last evening in a grim rerun of the fatal attack on MGNREGS activist Niyamat Ansari in the same rebel-hit district in March.

Though a hand-written note found beside 40-year-old Pradeep Prasad’s body in Salodi, 104km from the state capital, said the PLFI — a breakaway CPI(Maoist) faction — was responsible for the killing, police are yet to confirm Naxalite role in the incident.

According to Town police, who exercise jurisdiction over Salodi village, Prasad — the Latehar block convener of Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, a trade union outfit — was returning to his native Mukka village on a motorbike around 6pm, when he was intercepted. His bullet-riddled body — two wounds in the forehead and one in the chest — was discovered around 8am today.

Latehar SP G. Kranti Kumar expressed his inability to name any individual or organisation behind the attack. “Though the PLFI has claimed responsibility for the murder in Salodi, we are yet to ascertain the genuineness of the note found beside the body. Anybody can write it to mislead the police. We are also trying to verify the motive behind the killing,” he said.

Local villagers said Prasad often invoked the RTI Act to highlight corruption in government departments and might have made several enemies in the process.

“In October, he had exposed embezzlement of funds meant for distribution among beneficiaries of Indira Awas Yojana in villages here, which led deputy commissioner Rahul Purwar to suspend a panchayat sevak, Ishidor Aiend,” a villager said.

On whether Prasad was the victim of a conspiracy hatched by unscrupulous government functionaries, the SP said: “We are yet to ascertain the exact motive behind the killing and are investigating the case from all angles.” He reiterated that the PLFI note could be a decoy to confuse police.

Surprisingly, DGP G.S. Rath said he was not aware of the incident in Latehar, but insisted that the PLFI was not active in that district.

“Latehar is the base of breakaway Maoist groups like the Jharkhand Janmukti Morcha and the Tritiya Prastuti Committee,” he added.

After Prasad’s body was recovered, angry residents blocked NH-75 near Latehar bus stand for two hours from 9am, demanding adequate compensation for the activist’s family. Prasad is survived by his wife and five children — one son and four daughters.

The protest quelled after the district administration provided Rs 10,000 for last rites and assured Prasad’s kin of further financial assistance soon.

On March 2, Niyamat Ansari — a trusted aide of economist and MGNREGS architect Jean Drèze — was targeted by unscrupulous contractors, backed by Maoists, for exposing rampant corruption in the Centre’s flagship rural job scheme in a Latehar village.

While Ansari died after being beaten up brutally by a 12-member gang at Jerua, 130km from the state capital, his friend and colleague Bhukan Singh had a narrow escape because he wasn’t home when the rebel-backed group came hunting for him.

Both Ansari — the block convener of Gram Swaraj Abhiyan and MGNREGS Sahayata Kendra — and Singh had hit headlines on February 20, when they detected financial irregularities in two projects at Rankikala village in Manika block of the district and lodged an FIR against former BDO Kailash Sahu.

More than Rs 2 lakh were recovered from Sahu and his accomplices during raids that followed.

After much dilly-dallying, the Arjun Munda government sanctioned a CBI probe into Ansari’s killing in July. The central agency is yet to begin investigations.

Indian duo find neutrino fault - Scanner on faster-than-light claim

2011-12-31T14:49:00.002+05:30

The Telegraphm, Sunday , December 25 , 2011

G.S. MUDUR

A graphic showing traces of collision particles at the CMS experience at CERN in Geneva. (AFP)
New Delhi, Dec. 24: Two Indian physicists have identified a problem in the experimental observations earlier this year that appeared to show that subatomic particles called neutrinos can travel faster than light, defying Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

The physicists Ramnath Cowsik and Utpal Sarkar, collaborating with Shmuel Nussinov from Tel Aviv University, have used the laws of conservation of energy and momentum to show that the neutrinos claimed to be faster than light contradict the very observations that spotted them.

Scientists from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) had reported earlier this year that neutrinos produced in high-speed proton-proton collisions in an underground laboratory near Geneva had travelled 730km to Italy about 60 billionths of a second faster than light.

Their findings had stunned the physics community because special relativity theory, which has survived every experimental test since Einstein proposed it a century ago, dictates that nothing can travel faster than light.

Cowsik, Sarkar, and Nussinov applied principles of conservation of energy and momentum to the neutrino production process in CERN. Their calculations, based on equations taught in masters-level physics courses, show that if the neutrinos detected in Italy had indeed travelled faster than light, they would have had much lower energies than observed. A paper pointing out this problem is published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“The conservation of energy and momentum laws are fundamental to physics. If we assume they apply to these neutrinos, the experiment should not be seeing the neutrino energies that it did,” Cowsik, professor of physics at the Washington University, St. Louis in the US, said.

The CERN neutrinos are produced in a step-wise process. The proton-proton collisions create subatomic particles called pions which decay into neutrinos and another type of particles called muons. The energy balance calculations show that if the neutrinos that are produced through such pion decays travelled faster than light, the neutrinos would carry a smaller fraction of energy that is shared between the neutrinos and the muons.

The calculations emerged from an informal chat about the CERN results the three physicists had when Nussinov and Sarkar, a senior physicist at the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, were visiting Cowsik’s office in St Louis about a month ago.

“This is a strong paper with well-articulated arguments,” said Amitava Raychaudhuri, Palit professor of theoretical physics at Calcutta University. “Their calculations show that faster-than-light neutrinos are inconsistent with the neutrino energies seen.”

Cowsik and his colleagues checked their calculations by analysing the neutrino energies seen in an observatory called IceCube buried in Antarctic ice that has been tracking neutrinos created when cosmic rays strike the Earth’s atmosphere. These neutrinos are also produced from the decay of pions and mimic the CERN production process. “The contradictions are exacerbated in the Antarctic experiment — we see neutrinos with extreme high energies,” Cowsik said.

The scientific teams from CERN and the neutrino detector laboratory in Gran Sasso in Italy, aware of the significance of their observations first reported in September this year, have thus far declined to speculate on the theoretical interpretation of their results.

In October, two US-based physicists Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow had published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, in which they had shown that faster-than-light neutrinos would rapidly radiate energy in pairs of electrons and positrons.

“But even very strong theoretical calculations can be questioned because they make some assumptions,” Raychaudhuri said. “The feeling within the physics community is that we need another test — we’re all waiting for a second independent experiment to see how neutrinos behave.”

Cowsik said he has “great respect” for the experimental teams in CERN and Gran Sasso. “When physicists encounter such experimental results and they don’t find any obvious errors in their observations, they are compelled to publish and report their findings.”

But, he said, the theoretical calculations suggest that the experimental details need to be reexamined.

How one man rattled the ruling alliance

2011-12-31T14:19:00.002+05:30

From rediff.com page (Saisuresh Sivaswamy, December 28, 2011):

As Annus Horribilis ends with a whimper, the tantalising question is: In its 100th anniversary as the capital of colonial India, will Delhi become the graveyard of yet another dynasty, asks Saisuresh Sivaswamy.

In 1911, when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was perfecting his passive resistance movement in South Africa against the apartheid regime, which he later successfully deployed against the British colonial power in India as Satyagraha, little could he have imagined that 100 years later, an old man wearing his trademark topi would employ the same tactic against the party he forged into an instrument of Indian independence.

Was it then, and is it now, merely a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man? Or was the situation ripe, in 1911 and 2011, for the emergence of a symbol of resistance against an effete government, which both Gandhi and Anna Hazare seized?

In Gandhi's case, we have the advantage of hindsight stretching over 100 years. In Hazare's it's but a mere year.

And what a year it has been!

Read further and move through the slides at: http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-yearend-2011-anna-domini-how-one-man-rattled-the-ruling-alliance/20111228.htm

'Constitutional Lokpal would have been difficult to repeal' - says former Chief Justice

2011-12-31T14:06:00.002+05:30

Dec 30, 2011, 12.00AM IST

With the Lokpal Bill becoming the focus of attention within and outside Parliament, Justice V N Khare, former chief justice of India, spoke with Rudroneel Ghosh on the constitutional dimensions of the anti-corruption legislation:

How does the failure to confer constitutional status on the Lokpal affect the anti-corruption ombudsman?

Such an anti-corruption ombudsman was earlier established in Haryana and Punjab through a legislative instrument, that is through an ordinary statute. But there were some political bigwigs who were involved in corruption and the Lokayukta was on the verge of catching them. What the government did then was it repealed the (Lokayukta) Act itself through an ordinance. This happened both in Haryana and Punjab. My apprehension is that if a political heavyweight is under investigation, and the ombudsman has been established through an ordinary statute, then a simple ordinance can be passed to scrap the whole institution. But if the body has constitutional status, then it can't be amended like this. It would have been difficult to repeal the Lokpal had it been given constitutional status.

Can the opposition argue that the minority quota in the Lokpal is unconstitutional?

No. Consider Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution. Nowhere do they talk about a Hindu, Muslim or Christian quota. What they say is that nothing will prevent Parliament from enacting a law for advancement of educationally and socially backward class of citizens and members of the scheduled caste. There's no mention of religion. When you identify certain Hindu castes such as Yadavs, Kurmis, etc you don't say 'Hindus' are getting reservation; you say they are backward groups and on this basis you give them reservation. Similarly, among the Muslim community you can identify certain backward segments and have a quota for them. So it's not a question of religion but educationally and socially backward communities.

Does the Lokpal Bill impinge on the country's federal structure?

Article 252 of the Constitution provides that in case Parliament doesn't have the power to enact a law, it can on the request of the states make law for those states as well as whosoever is concerned with the law. Article 253 says that Parliament is empowered to enact laws for the enforcement of international treaties and UN conventions. For example, there is no legislative subject called human rights. But because we were a signatory to the UN Human Rights Convention, we enacted laws to establish the National Human Rights Commission. Similarly, the 2003 UN convention on fighting corruption empowers Parliament to make laws to tackle graft. It is on this basis that the Lokpal Bill has been introduced under Article 253. If the UN convention did not exist, then you could say the Lokpal Bill impinges on federalism. But not in this case.

Is there any merit in the Team Anna argument that the CBI should be brought under the Lokpal?

I don't think that the entire CBI can be brought under the Lokpal. The CBI is a huge organisation whose investigative capabilities are used for so many things other than fighting corruption. At best you can put 50 or 60 CBI officers on deputation with the Lokpal. However, if the CBI is under the government and the government is the prosecutor, there is a clear conflict of interest in prosecuting government corruption. I believe the CBI should be autonomous in any case.

Do you think the Lokpal can be a magic bullet against corruption?

Not at all. Just like water finds its own level, people will find other routes to corruption. But the Lokpal can be a deterrent and create some fear in the minds of potential offenders.

Link to the Times of India, Opinion page: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-12-30/edit-page/30569236_1_lokpal-bill-constitutional-status-anti-corruption-ombudsman

Journalism ultimate: BBC prepares for Tony Blair's death

2011-12-28T16:54:00.001+05:30

Indo-Asian News Service, Updated: December 28, 2011 16:26 IST London:

Former British prime minister Tony Blair is just 58 years old, but the BBC has started filming his obituary.

The "ghoulish" decision to ask former cabinet colleagues to contribute to the programme about Blair's life has shocked some within the Labour party, the Sun reported.

"It seems in pretty poor taste that the Beeb is already preparing for Tony's death....He is still a relatively young man who I'm sure has got a lot of years left in him yet," said a Labour party source.

Blair, who was premier for ten years, did have a minor heart scare while being in office. But he is known to keep himself in shape.

He and wife Cherie "who already had three children" had baby son Leo in 2000 when he was the prime minister.

"We don't comment on obituaries," said a BBC spokeswoman.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/bbc-prepares-for-tony-blairs-death-report-161474?pfrom=home-otherstories&cp

Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed

2011-12-28T16:50:00.000+05:30

Associated Press, Updated: December 28, 2011 12:13 IST

Danbury: For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized "cleanroom" where the equipment was stored.

They spoke in code.

Few knew the true identity of "the customer" they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.

At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret. And though they worked long hours under intense deadlines, sometimes missing family holidays and anniversaries, they could tell no one - not even their wives and children - what they did.

They were engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors - "real cloak-and-dagger guys," says Fred Marra, 78, with a hearty laugh.

He is sitting in the food court at the Danbury Fair mall, where a group of retired co-workers from the former Perkin-Elmer Corp. gather for a weekly coffee. Gray-haired now and hard of hearing, they have been meeting here for 18 years. They while away a few hours nattering about golf and politics, ailments and grandchildren. But until recently, they were forbidden to speak about the greatest achievement of their professional lives.

"Ah, Hexagon," Ed Newton says, gleefully exhaling the word that stills feels almost treasonous to utter in public.

It was dubbed "Big Bird" and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.

The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking. The fact that 19 out of 20 launches were successful (the final mission blew up because the booster rockets failed) is astonishing.

So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took to their graves.

Hexagon was declassified in September. Finally Marra, Newton and others can tell the world what they worked on all those years at "the office."

"My name is Al Gayhart and I built spy satellites for a living," announced the 64-year-old retired engineer to the stunned bartender in his local tavern as soon as he learned of the declassification. He proudly repeats the line any chance he gets.

"It was intensely demanding, thrilling and the greatest experience of my life," says Gayhart, who was hired straight from college and was one of the youngest members of the Hexagon "brotherhood".

He describes the white-hot excitement as teams pored over hand-drawings and worked on endless technical problems, using "slide-rules and advanced degrees" (there were no computers), knowing they were part of such a complicated space project. The intensity would increase as launch deadlines loomed and on the days when "the customer" - the CIA and later the Air Force - came for briefings. On at least one occasion, former President George H.W. Bush, who was then CIA director, flew into Danbury for a tour of the plant.

Though other companies were part of the project - Eastman Kodak made the film and Lockheed Corp. built the satellite - the cameras and optics systems were all made at Perkin-Elmer, then the biggest employer in Danbury.

"There were many days we arrived in the dark and left in the dark," says retired engineer Paul Brickmeier, 70.

He recalls the very first briefing on Hexagon after Perkin-Elmer was awarded the top secret contract in 1966. Looking around the room at his 30 or so colleagues, Brickmeier thought, "How on Earth is this going to be possible?"

One thing that made it possible was a hiring frenzy that attracted the attention of top engineers from around the Northeast. Perkin-Elmer also commissioned a new 270,000-square-foot building for Hexagon - the boxy one on the hill.

Waiting for clearance was a surreal experience as family members, neighbors and former employers were grilled by the FBI, and potential hires were questioned about everything from their gambling habits to their sexuality.

"They wanted to make sure we couldn't be bribed," Marra says.

Clearance could take up to a year. During that time, employees worked on relatively minor tasks in a building dubbed "the mushroom tank" - so named because everyone was in the dark about what they had actually been hired for.

Joseph Prusak, 76, spent six months in the tank. When he was finally briefed on Hexagon, Prusak, who had worked as an engineer on earlier civil space projects, wondered if he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

"I thought they were crazy," he says. "They envisaged a satellite that was 60-foot long and 30,000 pounds and supplying film at speeds of 200 inches per second. The precision and complexity blew my mind."

Several years later, after numerous successful launches, he was shown what Hexagon was capable of - an image of his own house in suburban Fairfield.
"This was light years before Google Earth," Prusak said. "And we could clearly see the pool in my backyard."

There had been earlier space spy satellites - Corona and Gambit. But neither had the resolution or sophistication of Hexagon, which took close-range pictures of Soviet missiles, submarine pens and air bases, even entire battalions on war exercises.

According to the National Reconnaissance Office, a single Hexagon frame covered a ground distance of 370 nautical miles, about the distance from Washington to Cincinnati. Early Hexagons averaged 124 days in space, but as the satellites became more sophisticated, later missions lasted twice as long.

"At the height of the Cold War, our ability to receive this kind of technical intelligence was incredible," says space historian Dwayne Day. "We needed to know what they were doing and where they were doing it, and in particular if they were preparing to invade Western Europe. Hexagon created a tremendous amount of stability because it meant American decision makers were not operating in the dark."

Among other successes, Hexagon is credited with providing crucial information for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

From the outset, secrecy was a huge concern, especially in Danbury, where the intense activity of a relatively small company that had just been awarded a massive contract (the amount was not declassified) made it obvious that something big was going on. Inside the plant, it was impossible to disguise the gigantic vacuum thermal chamber where cameras were tested in extreme conditions that simulated space. There was also a "shake, rattle and roll room" to simulate conditions during launch.

"The question became, how do you hide an elephant?" a National Reconnaissance Office report stated at the time. It decided on a simple response: "What elephant?" Employees were told to ignore any questions from the media, and never confirm the slightest detail about what they worked on.

But it was impossible to conceal the launches at Vandenberg Air Force base in California, and aviation magazines made several references to "Big Bird." In 1975, a "60 Minutes" television piece on space reconnaissance described an "Alice in Wonderland" world, where American and Soviet intelligence officials knew of each other's "eyes in the sky" - and other nations did, too - but no one confirmed the programs or spoke about them publicly.

For employees at Perkin-Elmer, the vow of secrecy was considered a mark of honor.

"We were like the guys who worked on the first atom bomb," said Oscar Berendsohn, 87, who helped design the optics system. "It was more than a sworn oath. We had been entrusted with the security of the country. What greater trust is there?"

Even wives - who couldn't contact their husbands or know of their whereabouts when they were traveling - for the most part accepted the secrecy. They knew the jobs were highly classified. They knew not to ask questions.

"We were born into the World War II generation," says Linda Bronico, whose husband, Al, told her only that he was building test consoles and cables. "We all knew the slogan `loose lips sink ships.'"

And Perkin-Elmer was considered a prized place to work, with good salaries and benefits, golf and softball leagues, lavish summer picnics (the company would hire an entire amusement park for employees and their families) and dazzling children's Christmas parties.

"We loved it," Marra says. "It was our life."

For Marra and his former co-workers, sharing that life and their long-held secret has unleashed a jumble of emotions, from pride to nostalgia to relief - and in some cases, grief.

The city's mayor, Mark Boughton, only discovered that his father had worked on Hexagon when he was invited to speak at an October reunion ceremony on the grounds of the former plant. His father, Donald Boughton, also a former mayor, was too ill to attend and died a few days later.

Boughton said for years he and his siblings would pester his father - a draftsman - about what he did. Eventually they realized that the topic was off limits.

"Learning about Hexagon makes me view him completely differently," Boughton says. "He was more than just my Dad with the hair-trigger temper and passionate opinions about everything. He was a Cold War warrior doing something incredibly important for our nation."

For Betty Osterweis the ceremony was bittersweet, too. Not only did she learn about the mystery of her late husband's professional life. She also learned about his final moments.

"All these years," she said, "I had wondered what exactly had happened" on that terrible day in 1987 when she received a phone call saying her 53-year-old husband, Henry Osterweis, a contract negotiator, had suffered a heart attack on the job. At the reunion she met former co-workers who could offer some comfort that the end had been quick.

Standing in the grounds of her late husband's workplace, listening to the tributes, her son and daughter and grandchildren by her side, Osterweis was overwhelmed by the enormity of it all - the sacrifice, the secrecy, the pride.

"To know that this was more than just a company selling widgets ... that he was negotiating contracts for our country's freedom and security," she said.

"What a secret. And what a legacy."

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/decades-later-a-cold-war-secret-is-revealed-161387?pfrom=home-otherstories&cp

Lok Sabha passes Lokpal Bill by voice vote: PTI

2011-12-27T23:18:00.001+05:30

Rediff.com live feed, December 27, 2011

23:16 PM Defence, Coast Guard out of Lokpal ambit:
A landmark bill for the creation of the Lokpal was passed by the Lok Sabha tonight with the government making it clear that setting up of Lokayuktas by the states would not be mandatory, amending a contentious provision in view of opposition from allies and others.
The Lokpal and Lokayukta Bill 2011 was approved after the government moved a few other key amendments, including keeping the defence forces and Coast Guard personnel out of the purview of the anti-graft ombudsman and increasing the exemption time of former MPs from five to seven years.
A number of amendments moved by the Opposition, to include corporates, media and NGOs receiving donations, were defeated.

23:24 PM Sonia Gandhi and Sharad Pawar in Lok Sabha: Quite interesting to see Sonia Gandhi and Sharad Pawar seated next to each other in the Lok Sabha during the Lokpal Bill vote. Twelve years ago, the Maratha warlord had broken off from the Congress citing his unwillingness to accept her as prime minister, and launched the Nationalist Congress Party. Today, of course, the NCP is an ally of the UPA, and as the Lokpal Bill vote shows, share common concerns.

Philippine flood toll rises to 1,249

2011-12-27T22:58:00.001+05:30

AFP, 26 Dec 2011

The death toll from killer floods in the Philippines rose to 1,249 on Tuesday, more than a week after the disaster struck, with officials expecting more corpses to be found.
The civil defence office initially said the confirmed number of fatalities had surged by more than 200 to 1,453, before revising the figure downwards due to double-counting.
Civil defence chief Benito Ramos said his National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council would no longer count the missing as no-one could give reliable figures on how many people are unaccounted for.
But Ramos told AFP he was sure the death toll would continue rising as more bodies were still being retrieved from the sea off the southern island of Mindanao or found trapped beneath fallen fallen logs and mud.
Tropical storm Washi brought heavy rains, overflowing rivers and flash floods to the southern Philippines from December 16 to 18, sweeping away whole villages built on sandbars and riverbanks.
Recovering the bodies has been hampered by the fatigue of rescue workers who have been labouring non-stop since the storm hit, said regional disaster council chief Ana Caneda.
"Even the (corpse) sniffing dogs are tired," she said.
Survivors at a sandbar in Cagayan de Oro city, trying to salvage belongings from the mud, instead dug up the bodies of three of their neighbours, the city government said.
Cagayan de Oro and Iligan and bore the brunt of the disaster, suffering most of the fatalities.
More than 376,000 people were displaced by the storm and almost 55,000 are still huddled in crowded makeshift evacuation centres, the disaster council said.
The government has said it will set up tent cities in safe areas to temporarily house the evacuees -- perhaps for as long as three months-- until more permanent shelters can be erected.
Health Secretary Enrique Ona said the government was also preparing a scheme to pay households unaffected by the flood to host families who had lost their homes.
Ona said there had been no major disease outbreaks at the evacuation centres but potable water remained in short supply for thousands of people.
Around 50 people left one centre on their own initiative, pitching tents at a nearby car park.
"I decided to leave because of the bad odour and because it is just too crowded in there, especially when we sleep," said Alan Labiano, 43, who was sheltering with his wife and three children.
At night, he said, some people were sleeping on plastic chairs because there was nowhere to lie down.
The government has barred many of the disaster victims from returning to their homes, saying they should not have been allowed to live on such unstable, low-lying land in the first place.
A low pressure area brought new floods to the central and southern Philippines on Monday, forcing thousands more to flee their homes, the disaster council said.
In Valencia City, just 118 kilometres (73 miles) southeast of Cagayan de Oro, some 300 families were forced to take refuge on their rooftops due to the floods and had to be rescued by helicopters, a military report said.
The disaster council said an infant was missing after floods hit the port city of Surigao, 120 kilometres east of Cagayan de Oro, but there were no confirmed fatalities from the latest rains.

Some notable points from Rediff commentary of Parliamentary Lokpal proceeding of 27 Dec 2011

2011-12-27T17:53:00.005+05:30

16:46 PM PM: Believe in transparent, open governance:
In Parliament, the PM is speaking. Says the government tabled the Bill because we are confident that it reflects the sense of the House. Says the government is open to other voices, but the decision must remain with us (the Parliament). The PM says the government believes in transparent legislation.

Goes on to give a rundown of the government's anti-graft legislations.

16:51 PM PM: Show India that the House means business: The PM says the Parliament must keep public anger in mind and keep partisan politics at bay and pass the Lokpal Bill. "We must show the country that the House means business," says Dr Singh. He says legislation is a serious business and must always rest with the Parliament.

16:54 PM PM defends Lokpal Bill: India is looking at Parliament with bated breath and waits for the Bill to be passed.

16:56 PM PM: CBI should work independently of Lokpal, but should be accountable. Lokpal is a judicious bill and supports and independent CBI.

17:00 PM Section 24 may be dropped from Lokpal Bill: Section 24 likely to be dropped from the Lokpal Bill. That's the huge sticking point from an united opposition since it allows prosecution of MPs. Section 24 of the bill allows presiding officers to act on the basis of a Lokpal report even before a trial is completed. The Lok Sabha Speaker or Chairman of Rajya Sabha is required to table the Lokpal report and inform Lokpal about the action being taken - or not taken - against the members concerned.

17:06 PM
The PM also said there has been public anger against corruption over the last four years, but all politicians are not corrupt. He says that all systems of governance must be based on trust.

17:09 PM PM: Unless Lokayuktas are put in place, the cancer of corruption will spread.

17:37 PM
The Left has so far moved 11 amendments to the Lokpal Bill. Wants corporates under the Lokpal Bill, something that every other party has left out.

18:07 PM PM has given election speech in Parliament today:
The session has been extended to pass the Bill.

Lalu says: We aren't against a strong Lokpal Bill. The PM has given an election speech in Parliament today.

Anna Hazare's life is very important, we should have a Save Anna Campaign, Lalu says tongue-in-cheek

18:13 PM
Speaker says, "Please be serious, what is this!" as the House twitters at Lalu's speech. Lalu says the Bill be the death warrant for all elected representatives. Fasting is not a solution to all problems -- baath baath pe anshan.

Says PMji we don't doubt your integrity, if you bring in a strong Lokpal Bill, we will make you the Lokpal. PM and MPs laugh.

18:24 PM
Lalu urges Parliament to take this bill back. Says when the bill is put to vote they should have the courage to reject it since it is nothing but a "phansi ka phanda" noose around the Parliament's neck.

He tells the BJP to stop giving speeches, and bring in suggestions to better the Lokpal Bill.

18:28 PM Lalu directing his ire at Team Anna tells the government: You have created this problem by entertaining those who will never be satisfied. Says they (Team Anna) want to impose power rejection and if they win they want the power to recall. Yeh kya hai, he asks, voice raised in fever-pitch theatrics.

18:45 PM Here's what the New York Times' India blogs has on Anna's fast: Frustration and hope at Hazare's fast in Mumbai.

18:47 PM And another read from the NYT's India blogs: Parliament kicks off 'fight of the year'.

18:52 PM
In Parliament, the BJP's Yashwant Sinha speaks.

Says it is toughest to be Parliamentarians. We are at the public's disposal 24x7. People who think its easy to fight and win elections, don't know anything.

18:54 PM PM's statement in Parliament today was like a farewell speech :
Always a good orator, expect this to be a lively speech. Yashwant Sinha says the need for Lokpal has never been so strong though it has come up for discussion many times.

Says PM's statement in Parliament today was like a farewell speech.

19:10 PM Govt's legislations are corruption centric: Yashwant Sinha :
Yashwant Sinha says two of our esteemed colleagues (alluding to A Raja, Suresh Kalmadi) are in jail, but not one of Atal Behari Vajpayee's ministers are in jail .

He says the government has no intentions of passing this bill. He tells the government that you cannot ignore the indignation of the people since it is your creation.

He says the government's legislations are corruption centric.

19:17 PM
Yashwant Sinha laughs at his own wit, calls the Lokpal Bill, Rogpal Bill.

19:30 PM
Does the Chair know? Sushma Swaraj has been tweeting links of her speeches from inside the House.

Tharoor says the Jan Lokpal bill came about through an undemocratic process, but the Lokpal Bill has effective checks and balances. Says the PM's speech was the speech of a statesman. The bill is not corruption-centric, it's people centric.

19:50 Tharoor: Our finest democratic move is to pass Lokpal:
Best lines from Tharoor's speech:
Let us today make one of our finest democratic moves by passing this Bill today.
We don't need a jasmine revolution, the scent of jasmine is in our democracy
For every bribe taker there is a bribe giver.We cannot point fingers and forget the moral responsibility of the society

Tharoor ends his speech with a rousing parallel to the national anthem: Let us end this session of Parliament with a rendering the national anthem knowing that we made a difference to the nation today by passing the Bill. This day, 100 years ago, the Jana Gana Mana was sung for the first time at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress. Much bench thumping.

22:04 Speaker calls for voting on three bills.

22:10 Clause on Lokayukta amended.

22:17
Left seeks vote on bringing corporates under Lokpal Bill. BJP, JD(U) reject amendment.

22:20
Walkout by Bahujan Samaj Party (21 MPs) and Samajwadi Party (22 MPs) before vote reduces halfway mark to 250.

22:39 Lok Sabha votes on 74 clauses by 10.35 pm:
The Lok Sabha is moving in double quick time, already it has voted on 74 clauses in the Lokpal Bill.

22:41
Clause 75 of the Bill as amended stands part of the Bill, the Lok Sabha has just voted. Ditto on Clauses 76 to 80 stand part of the Bill.

22:41 As the Look Sabha votes on the Lokpal Bill, here's a photograph from MMRDA ground in Mumbai, of an ailing Anna Hazare.

22:46 If Anna resists, he may be taken forcefully to hospital:
Toral Varia reports from Mumbai that Anna Hazare who has been on a fast at the MMRDA grounds, is likely to be hospitalised. Sources say the cops are waiting for the results of Anna's blood tests conducted by JJ hospital doctors. If Anna resists, he will be forcefully taken to the hospital, most likely JJ hospital.
Currently Team Anna is trying to convince him to call off his fast which could affect the Jail Bharo andolan too. Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan has also made a personal appeal to Anna to call off the fast.
Meanwhile, IAC member Kiran Bedi has flown to New Delhi and IAC holds that as of now Anna is not going to any hospital. However, security personnel have been briefed to be on standby. Ambulances and other ammenities needed are all ready to take Anna to the hospital.

22:52 Amendment number 16 rejected in division of votes: Speaker Meira Kumar called for a division on amendment number 16 at 10.55 pm, and the results were: Ayes: 189; Noes: 247; Abstentions: 2. With this, this particular amendment was rejected.

22:53 PM's farewell speech? Sinha, Mukherjee in war of words:
The Lok Sabha debate on the Lokpal Bill saw some acrimonious exchanges between the treasury (ruling) and opposition benches. At one point, BJP leader Yaswhant Sinha took a dig at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Lokpal Bill debate speech in Lok Sabha, calling it a "farewell speech".
Sinha's observation during the debate on the Lokpal Bill in the Lower House was countered a few hours later by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee who sarcastically told the BJP not to be impatient for power.

22:55 Anna is very resolute, says IAC volunteer:
Meanwhile, Shazia Ilmi of the IAC told Toral Varia that Anna Hazare is not doing well.
"His condition is not very good. Not very conducive to continue the fast. He is still very resolute. Arvind (Kejriwal) and others are trying to convince him. He needs to have medication to bring down his fever and and control his BP. And for that he needs to eat. But he is very resolute. But he is definitely not going to any hospital as of now. Clearly he is not in any condition to continue the fast. It will have an impact on the Jail Bharo plan. We will have to replan everything."

22:57 Voice vote gets Lokpal Bill through Lower House: Lokpal bill passed in Lok Sabha by voice vote, reports PTI, but not much clarity on it. The Lok Sabha members are still shuffling about.

23:03 PM Left, BJD and AIADMK walk out after voice vote: With the Lokpal Bill passed through a voice vote, the Left, BJD and the AIADMK staged a walkout from the Lok Sabha.

China Testing 500 km/h High-Speed Train

2011-12-27T17:49:00.000+05:30

December 26, 2011 By Zachary Shahan

It’s no secret that China is light years ahead of the U.S. on the development and use of high-speed trains. The latest news out of China is that it launched a super-fast high-speed rail (HSR) test train over the weekend. State-run media announced today that the train can travel up to 500 kilometers per hour (~310.7 miles per hour).

The train, designed to look like an ancient Chinese sword, was made by a subsidiary of CSR Corp Ltd, China’s largest train maker.

The train “has a maximum tractive power of 22,800 kilowatts, compared with 9,600 kilowatts for the CRH380 trains currentlyin service on the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, which hold the world speed record of300 km per hour,” China Daily notes.

Source: Clean Technica (http://cleantechnica.com/2011/12/26/china-testing-500-kmh-high-speed-train/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IM-cleantechnica+%28CleanTechnica%29)

Anna and Mamata top the Yahoo list of Newsmakers of the Year

2011-12-26T23:03:00.002+05:30

Every year, there is a handful of luminaries or dark horses who grace the forefront with either actions or words that set them apart from the rest of the landscape. These newsmakers gain equal parts attention and notoriety, sometimes unwillingly and other times otherwise, but they define the year that is to be and more often than not shadow the rest of the wannabes - such is their staying power while new names crop up every year, some of them continue to make news year after year after year. Here are 2011's top newsmakers.

1. Anna Hazare
2. Mamata Banerjee
3. ‘Amma’ Jayalalithaa
4. Mahendra Singh Dhoni
5. B S Yeddyurappa
6. Lal Kishanchand Advani
7. Kiran Bedi
8. Osama bin Laden
9. Sushil Kumar
10. Honourable Mention: Irom ‘The Iron Lady’

1. Anna Hazare
The face behind the Lokpal movement, Kisan Baburao better known as Anna Hazare is considered by many netas and babus as their biggest nemesis and a hindrance to their aspirations. His crusade against corruption has grabbed headlines all over and inspired the common Indian to demand for a Jan Lokpal Bill that would hold politicians accountable for their actions.
Even though his growing popularity surprised many, Anna Hazare has been a social activist for over two decades, relentlessly working towards social and political reforms in the country.
Born in 1937, Anna Hazare joined the army in 1963 and it was during one of his visits to his village of Ralegaon Siddhi that forced him to retire from the army and to dedicate his life to rooting out problems that the villagers were facing.
His biography says Anna Hazare accidently came across a book by Swami Vivekananda and as he began to read it he realised that the ultimate motive of human life should be service to humanity and thus he decided to devote his life to public service.
Always seen in white, Anna Hazare lives in a single room within the village temple compound.
This Gandhian hails the Lokpal movement as India's second freedom struggle. Leading a frugal life with integrity and honesty, overnight he has become a role model for India's middle class.
Anna has resorted to many hunger strikes to make his demands heard, a fact that doesn't augur well with his critics as they have labelled him a blackmailer and an armchair fascist.

2. Mamata Banerjee
The 34-year-old regime of the Left front finally crumbled to a feisty Mamata Banerjee, making her the first woman chief minister of West Bengal when her party won the assembly elections this year.
Mamata clad in a white sari and rubber slippers managed to do what many in Bengal thought was undoable till a few years back. Her angry denunciations of the Left administration made her an instant hit with the struggling Bengali. She systematically mounted protests against forced land acquisitions in the state by the then Left-ruled government.
During her short stint as the union railway minister she showered Bengal with railway projects which in turn gave Bengalis a glimpse of what she can do for their state if given a chance.
In 2011, Mamata gifted new trains and several new projects to six districts in north Bengal and didn’t let it go unnoticed by adding, "Railways have invested more funds in the six districts than the State has done for development of north Bengal". A smart move any time of the year.
'Didi', or elder sister as she is fondly called, strategised her campaign against the Communists in a manner that depicts the political scenario of India today. She stands against all that is wrong in Bengal- from wrongful land acquisitions, bad infrastructure to corruption and stagnation in the state's economy- she has gone to the aam junta with these issues and promised to make things right.
Moreover, what has appealed to the voters this time is Mamata’s humble background and her will to succeed and to put Bengal on the world map, just like it was back in the 19th century.

(skipped to the tenth in the list)

10. Honourable Mention: Irom ‘The Iron Lady’

Even though she doesn't strictly fulfil the newsmaker category, this iron-willed lady of Manipur has waged a long and lonely battle against an apathetic government the only way she can. Thanks to Anna Hazare's fast, Irom received some media attention this year, starved that she was of it for the last 11 years.
Irom Sharmila Chanu has been fasting for 11 years to seek the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act or AFSPA from her state, Manipur. She has the grit to try and persuade the government to repeal a law that empowers the security forces to arrest without a warrant, and shoot anyone at sight.
Dubbed as the Iron Lady of Manipur, Irom began her fast in 2000 after she witnessed the killing of 10 people by Assam Rifles jawans at a bus stop. For the past 10 years, she has not eaten a single morsel, resulting in her being force-fed by a tube through her nose.
Irom hopes one day the Indian government will recognise her and her fight against human rights violations in the north east. She has also urged Anna Hazare to visit Manipur and see what is happening there.
Although she has won international awards, Irom's cause has never managed to strike a chord with the otherwise vocal middle class. Very few know or care about what is happening in Manipur, and how people in the state are being constantly bullied by the armed forces.
Irom's heroic protest and her voice for a better homeland are still being ignored. Next time you attend a candlelight vigil, say a silent prayer and light a candle for this extraordinary woman.

Conjoined twins share single heart in Brazil

2011-12-25T22:43:00.001+05:30

Birth defects like the Mermaid syndrome, a deformity where the legs are fused together, Craniopagus, a phenomenon where twins are joined at the head, and Dicephalic parapagus, a condition of having two heads, occur rarely but prove challenging to the medical world. Recently in Brazil, a baby was born with two heads; Jesus and Emanuel are in stable condition, but doctors are hesitant to perform surgery is such delicate conditions.
The two-headed born baby is pictured in Anajas, northern Brazil December 21, 2011. Doctors in Brazil said on Wednesday said they are unsure whether they can operate on a baby born with two heads, although the newborn boy is in stable condition. The "twins", named Jesus and Emanuel, have two brains, two backbones and a single heart.

REUTERS/JR Avelar/Handout.

Lokpal and Lokayuktas Bill 2011 Introduced in Lok Sabha

2011-12-24T00:02:00.002+05:30

by NNLRJ INDIA,
Law Resource India, 23 Dec 2011

Government today introduced in Lok Sabha the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Bill, aimed at setting up the body of Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayuktas at the level of the States. Government also introduced a Bill for amending the Constitution for conferment of Constitutional status on both bodies. Government also withdrew earlier Lokpal Bill, 2011 as it decided to introduce a new comprehensive Lokpal and Lokayuktas Bill, 2011 Bill after consideration of the suggestions made by the Parliamentary Committee which recommended significant changes in the scope and content of the earlier Bill. The salient features of the proposed new Bills are as under:-

Focus on improving accountability

Establishment of new institution in the Constitution called Lokpal for the Union and Lokayukta for the States. These autonomous and independent bodies, shall have powers of superintendence and direction for holding a preliminary inquiry, causing an investigation to be made and prosecution of offences in respect of complaints under any law for the prevention of corruption.

The Bill provides a uniform vigilance and anti corruption road map for the nation, both at Centre and States. The Bill institutionalizes separation of investigation from prosecution and thereby removing conflict of interest as well as increasing the scope for professionalism and specialization.

Structure of the Institution:

Lokpal will consist of a Chairperson and a maximum of eight Members of which fifty percent shall be judicial Members. Fifty per cent of members of Lokpal shall be from amongst SC, ST, OBCs, Minorities and Women. There shall be an Inquiry Wing of the Lokpal for conducting the preliminary inquiry and an independent Prosecution Wing. Officers of the Lokpal to include the Secretary, Director of Prosecution, Director of Inquiry and other officers.

Process of selection:

The selection of Chairperson and Members of Lokpal shall be through a Selection Committee consisting of –

Prime Minister; Speaker of Lok Sabha; Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha; Chief Justice of India or a sitting Supreme Court Judge nominated by CJI; Eminent jurist to be nominated by the President of India A Search Committee to assist Selection Committee in the process of selection. Fifty per cent of members of Search Committee shall be from amongst SC, ST, OBCs, Minorities and Women.

Jurisdiction:

Prime Minister to be brought under the purview of the Lokpal with subject matter exclusions and specific process for handling complaints against the Prime Minister. Lokpal can not hold any inquiry against the Prime Minister if allegations relate to:

International relations;
External and internal security of the country;
Public Order;
Atomic energy
Space.
Any decision of Lokpal to initiate preliminary inquiry or investigation against the Prime Minister shall be taken only by the Full Bench with a majority of 3/4th. Such proceedings shall be held in camera. Lokpal’s jurisdiction to include all categories of public servants including Group ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ & ‘D’ officers and employees of Government. On complaints referred to CVC by Lokpal, CVC will send its report of PE in respect of Group ‘A’ and ‘B’ officers back to Lokpal for further decision. With respect to Group ‘C’ and ‘D’ employees, CVC will proceed further in exercise of its own powers under the CVC Act subject to reporting and review by Lokpal.

All entities receiving donations from foreign source in the context of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) in excess of Rs. 10 lakhs per year are brought under the jurisdiction of Lokpal. Lokpal will not be able to initiate inquiry suo moto.

Other significant features of the Bill

No prior sanction shall be required for launching prosecution in cases enquired by Lokpal or initiated on the direction and with the approval of Lokpal. A high powered Committee chaired by the Prime Minister with leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha and Chief Justice of India as members, will recommend selection of the Director, CBI. Provisions for confiscation of property acquired by corrupt means, even while prosecution is pending.

Lokpal to be final appellate authority on all decisions by public authorities relating to provision of public services and redressal of grievances containing findings of corruption. Lokpal to have power of superintendence and direction over any investigation agency including CBI for cases referred to them. The Bill lays down clear time lines for :

Preliminary enquiry – three months extendable by three months.
Investigation – six months extendable by six months.
Trial – one year extendable by one year.
The Bill proposes to enhance punishment under Prevention of Corruption Act :

(a) Maximum punishment from 7 years to 10 years
(b) Minimum punishment from 6 months to 2 years

The Bill proposes to give legal backing to Asset Declaration by public servants. The Bill also seeks to make necessary consequential amendments in the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, the Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003, and the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946.

Two 'Akash' news : One about brighter India and the other about the darker

2011-12-23T23:24:00.003+05:30

When birth of one "Akash" lightens up millions of young Indian faces, the death of another "Akash" darkens the face of the brighter India.

Just announced is the launch of the Tablet PC 'Akash', which will be available to the students at a meagre price of Rs 2500.
Around the same time, there came a news of a Delhi youth named 'Akash' beaten two death on the road of the capital in broad daylight.

Here are the news items:

Aakash tablet goes on sale for Rs 2500 online
By The Mobile Indian | Yahoo! India News – Thu, Dec 15, 2011
(http://in.news.yahoo.com/aakash-tablet-goes-on-sale-for-rs-2500-online-.html)

DataWind, the Canadian company that is manufacturing Aakash, has started the online booking and pre booking of the much anticipated low cost Android tablet. Online booking is for students' version of the tablet and pre booking is for UbiSlate 7, the upgraded version of Aakash.

Students' version of Aakash will be available for Rs 2,500 and will be delivered in seven days. The commercial version, UbiSlate 7 is priced at Rs 2,999. The payment mode for both the tablets is cash on delivery.

The commercial version of Aakash tablet will be powered by Android 2.3 and will have a resistive touchscreen, Cortex A8-700 MHz processor and graphics accelerator HD video processor, 256 MB of RAM and 2 GB of internal memory.

Youth beaten to death in road rage incident
By Indo Asian News Service | IANS
(http://in.news.yahoo.com/youth-beaten-death-road-rage-incident-160234079.html)

New Delhi, Dec 23 (IANS) A 19-year-old youth was beaten to death by a father and son duo in a road rage incident Friday afternoon in Mangolpuri area of west Delhi, police said, adding that the accused have been arrested.
The incident took place around 1.30 p.m. near Kamdhenu Public School in Mangolpuri. The deceased, identified as Akash, was beaten to death by Anil, 19, and his father Srawan, 45.
A senior police official said that Akash's scooter accidentally hit the bike of the accused from behind near the school. The bike suffered a little damage. The father and son demanded compensation from Akash. He refused, saying it had happened by accident. This enraged the father and son and they beat him mercilessly till he became unconscious.
The accused fled leaving Akash on the road. A PCR call was made and the police rushed the victim to Sanjay Gandhi hospital where he was declared brought dead, said the official.

AMRI Kolkata Fire: Two disturbing post-incident news

2011-12-23T23:10:00.003+05:30

Here here two really disturbing post-incident news on the AMRI Kolkata fire.
One talks about the AMRI authorities reluctance in calling the fire fighters in the fateful night of the fire and the other is about tracing a missing dead after 12 days.

Here they go:

AMRI didn't call fire brigade to save skin
Subhro Niyogi, TNN | Dec 18, 2011, 04.11AM IST
(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/AMRI-didnt-call-fire-brigade-to-save-skin/articleshow/11150494.cms)

KOLKATA: The staff at south Kolkata's AMRI Hospital had tried to douse the December 9 fire that killed 92 people, for more than an hour before a patient's relative called the fire brigade.

"No one called from the hospital that day," said West Bengal Fire Services additional director-general Debapriya Biswas. The management at the upscale hospital was averse to calling the fire brigade as they seemed to fear the consequences after the fire was put out. Two months ago, a security guard Haradhan Chakraborty was suspended for a fortnight for calling fire brigade.

"After a fire brigade attends to a fire, there is a preliminary probe and a report is filed. The report puts irregularities on record. The hospital was already on notice for altering the use of basement and stocking hazardous materials. If these were mentioned in the report, a closure order would be issued," said a hospital employee. Former fire services director Baren Sen agreed that could be a reason for not calling the fire brigade. If there is a fire in a hospital, a station officer leads the team and then files a report.

"Even if the fire is controlled swiftly and there is no loss of life, the report would be filed within an hour. If inflammable goods were found in the basement, an FIR would be filed. The hospital's false commitment to the fire brigade in August to clear the basement would have been exposed leading to action, including closure," Sen said. The hospital may have hoped it could get away with violation of rules if the fire brigade was kept out.

AMRI fire: Tripura man's body found after 12 days
Published: Thursday, Dec 22, 2011, 14:16 IST
Place: Agartala | Agency: IANS
(http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_amri-fire-tripura-man-s-body-found-after-12-days_1628849)

The mutilated body of a Tripura man, who went missing after the AMRI Hospital fire Dec 9, has been found at the morgue of SSKM Hospital in Kolkata, officials said Thursday.

Santosh Das, 25, had fractured his left leg in an accident in Tripura Nov 30 and was subsequently taken to Kolkata for treatment.

“The burnt, mutilated body of Santosh was found by his relatives on Wednesday night,” Tripura Bhavan resident commissioner in Kolkata Ashudeb Das told IANS by phone.

The man's parents, distraught since the sole bread earner of the family went missing, broke down after getting the news.

Santosh was admitted to the AMRI Hospital Dec 1.

“I met (West Bengal Chief Minister) Mamata Banerjee, several police officers, searched 21 hospitals and some morgues, but could not find my brother till Tuesday night,” Santosh’s younger brother Paritosh told IANS by phone from Kolkata.

Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, in a recent letter to Banerjee, urged her to help trace Santosh.

With Santosh's body found, the toll from Tripura in the Kolkata hospital fire rose to seven.

In the worst fire tragedy ever in any hospital in India, 94 people were killed in AMRI Hospital.

Planet found orbiting habitable zone of sun-like star

2011-12-07T04:25:00.001+05:30

Irene Klotz | Reuters – Tue, Dec 6, 2011
MOFFET FIELD, California (Reuters) - The most Earth-like planet ever discovered is circling a star 600 light years away, a key finding in an ongoing quest to learn if life exists beyond Earth, scientists said on Monday.

The planet, called Kepler-22b, joins a list of more than 500 planets found to orbit stars beyond our solar system. It is the smallest and the best positioned to have liquid water on its surface -- among the ingredients necessary for life on Earth.

"We are homing in on the true Earth-sized, habitable planets," said San Jose State University astronomer Natalie Batalha, deputy science team lead for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope that discovered the star.

The telescope, which was launched three years ago, is staring at about 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, looking for faint and periodic dimming as any circling planets pass by, relative to Kepler's line of sight.

Results will be extrapolated to determine the percentage of stars in the Milky Way galaxy that harbor potentially habitable, Earth-size planets.

This is the first detection of a potentially habitable world orbiting a Sun-like star, scientists reported in findings to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Kepler-22b is 600 light years away. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).

GROUND TELESCOPES

Planets about the same distance from their parent stars as Earth take roughly a year to complete an orbit. Scientists want to see at least three transits to be able to rule out other explanations for fluctuations in a star's light, such as small companion stars. Results also are verified by ground and other space telescopes.

Kepler-22b, which is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth, sits squarely in its star's so-called "habitable zone," the region where liquid water could exist on the surface. Follow-up studies are under way to determine if the planet is solid, like Earth, or more gaseous like Neptune.

"We don't know anything about the planets between Earth-size and Neptune-size because in our solar system we have no examples of such planets. We don't know what fraction are going to be rocky, what fraction are going to be water worlds, what fraction are ice worlds. We have no idea until we measure one and see," Batalha said at a news conference at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California.

If Kepler-22b has a surface and a cushion of atmosphere similar to Earth's, it would be about 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 C), about the same as a spring day in Earth's temperate zone.

Among the 2,326 candidate planets found by the Kepler team, 10 are roughly Earth-size and reside in their host stars' habitable zones.

Another team of privately funded astronomers is scanning the target stars for non-naturally occurring radio signals, part of a project known as SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

"As soon as we find a different, a separate, an independent example of life somewhere else, we're going to know that it's ubiquitous throughout the universe," said astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute in Mountain View.

The Kepler team is meeting for its first science conference this week.

Baby girl rescued after being buried alive

2011-10-09T15:53:00.000+05:30

Sat, Oct 8, 2011 - NDTV 1:40 | 9,364 views

A farmer was at work in the afternoon on Thursday when he heard a baby crying. He followed the sound to discover a baby girl, who seemed to have been buried alive. She had managed to push her head above the ground. The farmer, who is from Madhya Pradesh's Bodna village, rushed the child to a local hospital.

Steve Jobs: key quotes‎

2011-10-09T15:30:00.002+05:30

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” Quoted in The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993.

“Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.”

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” Stanford commencement speech, June 2005.

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Stanford commencement speech, June 2005.

Dr Binayak Sen wins 2011 Heinz Pagels Prize For Human Rights

2011-09-27T16:52:00.000+05:30

September 26, 2011
Dr Binayak Sen, the well-known humanitarian doctor and right activist has won the prestigious 2011 Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientist Award by the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS).

The Award was received by a representative of Dr Sen in New York on 22 September as he was unable to travel to the United States to receive it. The other awardee of this prize, given to scientists doing human rights work, was Jack Minker, Professor Emeritus, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland.
In his acceptance speech Dr Sen said “The support of my professional colleagues, and of the academic community across the world, has been invaluable in securing my freedom.” Apart from the 48 Nobel Prize winners who signed a statement calling for his release Dr Sen recollected that while in Raipur prison he was personally visited by a delegation of leading scientists, including Professor Robert Curl, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996.
“ Then as now, I was personally dumbfounded and humbled by this groundswell of support, which I can only attribute to shared recognition of our common cause of human rights” he said in his speech.
Regarding his own work in Chhattisgarh Dr Sen said that “As a paediatrician and public health physician, I have tried to enhance the public’s understanding of the ways in which poverty and injustice undermine efforts to promote health and peace, which we ourselves take for granted as our own fundamental human rights”
The NYAS’s Committee on the Human Rights of Scientists was created in 1978 to support and promote the human rights of scientists, health professionals, engineers and educators around the world. The committee focuses on rights of scientists who have been detained, imprisoned, exiled, or deprived of the rights to pursue science, communicate their findings to their peers and the general public, and travel freely.

The Academy annually honors scientists for their contributions in this area with the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award. Heinz Rudolf Pagels (February 19, 1939 – July 23, 1988) was professor of physics at Rockefeller University, the executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He is best known to the general public for his popular science books The Cosmic Code (1982), Perfect Symmetry (1985), and The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (1988).

Hazare defends Kejriwal over income tax notice

2011-09-03T22:58:00.000+05:30

Ralegan Siddhi, Sep 3 (ANI): Taking strong exception to the income tax department's notice to his key aide Arvind Kejriwal, veteran social activist Anna Hazare has urged the government not to target a man of integrity and character.
"I appeal to the government that it is not appropriate to target Arvind Kejriwal. He has devoted his time to social work, neglecting his family. He doesn't ask for money," said Hazare while addressing people here on Friday.
I have seen Kejriwal from close quarters. He is doing a selfless service for society. He could have made money if he wanted to, but he is not like that...," he added.
Meanwhile, former Karnataka Lokayukta Justice N. Santosh Hegde alleged that the government has been vindictive against his civil society activist colleagues.
"This government seems to be doing wrong things at a wrong time. They could have done it much earlier or they could have done it later. Right now, when Arvind Kejriwal is in news for other reasons, you (the government) serve a notice on him," Hegde told reporters in Bangalore.
The chief commissioner of income tax had issued a notice to Kejriwal last month, to clear his dues totalling Rs 9.27 lakh after his 2006 resignation from the Indian Revenue Service (IRS). (ANI)

Kejriwal gets breach of privilege notice

2011-09-03T22:53:00.001+05:30

Indo Asian News Service
New Delhi, Sep 3 (IANS) Team Anna member Arvind Kejriwal Saturday received a breach of privilege notice from parliament, an India Against Corruption activist said.
'The notice was sent through speed-post at his residence in Ghazhiabad. He has not gone through the letter yet,? said the activist, on the condition of anonymity.
Kejriwal could not be reached for comment.

California man arrested for biting pet python

2011-09-03T20:40:00.000+05:30

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - A California man is in custody after being accused of biting a python in what police said was apparently an unprovoked attack on the pet snake of an acquaintance.
The suspect, David Senk, 54, was arrested on Thursday evening on suspicion of unlawfully maiming or mutilating a reptile, Sacramento police Sergeant Andrew Pettit said on Friday. The badly injured snake underwent surgery.
In a jailhouse interview aired on KOVR-TV in Sacramento, Senk said he had no recollection of the incident after having blacked out from drinking but felt "horrible as hell about it."
Asked why he might have bitten the snake, Senk replied: "I get drunk, I get crazy. I don't know. I've been an alcoholic for a long time."
Full Story:http://in.news.yahoo.com/california-man-arrested-biting-pet-python-031649456.html

Anti-graft campaign has just started and must continue, says Anna Hazare

2011-09-03T20:39:00.001+05:30

ANI – Fri, Sep 2, 2011
Ralegan Siddhi (Maharashtra), Sep.2 (ANI): Stating that the recent anti-graft campaign against the government by civil society activists was just the beginning of a long and hard struggle, veteran activist Anna Hazare on Friday told about 7,000 supporters in his hometown of Ralegan Siddhi that his victorious fast of 12-days in Delhi was a victory of the people.
"I am concerned about the country's future. This is just a beginning. We have a long way to go. It will take another 10 to 15 years before we eradicate corruption from the system for which we should be prepared to go to jail," Hazare said.
"It's not enough to say I am Anna, one has to change their character. I believe even if a little change can be done, it's always good," he added.
Further calling the youth the real heroes of the nation, Hazare said that the general public is being looted and it was time to sow seeds of change.
"Despite 64 years of independence from the British rule, nothing has changed in the country. The whites have been replaced by black. Loot, corruption and terrorism is rampant," he said.
"One seed of change will lead to thousands of seeds of change. Every young Indian must sow one seed of change. Some of us have to sacrifice to ensure benefit for future generation," he added.
He also said that India must walk on the principles of B.R. Ambedkar to bring religion equality and narrow down economic disparities. (ANI)

Prashant Bhushan gets breach of privilege notice

2011-09-03T20:35:00.001+05:30

Indo Asian News Service, 03 Sept. 2011
New Delhi, Sep 3 (IANS) Team Anna member Prashant Bhushan Saturday said he has received a breach of privilege notice for his remarks against MPs and will respond to it. He further added that he stands by his statement.
'I have received the notice and will respond to it. I stand by my statement and don't think it amounts to breach of privilege,' Bhushan told a TV channel.
He was served notice for alleging that members of parliament take bribes to pass laws. He has been asked to file a reply by Sep 14.
Former top cop Kiran Bedi, another aide of activist Anna Hazare, also faces a privilege motion for her remarks against parliamentarians. Addressing the Ramlila Maidan gathering, she accused politicians of wearing 'several masks' at the same time, drawing the ire of MPs in both houses of parliament.
Affirming that she stood by whatever she had said, Bedi said Friday: 'If I get a notice, I would say I am sorry I will not be able to say sorry. If I get an opportunity, I will go before the Committee and will show a bigger mirror to Parliament.'
'The truth has to be said, which was needed, and I stand by it. You should see what is happening in parliament. Slippers were exchanged in the Rajasthan assembly,' she added.

Wrong people sometimes elevated to higher judiciary: Ex-CJI Verma

2011-06-27T16:31:00.002+05:30

TNN | Jun 27, 2011, 12.57am IST

NEW DELHI: Acknowledging that certain individuals with doubtful integrity were elevated within the higher judiciary, former Chief Justice of India JS Verma — who had envisaged the collegium system of judicial appointments — said a national commission should be put in place to ensure greater transparency. This comes on the back of growing pressure for greater transparency and accountability in judicial appointments.

Justice Verma - who wrote the 1993 Supreme Court judgment that was institutionalized in the form of a collegium – said his judgment had not been properly implemented and errors had occurred because of "improper working". Asked if the greatest error was that "the wrong sort of person has either been elevated or made it to a Chief Justice", he bluntly responded, "Correct".

Asked in an interview on TV news channel CNN-IBN if, as CJI in 1997, he had first recommended and then withdrawn approval for a High Court judge to be made chief justice of an HC, Justice Verma said, "Well, the prime minister rang me up and said he'll clear it, because it has come from me, but he had disturbing reports about his integrity. I said don't clear it, send it back to me. I withdrew the recommendation and also told two of my colleagues in the Supreme Court who had recommended his appointment that this is not the thing to be done and I also rang up that particular judge himself and told him I'm withdrawing your recommendation."

When asked whether one of his successors, Justice A S Anand, who knew about the incident, later promoted the judge and whether the judge was Justice Ashok Agarwal, Justice Verma responded, "Well, let us not take names".

Justice Verma added that several people whom he had not considered suitable were elevated after he retired, giving credence to the belief that judicial appointments were not as fair and transparent as made out to be.

In another revelation, the former CJI cited the case of Justice M M Punchhi, whose impeachment had been sought by the campaign for judicial accountability. Justice Verma said he was willing to permit the allegations to be probed but the political executive refused to allow this. When asked if former PM Inder Kumar Gujral refused to accept that an FIR be lodged against Punchhi, Justice Verma said, "Well, that's what he clearly said. And also the President, who did not say it directly, he said it through the prime minister. That was all I could do."

Underlining his willingness to have Punchhi probed, Justice Verma explained, "Because the allegations, if proved, were serious and therefore they required to be investigated, so that one could know whether they were true or not." He acknowledged that Justice Punchhi was later elevated to CJI despite facing what he called "serious allegations".

Justice Verma was also clear in his stand against former CJI K G Balakrishnan's continuance as National Human Rights Commission chairman. Asked if Balakrishnan should demit office in the face of allegations of financial irregularities, Justice Verma said, "He should have demitted long back and if he doesn't do it voluntarily, the government should persuade him to do that, otherwise, proceed to do whatever can be done to see that he demits office."
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For a detail account of the te Ex-CJI's interview with Karan Thapar please refere to this CNN IBN link: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/keep-pm-higher-judiciary-out-of-lokpal-excji/162837-3.html
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World's First Transatlantic Flight on Biofuels

2011-06-23T00:13:00.002+05:30

Jun 21, 2011, www.scientificamerican.com

This past weekend, the Paris Air Show witnessed two historic firsts: the first transatlantic flight on biofuels, closely followed by the second, which involved a much larger jet (although a smaller percentage of bio–jet fuel). Honeywell's corporate Gulfstream G450 sped from North America to Europe burning a 50–50 blend of kerosene derived from fossil algae and bio-jet refined from camelina oil, courtesy of Honeywell-owned refinery technology company UOP.

The blended fuel boasts all the same characteristics as traditional jet fuel, except that it burns a little more frugally. The bio-jet has to be blended, however, lest it leak out of conventional engines (biofuel lacks the aromatic hydrocarbons that help swell shut valves and seals in an aircraft engine). On the upside, the blended mix cuts down on the pungent aroma of jet fuel for the ground crew.

Camelina-derived UOP bio-jet also contributed 15 percent of the fuel for the first Boeing 747 to make the transatlantic flight partially powered by non-fossil plant oil.

Neither plane required changes to any of its engines to burn the bio-jet, and more than 700,000 gallons of the greener jet fuel have been produced to date, for customers such as the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force. The next hurdle is simply certifying that the fuel—known in the industry as synthetic paraffinated kerosene—can be used commercially, and then bringing down the cost (it remains more expensive than fossil jet fuel). Already, ASTM has issued a provisional standard. And that means bio-jet may not be a matter of demonstration flights for much longer.

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The UK Supreme Court ordered return of two girl children to their father in Norway, who were abducted by their mother

2011-06-17T23:58:00.004+05:30

It's a very recent judgment pronounced on 10 June 2011, with far reaching implication in cross-border parental abduction of children.

Here's the summary.

The Supreme Court has ruled that two girls, aged seven and four respectively, be returned with their mother to Norway, after she had removed them without the father’s consent. The decision was made largely under the Hague Convention on the Rights of the Child which gives more specific direction to the courts in abduction cases than the European Convention on Human Rights, although, as the Supreme Court observed, a little more reassurance that the necessary safeguards can be enforced in the destination country would make it easier for the courts in the requesting country to make orders protecting the interests of the child.

Shutdown of the Internet in Syria

2011-06-12T23:37:00.000+05:30

Published on June 5, 2011, Washington, DC,,
Hillary Rodham Clinton Secretary of State Washington, DC ,

We are deeply concerned by reports that Internet service has been shut down across much of Syria, as have some mobile communication networks. We condemn any effort to suppress the Syrian people’s exercise of their rights to free expression, assembly, and association.Two weeks ago, the White House released the International Strategy for Cyberspace, which noted that “States should not arbitrarily deprive or disrupt individuals’ access to the Internet or other networked technologies.” We condemn such shutdowns in the strongest terms.

The Syrian government has a history of restricting the Internet in an attempt to prevent the Syrian people from accessing and sharing information. The Syrian government must understand that attempting to silence its population cannot prevent the transition currently taking place. We believe that even in the face of significant obstacles, the Syrian people will — and should — find a way to make their voices heard.

The United States stands for universal human rights, including freedom of expression, and we call on all governments to respect them.

Assassination of Mumbai based Mid Day reporter, Shri Jyotirmoy Dey

2011-06-12T22:43:00.001+05:30

No civilized society can tolerate this kind of attack on the freedom of the press : Ambika Soni

Published on June 12, 2011

The Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Smt. Ambika Soni has condemned the assassination of Mumbai based Mid Day reporter, Shri Jyotirmoy Dey, who was allegedly shot dead by the underworld today.
In her condolence message, Smt Soni has said this act has challenged the freedom of press and perusal of objective reporting. This incident is a sign of insanity perpetuated by mindless individuals in which innocent citizens are killed. No civilized society can tolerate this kind of attack on the freedom of the press.

The Minister has said that she is confident that the Home Minister of Maharashtra, Shri RR Patil will live up to his assurance of tracking down the assailants in the shortest possible time. She has conveyed her heartfelt condolences to the members of Shri Dey’s family.

When the Supreme Court rules

2011-06-12T01:36:00.001+05:30

By Soli J Sorabjee in The India Express

Illegal demands for dowry and cruelty against women are persistent evils in our country. Parliament has enacted legislation to curb these evils. Demanding dowry is punishable under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961. Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code [IPC] punishes a husband and his relatives that harass or torture the wife and coerce her or her relatives to satisfy unlawful demands for dowry.

A person was convicted for an offence under Section 498A. He challenged the conviction on the ground that the complainant was not his legally wedded wife, as he was already married, and, therefore, Section 498A had no application in his case. The question before the Supreme Court was about the meaning of the expression “husband”, in the absence of any statutory definition.

A bench of the Supreme Court comprising of Justices Arijit Pasayat and A.K. Ganguly in a recent judgment held that irrespective of the legitimacy of the marriage, for the purposes of Section 498A the expression “husband” would include a person who enters into a marital relationship and under the colour of a proclaimed or feigned status of “husband” subjects the woman to cruelty to satisfy illegal dowry demands. The Court further held that “the absence of a definition of ‘husband’ to specifically include such persons who contract marriages ostensibly and cohabitate with such woman, in the purported exercise of his role and status as ‘husband’ is no ground to exclude such person from the purview of Section 498A.”

In common parlance a husband is a person who is legally wedded to another woman, and the marriage is subsisting. What is the basis for the court’s extraordinary conclusion? One is that acts of Parliament are not “drafted with divine prescience and perfect clarity”. True, but can that justify the reasoning that when a defect appears a judge cannot “simply fold his hands and blame the draftsman. He must set to work on the constructive task of finding the intention of Parliament not only from the language of the statute, but also from a consideration of the social conditions which gave rise to the statute”? Then the judge “must supplement the written word so as to give ‘force and life’ to the intention of the legislature.” The eminent English judge, Lord Denning, who had adopted a similar approach, was roundly reproved by the House of Lords who decried “such judicial heroics.”

The critical question is whether it is permissible for judges in India to cure omissions in a statute by filling in the gaps a la Lord Denning. Or by so doing are the judges not in effect legislating under the thin veil of purposive construction? There are divergent opinions among judges, lawyers and academics. However, there can be no two opinions that the judgment protects women who have in fact been cohabiting in a marital relationship with persons who, though not their legally wedded husbands, are professedly acting and behaving as their husbands. The judgment also highlights that the life of the law is not logic but experience. It reflects a humane approach towards ill-treated sections of society. It is a significant addition to the jurisprudence of compassion evolved by our Supreme Court. And that is what ultimately matters to the exploited and marginalised sections of Indian humanity.

The Supreme Court has in 1996 held that “water is a gift of nature and it would be mocking nature to force the people who live on the bank of a river to remain thirsty.” The court has also held that the right to life guaranteed under Article 21 inter alia includes the right to water. Gandhiji often said that freedom for him would mean the availability of safe drinking water to every person in every village of India. This has still not become a reality. It is a cruel paradox that our country, despite having immense reservoirs of water, continues to experience water shortage as an acute problem. (It is reminiscent of Samuel Coleridge’s famous lines, “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.”) In much of rural India there is shortage of water for irrigation and for drinking. John Briscoe, who has authored a detailed World Bank report on the subject, has said that despite this alarming situation there is widespread official complacency.

The Supreme Court has come to the rescue. A bench comprising of Justices Markandey Katju and H.L. Dattu in a recent judgment dated April 28 spoke first of India’s strong heritage of science, pointing out outstanding scientific discoveries and inventions made in the past by Indians, and then went on to lament that subsequently we took “to the unscientific path of superstitions and empty rituals, which has led us to disaster.” The court rightly stressed that the way out for our nation is to once again turn to the scientific path shown by our ancestors. Then follows a critical part of the judgment — namely directions, not recommendations, issued to the Central government inter alia to form a committee to address the water shortage problem at the earliest. The committee’s composition is also set out in the order. Thereafter the court has directed the committee so formed to conduct scientific research on a war footing to solve the country’s water shortage. The functions of the committee have been set out in detail. Thereafter the court requests the committee “to do patriotic duty to the nation”, and through scientific research discover solutions for the water shortage problem. The justification for these directions, apparently, is that the country is reeling under acute shortage of water.

The judgment and the directions given are most welcome, and should provide much needed relief. The stress on science and scientific methods and bemoaning the path of superstition is heartening. Indeed that thinking is in keeping with the fundamental duty prescribed in Article 51A “to develop scientific temper”. Another noteworthy feature is that the directions issued to the Central government signify a wholesome change in Justice Katju’s judicial philosophy of separation of powers, of which he has been a strong proponent. It must be realised that the doctrine of separation of powers cannot be rigidly followed but has to be adapted to the needs and problems of our nation in a pragmatic manner. And that is what the judgment has admirably done.

The case of soiled hands

2011-06-12T01:29:00.001+05:30

M J Antony / New Delhi January 13, 2010, 0:09 IST

The growing tribe of litigants who pollute the fountain of justice worries the Supreme Court

We are told to disclose the full truth to doctors and lawyers, and never tell lies or suggest falsehood to them. But the courts are left out. That is perhaps why the Supreme Court lamented recently that the tribe of litigants who have no respect for truth has increased over the last four decades. No prize for guessing who advises these litigants. The problem must be quite serious because the judgment delivered last month in the Dalip Singh vs State of UP case is prefaced with long passages on the fall in standards from the Gandhian precepts. It says in part: “For many centuries, Indian society cherished two basic values of life, that is satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence). Mahavir, Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi guided the people to ingrain these values in their daily life. Truth constituted an integral part of the justice delivery system which was in vogue in pre-Independence era and the people used to feel proud to tell truth in the courts irrespective of the consequences. However, the post-Independence period has seen drastic changes in our value system. Those involved in litigation do not hesitate to take shelter in falsehood, misrepresentation and suppression of facts in the court proceedings.”

Perceiving this trend, the courts have evolved new rules, and it is now well established that a “litigant who attempts to pollute the stream of justice or who touches the pure fountain of justice with tainted hands is not entitled to any relief, interim or final.” However, the problem has not gone away.

It has deep roots in the judicial system.

Every year, a few cases in which unscrupulous litigants are found abusing the process of the courts reach the apex court. The situation in the courts below must be worse. In 2008, the court stated that if the litigant has not approached it “with clean hands”, not candidly disclosed all the facts he is aware of and intends to delay the proceedings, he would be kept out of the system (Sunil Poddar vs Union Bank of India). This was reiterated in several other cases.

In the present case, a landowner who was told to surrender surplus land under the UP Imposition of Ceiling on Land Holdings Act could delay the proceedings since 1975 till his death, when his legal representatives took over the litigation. It ended last month in the Supreme Court, but not before depriving hundreds of landless persons of the benefit of the law. The failure of land reforms may be attributed to several other causes, but litigation is one sure bet for delaying the surrender and enjoying the land for three generations, as in this case. The grandson’s main argument was that his ancestor did not get notice of the proceedings under the law and, in any case, he was too ill to present himself before the authorities.

Disbelieving all these, the Supreme Court remarked: “We are amazed at the audacity with which the grandson could make a patently false statement on oath… The efforts to mislead the authorities and the courts have transmitted through three generations and the conduct is reprehensible.” They belong to the category of persons who not only attempt but succeed in “polluting the course of justice”.

The cases above are hard cases, but there are grey and white lies too. How deep must be the stain on the hands of the litigant to disentitle him to enter the portals of the court? Two years ago, the court asked itself, “Even if the dirt is removed and the hands become clean, would the relief sought for be still denied?”

In the Arunima Baruah vs Union of India case, an employee hid the fact that she had moved the district court when she tried a gamble in the Delhi High Court at the same time. The high court dismissed her writ petition as she was found “forum shopping”. However, on appeal, the Supreme Court was lenient towards her. It said that the right to move a court was a human right and if she was shut out from its doors, there might be grave injustice in individual cases. According to it, the suppression of “material facts” alone would disentitle a person from moving the court. But material facts depend upon individual cases.

The English courts seem to have confronted this dilemma a hundred years ago. Discussing the judgments there, one of the jurists said: “The absence of clean hands is of no account unless the depravity, the dirt on the hand in question, has an immediate and necessary relation to the equity sought for.” The clean-hand rule cannot be either precise or capable of satisfactory operation.

Starting the PIL revolution

2011-06-12T01:26:00.001+05:30

Krishnadas Rajgopal in Indian Express Jan 26, 2010

Thirty-one years ago, a woman lawyer confidently climbed the 17 steps of the Supreme Court and walked into a cold, thick-walled courtroom without a thought for the frowns trained at her from the high priests of Indian judiciary and her male colleagues.

Senior Advocate Pushpa Kapila Hingorani had a mission that day in December — one that the Supreme Court had never heard of before and one which would eventually kick off a revolution called the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) across the country. It was the same year she had resolved to give up her law practice and stay home.

The two pages she carried to the court contained the plight of undertrial prisoners languishing in jails in Bihar— men, women, children, lepers and mental patients cast away into jails and forgotten by the state. She wanted the court to intervene immediately and give orders to release them on bail. The historic case, later known to every law student in India as Hussainara Khatoon Vs Home Secretary, Bihar, drew its name from one of the prison inmates. It was the first PIL in India.

A shocked Supreme Court Bench led by Justice P.N. Bhagwati went on to release over 40,000 undertrial prisoners from various jails nationwide.

“The success of the Khatoon case was so widespread that the Supreme Court in the 1980s opened a new section in the Registry devoted to PILs. Officers used to sift through the incessant bombardment of letters or petitions from citizens everyday and choose the ones which should be brought to the court’s attention,” says Hingorani, who was born at the Kenyan Capital Nairobi into an Arya Samaj family.

“The Supreme Court held in the Hussainara Khatoon case that speedy trial and legal aid to the poor are the two essentials of a PIL. Today, as a woman who gave birth to PIL, I get hurt when people misuse it or judges do not understand the public problem laid before them,” she says.

Her title— “Mother of PIL” — is well-deserved. She has over the past 30 years done nearly 100 PILs, free of cost, including the Bhagalpur Blinding case of 1981 and Rudul Sah case of 1983. Her personal favourite among the PILs she did was one in which the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) agreed to pay Rs 1,000 to lepers to build their jhuggies. “I asked the court how people who could not even eat with their hands, build jhuggies? I sought the court to order the DDA to build them jhuggies and build them better,” she remembers before slowly walking indoors to escape the winter evening nip.

Is another Nandigram imminent?

2011-06-10T22:55:00.004+05:30

God knows if another Nandigran is soon going to happen ... on the soil of Jagatsinghpur in Orissa!

Here's an update on the situation (as posted on binayaksen.net):
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OVERNIGHT OR DAWN POLICE ATTACK IMMINENT ON POSCO AFFECTED VILLAGES

URGENT PRESS RELEASE
09 June 2011

The Odisha police have called in heavy reinforcements and are moving into positions all evening around the villages of Dhinkia and Gobindpur in Jagatsinghpur District of Odisha state. These villages form the epicentre of over 6 years of successful peaceful resistance to the scandalous POSCO steel-mining-power-port project – the world’s largest. This project is being pushed through by Odisha and Indian Governments in blatant violation of fundamental rights and a variety of environmental and economic laws of India.

According to confirmed sources within the Odisha establishment, the attack on this peaceful resistance is more than likely early morning tomorrow, if the police do not unleash terror overnight. The resilient people of these villages including women, children, elders, youth and men are holding overnight vigils along the borders of their villages now and will stay so till the police withdraw.

An alarming aspect of such abuse of police powers is that over 26 platoons of police have been mobilised around these villages over the past two weeks. Such heavy police presence betrays the Odisha Government’s claims that the acquisition of land for the project is peaceful.

The current Senior Police Officer in charge of the operation is the former Superintendent of Police of Kalinganagar, who had ordered firing on villagers protesting the Tata Steel plant, killing many tribals and injuring scores more. Under this officer’s ruthless leadership, the Odisha police has effectively declared an emergency on the resisting villages, completely halting normal life over the past several weeks. It is more than likely now that a needless carnage will result because of the such strong arm tactics of the police.

On behalf of the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samithi (PPSS), this urgent release is being made requesting your earliest attention to this impending disaster. India could do well without another Kalinganagar, or Nandigram, and the role of the mass media is critical in preventing such an incident.

High-speed Euro train gets green boost from two miles of solar panels

2011-06-07T00:20:00.002+05:30

Tunnel on Paris-to-Amsterdam line topped with 16,000 solar panels to power Antwerp station and Belgian train network
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Damian Carrington The Guardian, Monday 6 June 2011
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A two-mile-long Belgian rail tunnel, built to shelter trains from falling trees, will from Monday provide a double environmental benefit by hosting a unique solar power project.

The high-speed line running from Paris to Amsterdam passes Antwerp and a nearby ancient forest. To avoid the need to fell protected trees, a long tunnel was built over the line which has now been topped with 16,000 solar panels. The electricity produced is equivalent to that needed to power all the trains in Belgium for one day per year, and will also help power Antwerp station.

"For train operators, it is the perfect way to cut their carbon footprints because you can use spaces that have no other economic value and the projects can be delivered within a year because they don't attract the protests that wind power does," said Bart Van Renterghem, UK head of Belgian renewable energy company Enfinity, which installed the panels.

"We had a couple of projects lined up around London with train operators and water utilities, but they have been put on hold."

Van Renterghem said this was due to the UK government's controversial review of subsidies for large-scale solar power projects, which will lower the returns available.

The UK government argues that solar technology is too expensive, but Van Renterghem said he had seen the cost of cells halve in the last two to three years thanks to economies of scale in Germany, France and Belgium.

The new Blackfriars station in London, which will span the River Thames, will host the largest single collection of solar panels in the UK when it opens in spring 2012.
The roof of the new station will have 4,400 panels and a capacity of 1MW, enough to provide 50% of the station's electricity. However, the development is not dependent on the level of government subsidy for solar power as the £7.3m bill was paid by the transport department's environment fund.

Richest Bureaucrat: IAS at 22 and 253 crore asset at the age of 45

2011-06-06T23:51:00.004+05:30

5 June 2011

statesman news service
RAIPUR, 5 JUNE: A Chhattisgarh cadre who cracked the IAS exam in his maiden attempt at the age of 22 is probably the richest bureaucrat of the country. According to reports of the Income-Tax department this IAS officer has accumulated assets to the tune of Rs 253 crore, all by alleged corrupt means.
The 45-year-old serving IAS officer, Mr Babulal Agarwal, belongs to 1988 batch. From the country’s worst famine-hit district of Kalahandi in Orissa, he is now in the dock.
Of late, Bhopal-based I-T department has submitted about a 5,000-page report to the Chhattisgarh government, listing out details how the officer created an empire of Rs 253 crore. The report is based on the raid it had carried out at his residence and at his charatered accountant's place here in Feburary last year. Mr Agarwal was the then agriculture secretary.
Later, Chhattisgarh’s BJP government suspended him from the post but reinstated him after a few weeks that raised questions about the government’s intent to fight corruption.
The I-T report has recommended action against the officer who is always keen on foreign trips and said that Mr Agrawal has floated some 30-odd companies in the past 11 years and operated more than 470 bank accounts with a total asset pegged at a whopping Rs 253 cr.
The report has now hit the headlines in the state on which Union law minister Mr M Veerappa Moily said in March during his visit here that, "Chhattisgarh is the most corrupt place in the country." Mr Agrawal, who is now secretary, co-operatives, has termed the I-T report "baseless".
"The I-T raid in February 2010 had found Rs 8 lakh from my residence in Raipur and it was all tax-paid money,’’ Mr Agrawal told The Statesman, adding, "reporters should avoid conducting media trial on the issue because it’s sub-judice. I have moved the Chhattisgarh High Court at Bilaspur against what I-T department claimed about my assets.’’
Mr Agrawal was miffed with repeated questions about his illegal assets empire, and said, "I belong to a business family. How the I-T department can club assets of my family members in my name, my brother, father and other members, all have separate business activities for long time and you can’t show their income in my name, I will fight it out.’’
Chhattisgarh’s chief secretary Mr P Joy Oommen, when asked why is the government not taking action against the IAS officer for piling up an illegal assets empire, said, "the whole issue of I-T raid against Mr Agrawal and then I-T report to state government, has been sent to Economic Offences Wing (EOW) for its own investigation and action to be taken only after a final report of the EOW is received.’’
Official sources say that I-T report has specific mention of several evidences about 'rag and rich’ story of Mr Agrawal who has always been dynamic in engineering corruption since he got the first posting in 1988 as assistant collector of Khargone district in undivided Madhya Pradesh. Though a few senior officials here recall his contribution to effectively execute key government schemes in Sehore district in Madhya Pradesh in 1995 when he served there as collector.
As per the I-T report, Mr Agrawal amassed his mind-boggling illegal assets mainly in the past 11 years when his postings ranged as collector in Durg and Rajn-andgaon districts to secretary in health department and then in agriculture department with the Chhattisgarh government.

Germany announces end to nuclear power by 2022

2011-06-05T22:50:00.001+05:30

Associated Press, Updated: May 30, 2011 (NDTV)
Berlin: Germany's Environment Minister has said that Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government has agreed to shut down all of the country's nuclear power plants by 2022.

Norbert Roettgen also says the seven oldest reactors taken off the grid pending safety inspections following Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster in March will remain offline permanently.

He says all but the three newest reactors will be shut down by 2021, and the remainder a year later.

Roettgen announced the agreement early Monday morning after hour-long negotiations between the governing parties.

Merkel in 2010 had pushed through to extend the lifespan of the country's 17 reactors with the last one scheduled to go offline in 2036, but she completely reversed her policy in the wake of Japan's nuclear disaster.

Baba Ramdev detained, asked to leave Delhi

2011-06-05T22:45:00.000+05:30

NDTV, New Delhi: There was high drama at the Ramlila Ground in New Delhi after a defiant Baba Ramdev refused to call off his fast despite the government's best efforts. The government then hardened its stand and asked the yoga icon to leave Delhi.

Delhi Police served an externment order on Baba Ramdev and Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which prevents unlawful assembly of five or more persons, was imposed. Police sources say the order was issued after Baba Ramdev used the Ramlila Ground for staging a hunger strike against corruption instead of a yoga camp.

Sources have told NDTV that Baba Ramdev was detained and sent to Haridwar, but Home Secretary GK Pillai says the yoga icon voluntarily left Delhi.

The Press Trust of India (PTI) has reported that Ramdev has sought the intervention of the Chief Justice of India. PTI reports also suggest that at least 30 people were injured in the police action in Ramlila Grounds.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/baba-ramdev-detained-asked-to-leave-delhi-110200?cp

I will join Baba Ramdev on June 5: Anna Hazare

2011-06-03T23:19:00.001+05:30

CNN-IBN, Jun 02, 2011 at 10:30am IST

New Delhi: After the Baba Ramdev scare, there is a new complication for the government. Now, Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev pose a combined challenge to the UPA government and the Congress party.

Anti-corruption crusader and Lokpal panel member Anna Hazare on Thursday announced that he will join Baba Ramdev's protest fast in Delhi on June 5 saying he won't allow the government to weaken the anti-corruption agitation.

Hazare lashed out at the Centre saying that the government has tried to cheat civil society members on the Lokpal bill and tried to sabotage the Lokpal panel.

"I will join Baba Ramdev on June 5. The fight is against corruption. I will talk to Baba on how to go forward on the fight against corruption. The government has tried to cheat us. The government had assured us that they would look into our demand," he said.

With just two days to go for Baba Ramdev's fast, battle lines are drawn between the government and civil society groups fighting for a strong anti-graft bill.

"I will support Baba Ramdev so that the government does not do what it did when we were fighting. We will fight together against corruption," he added.

Hazare claimed that the government lacks the intention to root out corruption from the system. He said that the government is insecure and is only trying to prolong its stay at the Centre.

"The government is bringing in clauses so as to let corruption grow. The government lacks the intention to root out corruption from the system," he said.

Anna Hazare also said that there is no divide in the civil society over the Lokpal bill.

"There is no two views on Lokpal bill between us and Baba," he said.

Meanwhile, the UPA's outreach to Baba Ramdev continues. Ministers are expected to meet Ramdev on Thursday as well.

The Cabinet too is expected to discuss the Ramdev issue. significantly the Congress Core Committee will also meet today. Baba Ramdev though is firm on going ahead with his fast, starting Saturday.

The meetings come even as the party indicated it was miffed with the government's red carpet rolled out to the Yoga guru at the airport on Wednesday - he was received by four Union Ministers and the cabinet secretary.

The party is also worried about the fact that the RSS has come out in support of Baba's protest.

RTI ACTIVIST & ENVIRONMENTALIST CHAINED AND HANDCUFFED IN CAPTIVITY IN HOSPITAL

2011-06-03T22:32:00.004+05:30

Bahar Dutt , CNN-IBN, Updated Jun 02, 2011 at 05:41pm IST

New Delhi: RTI activist Ramesh Agarwal has been arrested and chained to a hospital bed Chhattisgarh's Raigarh after a complaint by business group, the Jindals. Agarwal was arrested on May 28 by Chhatisgarh Police based on a complaint filed by the Jindals. Photographs available with CNN-IBN clearly show that Ramesh has been handcuffed.

Agarwal is apparently paying the price for being a whistleblower as he had written to Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh asking for environment clearance to be cancelled of Jindal plant for violating green norms in 2010.

It was based on his letter that Ramesh cancelled the environment clearance of Jindal Steel and Power Plant.

Agarwal is accused of defamation, insult and of making false statements. He was arrested after he reportedly spoke at a public hearing against the Jindals.
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More on the news from accessinitiative.org

Link: http://www.accessinitiative.org/sites/default/files/CHAINED%20AND%20HANDCUFFED%20FOR%20SPEAKING%20UP.doc

On wee hours of morning of 28th May 2011, Shri Ramesh Agrawal and Dr. Harihar Patel two longstanding and strong-willed activists from Raigarh district of Chhattisgarh were arrested from their homes by the district police. Both Agrawal and Patel had been raising concerns about the social and environmental impacts of rapid and indiscriminate industrial expansion in the district for the last several years. They had actively participated in mandatory public hearings being organised as part of the environment clearance procedure of India, wherein locally affected people and concerned citizens can raise their concerns and objections to any industrial or infrastructure related project that is to be set up.

Shri Ramesh Agrawal was part of an active group called Jan Chetana and lived in Raigarh town from where he carefully acted as a watchdog and a whistle-blower to several irregularities related to environmental compliance, water pollution and social impact issues of different project being proposed in the district. He had filed several Right to Information (RTI) applications and had on a regular basis highlighted the plight of environmental governance and disregard to environmental norms in the district before the concerned state and central level authorities and ministries. He had also taken up several matters before the National Environment Appellate Authority (NEAA) and other regulatory authorities raising concerns about faulty impact assessment, infective public hearings and instances of construction before mandatory approvals.

Dr. Harihar Patel is a resident of Gare village is a a practicing medical doctor (B.A.M.S. and DAC Aryuvedic and Acupuncture). In more recent times Dr. Patel had been leading the Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Ekta Sangathan which had been fighting against take over of people's land due to industrial and mining activities in and around his village. He had also filed an application against environment clearance granted for setting up of the Gare IV coal mining project (by M/s JSPL) before the National Environment Appellate Authority (NEAA) proposed .

Both Agrawal and Patel had participated in a public hearing on 8th May 2010 and raised objections against the expand an existing thermal power plant of Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JPSL) with an additional capacity of 2400 MW. The Chhattisgarh Environment Conservation Board (CECB) had visited the plant site in February 2010 and made observations that the company had initiated construction activity even prior to the public consultation being being completed and an environment clearance issued based on people's responses and the contentions of an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA). Both Agrawal and Patel had raised these and many other issues at the public hearing along with their colleague Rajesh Tripathy.

A Complaint was filed against the Aggarwal and Harihar Patel by Jindal Power Ltd. A perusal of Complaint filed before the Police shows that Sections 501,502,503,504,505,506 read with 34 and 35 of IPC have been registered against Ramesh Aggarwal for statement made at the Public hearing for the proposed project. The offences alleged are mainly dealing provisions of defamation, insult, making false statement with intent to cause offence against public peace etc. and criminal intimidation.

Ramesh Aggarwal has been handcuffed and chained to the bed. This is illegal and violates Supreme Court orders and clearly invites contempt of Court. (See Extracts from Supreme Court Judgement)

Ramesh Agarwal has been spearheading the fight against unplanned industrialisation and exploitation of the natural resources of Chattisgarh. He has been critical in challenging environmental clearances granted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests without proper Environment Impact Assessment studies and public consultation. Infact he has to his credit the maximum number of Appeals before the National Environment Appellate Authority. Some of the significant issues which Ramesh Aggarwal has brought before the Courts are: challenge to thermal power Plant, Champa, Chattisgarh, leading to the initial revocation of environmental clearance and having a fresh public hearing conducted, to his ongoing challenge about half a dozen projects in the region. On a petition of Aggarwals NGO i.e Jan Chetna the Delhi High court directed that copies of approval given to projects must be made published in local newspapers so as to enable people to know the approval conditions.

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Supreme Court Judgment relied upon:

AIR 1996 SC 2193, 1996 CriLJ 3247, (1996) 1 GLR 682
Citizen For Democracy Through Its ... vs State Of Assam And Others

16. We declare, direct and lay down as a rule that handcuffs or other fetters shall not be forced on a prisoner convicted or under-trialwhile lodged in a jail anywhere in the country or while transporting or in transit from one jail to another or from jail to Court and back. The police and the jail authorities, on their own, shall have no authority to direct the handcuffing of any inmate of a jail in the country or during transport from one jail to another or from jail to Court and back.
19. When the police arrests a person in execution of a warrant of arrest obtained from a Magistrate, the person arrested shall not be handcuffed unless the police has also obtained orders from the Magistrate for the handcuffing of the person to be so arrested.
21. We direct all ranks of police and the prison authorities to meticulously obey the above mentioned directions. Any violation of any of the directions issued by us by any rank of police in the country or member of the jail establishment shall be summarily punishable under the Contempt of Courts Act apart from other penal consequences under law”
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Aussie student cracks universe's 'missing mass' puzzle

2011-05-31T23:21:00.000+05:30

Press Trust Of India
Melbourne, May 29, 2011

Astrophysicists have for long been baffled with the universe's "missing mass" puzzle -- one of the major mysteries of science. Now, an Australian student claims to have finally cracked the scientific conundrum. Physicists knew that universe contained more mass than was visible in planets, stars and other objects -- but didn't know where to find it or how to prove it. They estimated that about half the mass required to keep the universe functioning as it does was "missing".

Now, 22-year-old Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, an aerospace engineering student at Monash University, has discovered the missing material after spending a holiday internship with a team of researchers at the varsity's School of Physics.

The student conducted a targeted X-ray search of vast structures known as "filaments of galaxies", which stretch across the vast expanse of space. Examining data the research team had already gathered, her analysis of material confirmed that mass was present in the filaments.

"If we're looking very, very long distances from Earth we're detecting mass, but if we're looking closer to Earth we only see about half the mass that we're expecting to see. This is what is called the missing mass problem.

"People have theorised that this mass has settled in filaments that extend between clusters of galaxies, so we tested and confirmed this prediction by detecting it in the filaments," the Australian media quoted Amelia as saying.

Monash astrophysicist Dr Kevin Pimbblet explained that scientists had previously detected matter that had been present in the early history of the universe but that could not now be located.

He added that physicists had known about the missing mass for the past two decades, but the technology needed to pinpoint its location was only made available in recent years.

"We don't know where it went. Now we do know where it went because that's what Amelia found," he said, adding that the discovery could drive the construction of new telescopes designed to specifically study the mass.

The findings have been published in 'Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society'.

Lokpal Bill: Centre' takes a cunning but risky step

2011-05-31T23:10:00.002+05:30

Faced with a possible deadloak in Lokpal Bill drafting negotiations and another unto-death hunger threat, this time from Baba Ramdev, Centre today wrots to the CMs and political parties seeking their views on Lokpal Bill.

The question that may soon have to be answered: Why only the CMs and the political parties? It could well invite suggestions directly from citizens of the country!

Here is the HT report:

Centre writes to CMs, parties seeking views on Lokpal

Seeking to widen consultations, the Centre on Tuesday wrote to all chief ministers and leaders of political parties eliciting their views on issues including whether to bring the Prime Minister under Lokpal. A day after civil society activists on the Joint Drafting Committee on the Bill threatened to take to streets, home minister P Chidambaram and HRD minister Kapil Sibal addressed a press conference to make it clear that the government was committed to bringing a Bill in the Monsoon session of Parliament.

The government is also trying to avert a situation like the one that evolved during the indefinite fast by Anna Hazare last month with finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and top ministry officials talking to Baba Ramdev to persuade him not to go ahead with his proposed indefinite fast from June 4.

Mukherjee, who is also the chairman of the Joint Draft Committee, on Tuesday wrote a letter to the the chief ministers and leaders of political parties representatives in Parliament to give their views on six issues.

These include the demand of civil society members that one single Act should provide for both the Lokpal in the Centre and Lokayukta in the state and whether their governments would be willing to accept a draft provision for the Lokayukta on the same lines as that of the Lokpal.

Answer has also been sought on whether Prime Minister should also be brought under the purview of the Lokpal and if so, should there be a qualified inclusion and should judges of Supreme Court and hgh courts also be covered by the proposed law.

Link: http://www.hindustantimes.com/Centre-writes-to-CMs-parties-seeking-views-on-Lokpal/H1-Article1-704139.aspx

Who let Davy escape? CBI to zero in on 'politician'

2011-05-27T17:37:00.001+05:30

The CBI wishes to write "the last chapter" of the Purulia arms drop case as the agency wants to know the name of a politician, if any, who had helped the main accused Kim Davy escape from Mumbai airport. Source in the agency said the CBI is ready to probe the mysterious escape of Purulia arms drop case accused Kim Davy with the alleged help of a politician from Mumbai airport, if he gives details about him during his trial before Indian courts after his extradition from Denmark.

Sources in the agency said the "last chapter of this mystery will be written by Davy himself" as the CBI so far has not found involvement of any politician in the Purulia arms drop "conspiracy".

"The details about the escape can only be provided by Kim Davy. Let him come to India and say in the court whatever he is claiming through media interviews. Once he gives his statement in the court, we are ready to probe in every possible lead provided by him," a senior official of the agency said.

Davy, in a media interview, had alleged an MP from Bihar had helped him escape from the country to Denmark after his infamous air-dropping operation of sophisticated weapons in Purulia in West Bengal on the night of December 17, 1995.

A CBI team has recently returned from Denmark where a five-judge bench of the Danish High Court, first to be constituted since 1957, concluded hearing extradition case of Davy. The bench is likely to pronounce its decision in the case before the start of their summer vacations which begin some time in July.

TOI news 26 May 2011

Jan Lokpal Bill will have tooth to send corrupt to jail: Anna Hazare

2011-05-27T17:31:00.001+05:30

TOI link PTI news 26 May 2011

AHMEDABAD: Social activist Anna Hazare exuded confidence that the Jan Lokpal Bill will have 'enough tooth' to send the corrupt in jail.
"The multi-crore scams like Adarsh, CWG are surfacing ... but scamsters are not being sent to jail. For sending such scamsters to jail there will be this Jan Lokpal Bill," Hazare said at an event.
"In the last 62 years, no law has been enacted in the country to put brakes on corruption, which is not good in a law-driven democratic country like India," he said.
The government was saying why do we need people (civil society) from outside for drafting the bill, I told them they are not outsiders, Hazare said adding that people in democracy are politicians' boss as they vote them to power.
On January 26, 1950, a day when India became sovereign republic, people of the country turned your bosses, Hazare said.
"When I spoke like this the government went silent," Hazare said.
"I mean to say that in a democratic set up it is necessary to take civil society with you if the nation has to make progress, he said.
If a law is to be enacted then the public must be consulted on it, like we are doing, Hazare said adding that an effective legislation like the RTI Act came into existence in a similar fashion.
Swami Agnivesh, while sharing dais with Hazare said that the Jan Lokpal bill draft is likely to get finalised before June 30.

Osama’s Yemeni wife led US to Abbottabad? PTI | May 23, 2011, 01.16am IST

2011-05-26T17:08:00.000+05:30

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/Osamas-Yemeni-wife-led-US-to-Abbottabad/articleshow/8518908.cms

LONDON: Pakistan interior minister Rehman Malik believes US had a mole right inside Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad hideout and this was how the al-Qaida chief was tracked down, a media report said on Sunday.
Top US officials said after the raid that they were only partially certain of Osama's presence inside the $1 million mansion, but Malik says only definitive information could have led them right to the room where bin Laden was killed, according to a report in The Sunday Times. The report also says that bin Laden's Saudi wives believe it was his younger Yemeni wife Amal who betrayed him.
"In my experience of years as an intelligence officer, I think someone from inside may have given information," said Malik. "If the Americans didn't have definitive information, they couldn't have gone straight to the room where bin Laden was," he was quoted as saying by the paper.
A pocket guide carried by the US Navy Seals who killed Osama, suggests "bin Laden had fathered twins in captivity" referring to the unidentified children born this year to his youngest wife Amal, 28.
The document, left behind in the compound, lists the names and ages of those who were present, including bin Laden's wives, children and grandchildren. It also details where they lived in the compound and when they arrived.
According to the report, after the mission Obama said he had been "only 45% to 55% sure that bin Laden was even in the compound". The document, which is believed to have been carried by all the Seals on the mission, however, indicates that US intelligence was certain of his presence.
Some Pakistani officials, including Malik, believe the briefing points to the presence of a mole in the compound. The two elder Saudi wives of bin Laden have accused Amal of betraying bin Laden, either by supplying information or by allowing herself to be tracked to the compound.
There have been reports of visits to the compound by donors and a Taliban commander. The other possibility is that US drone technology is far more sophisticated.
Documents also reveal for the first time that the two courier brothers moved to Abbottabad in 2006 from Mardan where Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the al-Qaida No 3, was captured in May 2005. According to Guantanamo detainee assessment published by WikiLeaks, he was caught while waiting for a courier. He had earlier been living in Abbottabad.
According to the report, an employee at Abbottabad Post Office was tracked after he received suspiciously large cash transfers and he led investigators to Umar Patek, one of the Bali bombers, arrested in Abbottabad in January. All these arrests in the same area seem more than coincidence, it said.

Gwangju Prize: Acceptance speech of Dr Sen

2011-05-19T13:03:00.000+05:30

Posted: 18 May 2011 01:13 AM PDT

Dr Binayak Sen

I am greatly honored to be chosen as the 2011 recipient of the prestigious Gwangju Prize for Human Rights. It is indeed an honor not just for me but also the countless other human rights workers struggling to establish justice, peace and equity all over India, including Chhattisgarh where I live and work. Let me begin by thanking all those who have taken the time to advocate about me and on behalf of me, and then take this opportunity to speak for myself and in my own words.
I would like to thank the people of South Korea and in particular the citizens of Gwangju whose historic struggles have made freedom, democracy and justice core values of their society. The martyrs of Gwangju will remain an inspiration to people all over Asia as we struggle to make the world a better place.
First, I shall try to briefly clear up some possible misconceptions about myself. I did not violate any laws and never was disloyal to the people of my country. I condemn, unequivocally, all violence by any and all individuals and agencies. I believe that violence is an invalid and unsustainable approach to achieving goals, whether these are the goals of the state or the goals of individuals operating outside the law. Because the state is sworn to uphold the Constitution, I believe we are entitled hold agents of the state to a higher standard than we hold outlaws. As members and office-bearers of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, it is the responsibility of my colleagues and myself to help hold the state accountable to the promises of the Indian Constitution.
But the state does not only consist of the government or its agencies. As a society, we are all part of the state, and there would be no state without us. We often tend to think of violence only in terms of the use of weapons and explosives against others. However, there is another form of violence in society, which is structural in nature, which I believe is even more pervasive and pernicious than guns and bombs, because it is all around us and we have stopped noticing it. It is this other form of violence that concerns me as a paediatrician and public health physician.
I would like to begin my speech here today by first telling you very briefly about myself and my work but follow this up with my perspectives on what is happening in my home country India, which is home to over one-sixth of all humanity on this planet. I will also try to deal with the global context which is affecting the health and human rights situation in India.
It was nearly four decades ago that I, as a pediatrician trained at the Christian Medical College, Vellore in southern India after a brief stint at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi decided to go and work in Chhattisgarh. My graduate thesis at CMC had focused on severe malnutrition in children and the theme of nutrition and its interface with health and well being has been a life-long area of concern for me.
Chhattisgarh, a province in central India that till ten years ago used to be part of the larger province of Madhya Pradesh, was created in 2000 as a separate state ostensibly to benefit the large population of indigenous people or ‘adivasis’ there.
However, Chhattisgarh is also the most mineral rich state in the country and iron-ore, limestone, dolomite, coal, bauxite are found in abundance. The province also produces 20% of the India’s steel and cement and is also a major centre of thermal power production. Much of the mineral resource lies below adivasi lands. Yet throughout India a as well as in Chhattisgarh, the adivasis are a much-neglected group, long deprived of such basics as nutritional security, health care and education, who are now also suffering displacement from their natural habitat and their traditional livelihood resources as politically favoured commercial interests seek to exploit the state’s vast mineral wealth in their lands.
When we first arrived here my wife Dr Ilina Sen(who is a sociologist with a special interest in gender studies) and I, decided to work with the Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh (CMSS)which was a unique trade union movement among mining and steel plant workers led by the legendary Shankar Guha Niyogi. Under Niyogi’s leadership, the mine workers’ organization led a militant struggle for the rights of indigenous, contractual mine workers, and combined this with a strong commitment to social initiatives that were anchored in the strength of the people. The idea of basing health outreach programmes on the strength of community based health workers was born here.
In the mid-eighties we moved to the capital city of Raipur and founded Rupantar, a community-based non-governmental organization (NGO) that aimed at an integrated approach to health care and human rights, including women’s rights and food security. Using this platform we contributed to the mainstreaming of health worker based community health programmes that has now been adopted nationally in India. However, my health work in Chhattisgarh for the last 30 years has demonstrated to me again and again that there is a clear relationship to peoples’ nutrition, social , economic and political well being and the state of their health. Health can never exist is isolation and without a broader concept of entitlements.
My participation in human rights work started with my joining the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), a long-established and respected Indian human rights organization established by the late Jai Prakash Narayan during the dark days of the Emergency when the liberty of speech and expression ordinary citizens stood suspended. When the new state of Chhattisgarh was formed, I became the secretary of the PUCL in Chhattisgarh and in the course of time, its National Vice-President. A lot of my human rights work consisted of highlighting the deprivations of the tribal communities and exposing instances of state insensitivity as well as police atrocities against them.
This was a period when the government of Chhattisgarh was engaged in a major project of land acquisition and mega development that deprived the adivasis of their access to common property resources in land, water and forest, as well as existing livelihood options. State action in the forested parts of the province, ostensibly against the Maoists, severely compromised normal life, with repressive laws, police brutality, and the sponsorship of a vicious civilian militia or vigilante group called the Salwa Judum. On behalf of the PUCL, my colleagues and I organised objective enquiries into the atrocities of this militia. We also led enquiries into so called “encounter killings”, by which security agencies sometimes secretly liquidate suspected militants. One such enquiry ultimately led to registration of criminal cases and issuing of arrest warrants against eight erring police officers, much to the discomfort of the state police.
The PUCL has also strongly criticized over the years the forced displacement of the adivasis without proper rehabilitation and without sharing with them the fruits of economic development which is mainly based on exploitation of mineral wealth located in their natural habitat.
Almost certainly because of my growing involvement in human rights work and exposure of state atrocities on indigenous populations on 14 May 2007, I was detained for allegedly supporting the outlawed Maoists, thereby violating the provisions of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005 (CSPSA) and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967, and for indulgence in seditious activity.
On 24 December 2010 a lower court in Raipur sentenced me along with two others to rigorous life imprisonment for ‘sedition’, under an outdated colonial-era law that was formulated by our Imperial masters in the nineteenth century , and used for long against fighters for India’s freedom from British rule.
Today, as I stand before you here in Gwangju I have been freed on bail by the Supreme Court of India which in a hearing on 15 April has said clearly that the law on sedition has been wrongly applied in my case and there is no evidence at all for such a charge. My appeal to overturn the conviction and sentence of life imprisonment continues at the Chhattisgarh High Court and I am determined to fight the case till it is finally established that my actions were always in the interest of justice with equity, and were never seditious in nature.
What I have said so far about Chhattisgarh, applies today to all of India. India, the country I belong to, is an ancient and great nation. It is a land of stupendous diversity of people, cultures, languages and ethnicities. It is a land that gave rise to at least four major religions of the world Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism and to numerous great philosophers, mathematicians, physicians and social revolutionaries.
Today, India is considered around the world as a rapidly developing country posting economic growth rates of around 8-9 percent consistently over the last several years. Along with China, which is much further ahead, India is seen as a powerhouse of the global economy in the decades to come and already it is home to a very large number of dollar billionaires, perhaps the largest such number in Asia.
In our own times as we look around this vast and populated country though the picture that one sees is not as rosy as it is made out to be. India is also home to the world’s largest number of people living in absolute poverty. In 2007 a study on the unorganized sector in India, based on government data for the period between 1993-94 and 2004-05, found that an overwhelming 836 million people in India live on a per capita consumption of less than Rs 20 or O.50 US cents a day. [1]
In 2010 a UNDP/Oxford University study, using a new Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI), said that eight Indian provinces alone have more poor than 26 African nations put together.The report said that acute poverty prevails in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal which together account for 421 million people, 11 million more “MPI poor” than in the 26 poorest African countries.
As a physician and a pediatrician in particular what concerns me is that such absolute poverty among such large numbers of people really translates into a major health disaster the proportions of which can only be called genocidal. I have a specific technical reason for using the word genocide and do not wield it in a rhetorical manner.
The Indian National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB) tells us that over 33% of the adult population of India has a Body Mass Index of less than 18.5, and can be considered as suffering from chronic under nutrition. If we disaggregate the data, we find that over 50% of the scheduled tribes (Adivasis), and over 60% of the scheduled castes (dalits) have a BMI below 18.5.
The WHO says that any community with more than 40% of its members with a BMI below 18.5 may be regarded as being in a state of famine. By this criterion there are various subsets of the population of India-the scheduled tribes, scheduled castes, – which may be regarded as being permanently in a state of famine.
So it is not any general population that is suffering the consequences of poverty-induced malnutrition but specific ethnic groups and hence my use of the term ‘genocide’ as per the United Nations definition. All this is, of course, in addition to the mundane reality, to which we have become inured, of 43% of children under 5 in India being malnourished by weight for age criteria. has the world’s largest number of malnourished children and according to the UNICEF over 2 million Indian children die every year due to malnutrition related diseases.
I want to bring to your and indeed the attention of the world that it is precisely this section of the population, that is stricken by famine, that is today the principal target of a widespread policy of expropriation of natural and common property resources, in a concerted and often militarized programme run by the Indian state.
For a long time, despite their cash poverty, the Adivasis of central India, living in extreme poverty, nevertheless survived through their access to common property resources- the forests, the rivers, and land- all of which are now under a renewed threat of sequestration and privatization as global finance capital embarks on its latest phase of expansion. The doctrine of eminent domain vests ultimate ownership of all land and natural resources in the state. Under cover of eminent domain, vast tracts of land, forest and water reserves are being handed over to the Indian affiliates of international finance capital.
Land acquired from ordinary people in Chhattisgarh, as also in other parts of India, has been handed over to the industrial houses for the purpose of mining or building large steel and power plants. With a few honourable exceptions, the personnel articulating the agency of state power have almost uniformly possessed a colonial mindset. It is not as if the people have not resisted. The forced takeover of indigenous land is being met with resistance that is multi hued , yet the state has chosen to brand it under the single category of Maoist, and has met it with brutality and human rights violations. The social fabric in many of these regions is today polarized beyond immediate rectification, and the deep fissures in our society will take time to heal
Ladies and Gentlemen, on this solemn occasion, I would like to make an appeal to all of you. In the times we live while oppression is most acutely manifested in remote and local places like Bastar district of Chhattisgarh the truth is that the forces behind such oppression are often global in nature. It is well recognized now that the tsunami-like flow of capital around the world is a source of tremendous tragedy for many communities around the world which do not fit into the ideologically straitjacketed confines of the ‘market economy’.
Countries like South Korea that have suffered the ravages of colonialism in the past and risen from the ashes of the Second World War to become industrially and economically leading nations of the world have a special responsibility today. It is the responsibility of ensuring that they do not do the kind of violence and exploitation to the people of the Third World what they themselves were subjected to in the past by others.
I want to bring up the specific case of the South Korean steel giant POSCO which has embarked on a USD 12 billion dollar project in the Indian state of Orissa, which at USD 12 billion to mine iron ore, build a port and a mega-steel plant.
Indian activists have pointed out repeatedly that from a national point of view the MoU signed by the Orissa government with POSCO to give it the rights to mine over 600 million tonnes of high grade iron or is a scam of immense proportions. According to the original MoU, the royalty that POSCO will pay for the iron ore is around Rs. 24 per tonne whereas the selling price in the international market is around Rs. 5000 today. Besides all this POSCO and its investors from around the world are to be illegally given nearly 5000 acres of land that was originally forest land and cannot be used for any other purpose under Indian law without the consent of forest dwelling people.
For more than five years now the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samity (PPSS), a local people’s movement in Jagatsingpur district, has been bravely resisting the POSCO project which threatens the livelihood of thousands of agriculturists, workers and small businesses in the area besides devastating the local environment and ecology. Over 30,000 people, mostly farmers and fisherfolk are expected to be displaced.
Even as we speak here today large contingents of the Orissa police are moving into the villages settled on the targeted land for the POSCO project to uproot local communities using brute force. I would like to appeal to the South Korean people and the people of Gwangju in particular to strongly oppose the POSCO project in solidarity with the brave farmers and fishermen of Jagatsingpur. POSCO should withdraw its investment in this project immediately and an inquiry launched in both South Korea and India into the circumstances under which such a project was considered and cleared.
The spirit of the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights calls upon all of us to continue to oppose violations of human rights in every form, wherever it occurs and whatsoever the costs of such opposition. We remain committed to Peace, but realize that there cannot be any peace without equity and social justice. I am confident that my appeal to you will be heard and responded to and the solidarity of the South Korean people will forever remain with the oppressed people of India and other parts of Asia and the world.
Thank you

Updated Mamata page on Wikipedia

2011-05-16T11:16:00.002+05:30

"Mamata Banerjee (Bengali: মমতা বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়, [mɔːmoːt̪ʰaː bɛːnaːrjiː]; ممتا بنرجی born 5 January 1955) is the Chief Minister-elect of West Bengal (to assume office on 18 May 2011) and the founding chairperson of the Trinamool Congress.[1][2][3] Noted as a firebrand orator and popularly known as "Didi" (meaning 'the elder sister'), she pulled off a landslide victory for the All India Trinamul Congress in West Bengal by defeating the world's longest-serving democratically-elected communist government, i.e. Communist Party of India (Marxist) led Left Front government, eliminating the 34 years of Left's rule in the state.[4][5][6] She opposes Special Economic Zones and forceful land acquisition for industrialization in West Bengal at the cost of agriculturalists and farmers.[1][6]"

Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamata_Banerjee

Link to Mamata page on Lok Sabha website: http://india.gov.in/govt/loksabhampbiodata.php?mpcode=39

Release 5 million tonnes of foodgrains: Supreme Court

2011-05-16T11:14:00.000+05:30

J. Venkatesan, The Hindu, 15 May 2011

To prevent starvation deaths and malnutrition

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‘In 150 poorest districts, malnutrition is very intense'

‘The position of foodgrains stocks is extremely good'

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New Delhi: To ensure that no starvation death takes place and people are saved from malnutrition as far as possible, the Supreme Court on Saturday directed the Centre to release five million tonnes of foodgrains immediately for distribution in 150 most poverty-stricken districts or other poorer segments in the country.

Though it was a holiday for the court, a Bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma held a special sitting and passed the order, considering the urgency and gravity of the matter.

The Bench heard Gopal Subramaniam, Solicitor-General; Mohan Parasaran, Additional Solicitor-General; Colin Gonsalves, senior counsel for the petitioner (People's Union for Civil Liberties), and other counsel for the respective parties and passed the order.

The Bench said: “Admittedly, in the 150 poorest districts of India, the problem of malnutrition is very intense and is related to the inadequacy or lack of food in those areas.

The Union of India must provide adequate foodgrains for these 150 poorest districts, on a priority basis.

“A number of cases of malnutrition and starvation are reported from time to time. Subsidised food is really meant for this section of our society. Fortunately, the position of foodgrains stocks in our country is extremely good. Mr. Parasaran, ASG, submits that as on April 1, 2011 there are 44 million tonnes of stocks. Perhaps, never before have foodgrains stocks been so high. The bumper crop of this season will further improve the situation of existing stocks. Even after keeping adequate foodgrains for emergency or unforeseen circumstances, we would still have huge stocks in our godowns.”

Further, it said: “Millions of tonnes of foodgrains are lying in the open for years because of inadequate storage capacity. Admittedly, about 55,000 tonnes of foodgrains rotted in Punjab and Haryana. A very large chunk of foodgrains were destroyed in the recent Punjab fire because the foodgrains were lying in open. In this background, the 5 million tonnes of foodgrains which the Union of India has already undertaken to additionally allocate, must go to the most vulnerable sections of our society and the parties are in total agreement about this proposition.

“Looking to the enormity and gravity of the problem, as a one-time measure, it is absolutely imperative in the larger public interest to direct the Union of India to reserve another 5 million tonnes of foodgrains for distribution to the 150 poorest districts or the extremely poor and vulnerable sections of our society. This additional 5 million tonnes of foodgrains would be over and above 5 million tonnes which the Union of India has already undertaken to allocate.

“The estimated population of the country as of March, 2010 is 117.67 crores and according to the office of the Registrar-General, Census, the projected population of India as in 2011 is 119.3 crores (Planning Commission working Group on Population Stabilisation for the 11th Five Year Plan). We see no rationale in not distributing foodgrains according to the estimate of the Union of India. The food allocation should be based on every year's population estimate as carried out by the Planning Commission or the Registrar-General, in the absence of any official census figure,” the Bench said.

Democratic war

2011-05-16T11:11:00.001+05:30

by V.R. KRISHNA IYER
Frontline, Volume 28 - Issue 10 :: May. 07-20, 2011

The Lokpal must be an independent body accessible to every citizen on any matter of corruption affecting the purity of public life.

IT is well known that corruption is widely prevalent in India. Time and again, acts of corruption have been brought into the public domain. They violate human rights, undermine the rule of law, distort the development process and disempower the Indian state. While there are laws against corruption in India, there exists a wide gap between the law in the books and the law in practice. Therefore, a comprehensive law providing for forfeiture of illegally acquired property, in India and abroad, of public servants is the need of the hour.

The Jan Lokpal should have independence in its functioning. It must have the power to inquire into, decide and forfeit illegally acquired property of public servants, their relatives, associates, name lenders, and so on. For discharging the onerous duties of the Lokpal under the said enactment, that office must be given wide powers, including the power to call even from Swiss banks details of funds deposited by public servants. Power should be conferred on it to attach and confiscate movable and immovable property even before a final decision is taken. There must also be a provision stating that all transfers of illegally acquired property shall be void if such transfer is effected after the issue of notice of forfeiture. The accused public servant should be burdened with the duty to prove that all the assets he possessed are legally acquired wealth.

The Lokpal should be headed by a former judge of the Supreme Court with impeccable integrity. There has to be a provision for appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Lokpal will be an independent body accessible to every citizen on any matter of corruption affecting the purity of public life and will act only according to its chaste conscience. The members of the Lokpal body can act without fear or favour or affection or ill will of anyone in India, be he ever so high. Its jurisdiction will extend to investigate the proceedings of the Prime Minister, the President or other public authority or public body functioning in a manner affecting public interest, public life or work. The Lokpal cannot be changed by the government and can be replaced only by resignation or a unanimous decision of Parliament, Prime Minister and President.

Such a body will be supreme in its operations and its guidance will extend over the executive, legislative and judicative wings of government. The Lokpal and other members of the body will be selected by an independent authority in India and they can be prosecuted or subject to any court's jurisdiction only on a specific motion for that purpose in Parliament or the State Assemblies and approved by a two-thirds majority of each House.

On the other hand, the Lokpal, acting on the basis of a majority, can quash any decision or order of any authority that is found delinquent after a full and fair inquiry.

India has seen many avatars of corruption – the Bofors scandal, the fodder scam, the 2G spectrum allocation scam, the swindle in the Commonwealth Games preparations, and so on. The people of the country strongly believe that toothless pieces of legislation made by legislatures are the reason why corrupt people go scot free. The people also seem to have lost belief in the judicial system, which has been able to bring to justice only a few of the corruption-accused and that too after a minimum of 10 years.

The people have realised that their elected representatives do not do any legislative work and have started pointing to acts of corruption through the strong media. The people's struggle for independence from the British has now turned into a democratic war against corruption.

How can one expect a Prime Minister who does not exercise his franchise to wipe the tears of the aam aadmi who is suffering on account of rampant corruption? Development is now seen to be synonymous with corruption. To make the legislature do its duty, the people, who believe in a system of good governance, have turned to weapons of non-violence, such as satyagraha. For development to happen, India first needs independence from corruption.

Power is tempered with accountability; sans investigation, power is tower. This principle has been accepted in the Bill now introduced. But the supreme functions vested in this new instrument must be free from state control. Or else it becomes another tool of torture in the hands of the executive – a remedy aggravating the malady.

Prashant Bhushan has made a sound critique of the Bill. The larger the power, the more responsible is the accountability, lest the instrument destroy democracy. Today, if the judiciary delivers an authoritarian judgment, there is none to correct it nor is it accountable to any agency or authority. This makes judges a body of dictators.

The appointment of judges and the critique and correction of their fiats are vital. What is provided on this behalf is insignificant. Besides, access to correct the blunders of this arbitrary body, to make its selection democratic and transparent and its performance subject to a democratic organ has not been given due consideration.

Under the guise of control over judicial and other instruments, we cannot create a royalty above all. That is, the choice is between fascism and a self-created authoritarian Grand Jury. The verdict of the jury for misbehaviour of the judiciary and executive authority will make the whole system self-contained and democratic without totalitarian bias.

Judges are not jungle creatures but maintain standards of conduct. During the days when J.S. Verma was the Chief Justice of India, an informal code of conduct was evolved, which commanded the concurrence of the judges of the High Court and the Supreme Court. This code of conduct, to have a binding force, must be incorporated in the Constitution itself and made enforceable. Thus, the standards of conduct of judges abhor corruption, misuse of power or other oblique behaviour. They can be enforced by the Grand Jury. The delinquent conduct not only of the judiciary but of all public authorities must be dealt with by the Grand Jury.

This steering body with final authority must be selected by a commission for appointment and performance. No longer confined to the judiciary but including every instrument that enjoys public power, the Grand Jury will sit for a period of 10 years and can be removed for misconduct only by the paramount power of the two Houses of Parliament. These are matters that have to be refined by the draftsman and presented to Parliament. These are rough ideas and have to be debated by Parliament and approved with a two-thirds majority. The whole process is cumbersome, but when complicated problems face a nation, the process has to be complicated. Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let justice be done though the heavens fall).

Two fundamentals

Two fundamentals that make the Grand Jury itself accountable may be indicated briefly. Public power becomes a terror unless it is accountable to the nation and makes itself accessible to the littlest Indian who has a grievance of corruption or improper behaviour justifying an inquiry into the conduct of the judges implicated. In principle, access to every citizen and accountability to ‘We, the People of India' is accepted in the Lokpal Bill. I have suggested the creation of a basic authority with supreme powers. If both Houses of Parliament, each with two-thirds majority, have the power to appoint and to dismiss, surely it will be a grand wonder of paramount power.

Modifications and refinements may be necessary in what I have said. A national debate may bring out flaws, and faults and failings may be disclosed and corrected at the final stage. Egregious errors cannot be avoided in advance. Only when the nation debates the issue latent errors will become patent.

It is my conviction, as I have repeated several times, that an appointments commission should be set up with transparency and opportunity for the public to speak up. When this article gains national circulation, new thought will surface and correction may still be possible. A performance commission also may be necessary. Perhaps, it is good to remember Edmund Burke's observations: “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

The Grand Jury I envision will be a powerful body, itself accountable to the people through Parliament, and its processes will be transparent and progressive. Glasnost and Perestroika are principles that apply to all instruments where state power is vested. After all, the greater the power, the more dangerous is the abuse. It is a fact that the former Chief Justice of India has been accused of corruption, and yet the Prime Minister has kept silent. While I have demanded power in Parliament even against the Grand Jury, that is because “in all forms of government people is the legislator”.

The former Chief Justice of India with grave aspersions against him is silent and the Prime Minister and Parliament are keeping guilty silence. But an event of corruption has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent. Dear Prime Minister, still I hold you as a statesman and straightforward repository of power. Parliamentarians, remember your duty to the nation. Speak up against corruption. Silence is grave guilt where it is your duty to speak on the side of the nation.

Dear Prime Minister, I still have great hopes from you. Act now and make the judiciary a credible instrument beyond suspicion, beyond delinquency. Manmohan Singh, you are the guardian of democracy for the nonce. Therefore, I cite Swami Vivekananda to impress upon you the basics of democracy and godism:

“Feel, my children, feel; feel for the poor, the ignorant, the downtrodden; feel till the heart stops and the brain reels and you think you will go mad…. I do not believe in a God, who cannot give me bread here, giving me eternal bliss in heaven!”

Obama releases 'long form' birth certificate

2011-04-27T22:40:00.002+05:30

BBC 27 April 2011

The White House has released President Barack Obama's birth certificate, in response to persistent rumours he was not born in the US.

Mr Obama had previously released an official "certification of live birth" showing he was born in Hawaii.

But fringe "birther" theorists have insisted Mr Obama was actually born in his father's native Kenya, making him ineligible to be president.

Recently potential Republican candidate Donald Trump has revived the rumour.

PM's indirect green signal to Raja's designs: PAC

2011-04-27T22:30:00.001+05:30

Indo-Asian News Service
New Delhi, April 27, 2011

A parliamentary panel's draft report on the 2G spectrum allocation has criticized Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for giving an "indirect green signal" to former IT and communication minister A Raja to execute his "unfair and dubious designs" in selling the scarce radio waves at throwaway prices.

The yet-to-be adopted Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report said Raja, who is now in jail, revealed "half truth to conceal his ulterior design".

The report doesn't hold Manmohan Singh directly responsible for the alleged losses the 2008 sale of telecom licences caused to the nation, but the prime minister however faces critcism in the explosive report that was leaked to the media a day before it is likely to the adopted by the 22-member panel.

Criticising the prime minister, the report says that the committee examined the "sequence of events (that) testifies some unfortunate ommisions".

It highlights how "strangely" the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) processed Raja's Dec 26, 2007 letter to the prime minister.

It alleges that the letter was submitted to the prime minister Jan 7, 2008, 12 days after Raja had sent it.

Four days later, the private secretary to the prime minister conveyed Manmohan Singh's "desire to take into account the developments concerning the issue of licences", it said.

This happened a day after the licences were issued Jan 10, 2008, according to the report.

On Jan 15, Manmohan Singh's private secretary wrote a note that the prime minister wants this informally shared with the department of telecom and "doesn not want a formal communication and wants PMO to be at arm's length".

"By just acknowledging the minister's letter, the PM seemed to have given his indirect green signal to go ahead with his plan and decision... The prime minister's desire to keep the PMO at arm's length indirectly helped the communication minster to go ahead and execute his unfair, arbitrary and dubious designs."

The report, full of errors and grammatical mistakes, has already triggered a full blown war between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress and DMK combine.

The term of the present PAC ends April 30 and it is alleged that BJP's Murli Manohar Joshi, who heads the panel, was hurrying to finalise the report "with malafide intension", the ruling partners said.

"It appears that he (Joshi) has a hidden agenda to destabilise the government. He should resign. The draft report seems to have been prepared in pre-determined way with biased mind and malafide intentions" Congress' K.S. Rao, who is also a panel member, said in a joint press conference with a DMK MP and other members from his party.

The report also comes down heavily on the PMO's role saying it "certainly either failed to see the foreboding or was rendered a mute spectator".

"The PMO was very much aware of the law minister's suggestions (to refer the matter to the empowered group of ministers) but the counter view of the communication minister got overriding preference to the law minister's view for some unknown reasons and thus no effort was made by the PM."

Raja, the report said "arrogantly termed the suggestions of the law minister as out of content".

Raja "audaciously informed the prime minister that the cut-off date has been fixed at Sep 25, 2007 on the plea of shortage of spectrum whereas on another occasion he had said that there was enough scope for allotment of spectrum to few new operators".

The assurance to Manmohan Singh that "he was not deviating from the established and existing procedures was a blatant lie as he deformed and distorted the (FCFS) first-come, first-serve policy" the report says.

It also critcises Chidambaram who was then the finance minister saying the committee was "shocked and dismayed" to note that in his note Feb 15, 2008, he acknowledged that spectrum price should be based on its scarcity value and efficiency of usage.

But Chidambaram later suggested that the matter be closed, it says.

"...the finance minister, the guardian of the public exchequer and entrusted with the principle task of mobilisation of resources for public welfare, instead of initiating stringent and swift action against all those responsible for the whopping loss to the exchequer, pleaded with the prime minister to treat the matter as closed."

I saw posters calling for Binayak to be hanged.

2011-04-27T22:21:00.003+05:30

JUSTICE FOR BINAYAK

BY ILINA SEN

Unflinching devotion ‘When I heard he had been sentenced for life, I thought there was so much we could still have shared, so much I wanted to say...’

......................................................................
Today, on one hand I feel great happiness and great relief that this part of the ordeal is almost over. On the other hand I feel anxiety — we have seen how hostile and vengeful the State has been. But there is no sense of loss, or futility over the lives we’ve led. At times one wishes for a less eventful, less traumatic life. But on the whole, it’s been a rich experience. A good life.

Binayak and I have given so much to Chhattisgarh — before anyone was writing about the state, we were doing it. Any journalist or researcher who came to the state would meet us first.

I WAS born in 1951. My father was an army doctor, so we moved every three years. We lived everywhere: I began my schooling in Faridkot in a Punjabi-medium school. Then there was a lot of growing up in Jabalpur, and I ended up finishing school in Shillong. Next was history at Lady Brabourne College in Calcutta followed by a master’s in English in Jabalpur, where my parents had settled. Studying history was very useful, giving a certain perspective to all my work. The literature was for pleasure — I focussed on two American poets: Frost and Dickinson.

Then I thought I’d like to study something connected to real people, real life, so I did an MPhil and PhD in sociology from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. My PhD thesis, submitted in 1984, was one of the first works on the declining sex ratio in India based on Census figures from 1901 to 1981.

Binayak’s father was also an army doctor and our families often crossed each other. We must have met as children, but met properly as young people in Jabalpur. Binayak is obviously very attractive, both as a person and a personality. When I first met him as an adult, he was soft-spoken, gentle. I immediately sensed that he was a democratic person — someone one could grow with, not dogmatic or patriarchal. I reached a comfort level with him very early. In those days, of course, we sent letters through snail mail and booked trunk calls. It did feel unusual to get married at 21, but we just felt we wanted to be together, to build a life together.

Also, my younger sister died in Jabalpur in 1970 at age 13 from Crohn’s disease. Something like this causes a total breakdown in a middle class family. I had no other siblings and her death wrecked us. Both my grandmother and Binayak’s had 8-9 children and they each lost one or two, but it wasn’t the same for my parents’ generation. In retrospect, when I think about it, a part of me must have also wanted to marry to get away from all this.

When Binayak started his residency training in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, I came to Chennai and saw the sea for the first time. It was very dramatic. I taught English in a school for two years, which was great fun, though I had no formal training. They selected me because, of all the candidates, I knew no Tamil, so they felt I’d teach more intensely — it was like ducking kids into the sea! I still meet some of those children.

Binayak and I moved together to JNU in Delhi in 1978 for our PhDs. He didn’t last very long, as he desperately wanted to do field work and this wasn’t even a medical college. He didn’t have patience with research and had problems with the senior faculty. He left in about a year, while I stayed on.

In Delhi, I was exposed to all kinds of things, the most pivotal being the women’s movement — there were groups like Manushi and Saheli. The Emergency had just ended. We’d get brilliant speakers like Noam Chomsky and AB Vajpayee. This period had a huge influence on me. I was the first recipient of ICCR’s women’s studies fellowship, for which I began fieldwork in Hoshangabad, Chhattisgarh.

Binayak wanted to build a hospital for workers in Chhattisgarh’s twin mining settlements of Dalli-Rajhara, where he had begun work in 1981. I joined him full-time in 1984, picking up Chhattisgarhi and the culture much more easily than Binayak — I’ve always been good at languages.

It was a fascinating place and time. I’ve always been very adventurous in finding new places, new relationships. It seemed like the whole world was going to Chhattisgarh, all the jhollawalla bhais were headed there. It was a social experiment, with tons of intellectuals visiting us. We had a sense of building a sustainable, egalitarian society.

Chhattisgarh was so invigorating. Madhya Pradesh, where I grew up, still had the ghunghat (veil) and segregation of sexes. I fell in love with Chhattisgarh, where the women are such an inspiration, so strong and articulate. The trade unions had 5,000 women members, and I made friends like Durga Bai, who worked in the mines and was equal to any man. The organisation of people was also remarkable.

I’ve been very lucky, being at the right place at the right time, forging enduring friendships across classes in both rural and urban worlds. I can go to my friend and pick custard apples from her trees — I know when it’s the right time.

Living in rural India has challenges like no toilets, but those are minor di culties. Now, as I grow old and become arthritic, there are some new di culties. Then I need electricity for writing, since I’ve always written at night after the children sleep.

I and Binayak had a fight — one of many continuing negotiations! — when I came to live in Dalli-Rajhara in 1984. He’d been staying with a worker’s family and I couldn’t look upon that as a permanent way of life — it was not how I wanted to be. The family was very loving but you can’t park yourself indefinitely in someone’s house. Eventually, we moved into a flat. Binayak is a very passionate man but he doesn’t always think of consequences. I’m a little more cautious, thinking about things — like, we have two children. He’s very pure in what he thinks has to be done.

We moved to Raipur in 1988 where I set up the NGO Rupantar for people-centred development. We worked with Gond and Kamar tribes in the Nagari-Sihawa area, who had built settlements in forest land after being displaced by dams. There were no schools, no social institutions. Binayak did health work while I worked with the kids, designing educational programmes. I tried to combine literacy skills with my own understanding of things. That world was very collaborative. The Kamar children would offer to build something in return for an education. The tribal community had a different context but it had the same energies as anywhere. And it had solidarity.

I continued to research, write, do consultancies. I wrote two books: Women’s Participation in People’s Struggles and Migrant Women of Chhattisgarh. I’d been visiting to teach women’s studies, in Hindi medium, at the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtrya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya in Wardha, Maharashtra, since 2004, and in 2006 I moved base there. Binayak stayed back in Chhattisgarh, which was already becoming virulent. The spaces were closing in. The Salwa Judum had come in 2005 and it wasn’t comfortable.

The times changed: Our daughters’ lives are very different. Pranhita works as a cinematographer in Chennai while Aparajita is doing her BA in Mumbai. They’ll make their own life.

I’VE ALWAYS romanticised Chhattisgarh. The people are so vibrant with their modern outlook about love and divorce. But the trajectory of public discourse has been a disappointment here — it’s become increasingly monolithic. It’s a combination of ignorance and arrogance, which is quite deadly. There’s a lot of self righteousness. Nobody likes good citizens, everyone likes good consumers. The Chhattisgarhi media doesn’t reflect the breadth of vision of the local people, it has a narrow worldview.

On the morning of 24 December last year, when Binayak was convicted for life, I thought: This can’t be happening. This can’t be true. But I believed the truth would come out when people analysed the case in 10-20 years. My sense of being was under threat when my name was also dragged into court. I had nightmares, migraines. There would be times when I couldn’t sleep for five nights. And I still had to lead a so-called normal working life with children.

There’s been a sense of deep insecurity, but these past few years I never felt suicidal. I kept hoping and praying. I had the conviction that we were right. Truth was on my side. And the lawyers, certain media, old friends and family, everyone stuck by me. The support was there. You cope because you have to. I’ve continued reading Frost and Dickinson and sharing them with friends. I don’t feel like giving up. I still want to find peace but the future will take time.

Prior to 2007, I used to be very much focussed on Chhattisgarh and the issues most prevalent there like displacement. But during the past few years, I have felt a larger canvas now of Constitutional values. The Constitution promises a lot but a lot of its entitlements remain conceptual. For example, even though I’m not a religious person I’m still governed by the personal law of my community.

I have a much larger worldview now both intellectually and spatially. Increasingly, I’ve also understood the great unevenness of India — there is no one India, whether it be the media, the courts or the government. The role of the State needs to be urgently renegotiated in our lives and our future will hang on how democratically we do that. For example, leave aside Anna Hazare’s politics, but look at the support for the Lokpal Bill.

Personally, these years have given me both confidence and a lot of uncertainty. There’s been a loss of trust. Now when I meet someone I measure them and what I say to them. I also don’t know where my home is anymore, which is a source of great pain. I haven’t yet dealt fully with being dislocated, not belonging anywhere.

It’s very difficult to understand what happened to the Chhattisgarh I was in love with. I had so much rapture about this place. I still do about its people, but the State is different. The newspapers would print headlines gloating over what was happening to us. There was such a tone of malice. I saw posters in Raipur calling for Binayak to be hanged. This is not the Chhattisgarh I’ve loved. Does it still exist? I don’t know. I hope so. I hope I find it again.

Today I still admire the democratic person in Binayak the most. On 24 December last year when I heard he’d been sentenced to life, I felt there was so much we could still have shared, so much I wanted to say to him and hadn’t said. We still have lots to explore with each other and I look forward to that.

Is There Anyone To Hear This Boy’s Cry

2011-04-27T21:44:00.000+05:30

By Gladson Dungdung

26 April, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Anup Oraon is merely 10 months old Adivasi boy. He was born in mid of the summer in 2010. He started traveling in the winter. And now travelling has become part and parcel of his life. However, his travel is different from others. His travel is unique. He has been traveling with his mother Nirmala Kanti Oraon with the hope that one day someone will hear his cry. Of course, his travel is for demand of justice. He has already attended several public hearings, mass meetings, protests, seminars and conferences across the country, where he shared his agony with people and demand justice for his father, uncle and neighbours.

Last time, I met him in a national seminar held in Bhopal the capital city of Madhya Pradesh. It was the beginning of summer, when he had come to Bhopal with his mother to tell the concerned people about their pains, sufferings and sorrows. However, the climate of Bhopal added salt in his wound. He started suffering from cold, cough and fever. His mother was worried. She told me that they have traveled to many places but this time Anup fell sick. She said in anxiety, “I’m worried if something happen to my child, how I can explain to my husband when he comes out of the Jail.” She was there to tell the people that how the Odissa police humiliated, tortured and put her innocent husband in jail after branding him as a member of the CPI-Maoist.

The worst thing is Anup Oraon has not even seen his father since his birth. When he was born his father Paulus Oraon was already behind the bars. Though he cannot express his pains, sufferings and sorrows in words but his endless cry, anguish and anxiety are enough for describing everything he has been undergoing in absence of his father. Perhaps, he wants to play in the lap of his father, he wishes to hear the voice of someone else than hearing her mother’s voice every time he wakes up for the bed and of course, he wants to be loved by his father. But India’s war (for minerals) has put this child’s life in a stake. Both the mother and child have been running from pillar to post but no one is there to hear their plea. Can anyone hear their cry for justice?

According to Nirmala Kanti Oraon, she was living with her husband Paulus Oraon in a village called Silpunji, comes under Banki police station of Sundargarh the mineral rich district of Odissa. Since, they have fertile land; they used to harvest enough food grain, which of course, was ensuring them a good life. Meanwhile, Nirmala Kanti Oraon conceived. Consequently, the happiness and joy was about to be poured in their family. However, the destiny was something else for them. In the early morning on 29 August 2009, the security forces consisting of the CRPF personals and local police arrived to their village. The security forces started search operations in the village. The police entered into house and asked Nirmala Kanti Oraon about his husband. When they didn’t find him in the house they started roaming in the vicinity and caught him nearby a river closed to his village, where he had gone for toilet in the morning. The police abused and severely beat him alleging him as a Maoist. Finally, he was arrested. However, the police did not inform Nirmala Kanti Oraon about the arrest of her husband.

The security forces did not stop here. They abused, assaulted and beaten the villagers, and also molested the women. They did not spare children too. The police entered into the house of 50 year-old Joseph Oraon, ransacked all the belongings and scattered the food grains. The police picked up 24 year-old teacher Sapal Oraon from his bed alleging him as a Maoist. He was assaulted and forcefully taken to the police camp. He is a good leader of the area and also a teacher under Sarva Sikhya Abhiyan in the village. After a few months, the police also arrested Sopal’s wife Khudia who leads women SHG group in the village. Now their three kinds and mother are facing severe livelihood crisis. Similarly, 25 year-old daily wage labourer Budhram Oraon had gone for toilet and police arrested him from there. Now his wife is living with her 6 months old kid and suffering from need of food and care. In another case the police caught 19 year-old Ashim Oraon and tied him in a tree with rope and left him for 5 hours without food and water. Similarly, the police caught 22 year-old Raju Oraon from his house when he was sleeping. When he questioned the police, he was tied in a tree with rope near the bridge for 6 hours without food and water. They also severely beat 2 minor boys – Anil Oraon (13) and Elam Oraon (16). Finally, they arrested 30 innocent Adivasis from the village after coining them as the members of the CPI-Maoists.

All 30 innocent Adivasis were booked in serious charge of attempt to murder, killings and possession of illegal arms and so on. The case was filed against them in Banki Police Station with the case No. 31 Dt.17-07-2009 U /S 147/148/341 /353 / 364 / 395 /307 / 506 /121 /121 A/149 of Indian Penal Code (IPC), 25/ 27 of Arms Act, 9B of Indian Explosive Act and 17 CLA Act. Ironically, the case was booked in the police station on 17 July 2009 under serious charges but the police arrested them after more than a month, which generates a serious doubt about the police action. Though the Police claim of having evidence of their involvement in several crimes including the murder of a police officer in the region on July 16, 2009 but there is no such evidence to prove the allegation. “Most of the arrested people are daily wage earners and none of them were involved in any kind of Maoist activities,” says a noted activist Prafulla Samantray, who was part of the protest in Rourkela for release of the innocent Adivasis.

The relevant question here is why are the police victimizing the innocent Adivasis? In fact, the police have been victimizing these Adivasis for two obvious reasons. One is to shield their failure in arresting the real killer of a police officer and second, they want to vacate the area for the corporate sharks as there is huge mineral resource lying beneath the lands. “We don’t even know about the Maoists but our only crime is that we don’t want to surrender our land for mining therefore we are victimized by the government,” says Nirmala Kanti Oraon. The Local legislator George Tirkey who has been fighting against victimization of the Adivasis by the police says, “The police do not have the courage to arrest the real Maoists. They are victimizing the innocent villagers to save their own skin.”

After arrest of the main earning members, women and children are facing huge livelihood crisis. Consequently, their food intake has gone down. Nirmala Kanti Oraon says, “We used to have food three times everyday but after arrest of the main earning persons of our families, we are bound to eat only once or twice in a day.” “We are neither able to cultivate our lands nor able to collect minor forest produces as we have to take care our small kids. How will we survive if our people do not come out of Jail?” she adds. Presently, there are 45 children (below the age of 8 years) in the village and some of them were born in absence of their fathers consequently, they suffered like anything. For example, Ainche Oraon delivered her first baby on the roadside at 7 O’clock in the morning on 9 September 2009, when she had gone for toilet and could not come back home as her husband Ramo Oraon was in Jail and nobody was there to take care of her. All the lactated mothers need nutritious food, medical attention and care. There are also 5 old women who have crossed the age of 70 but no one is there for looking after them. However, the police had also assaulted some of these old women.

The most stunning fact is that the police also victimized those people who raise questions against injustice meted out on Adivasis, demand for rights to be protected and unite the people to fight against state suppression. When a Human Rights Advocate Nicholas Barla intervened on the case, he was abused, threatened and harassed by the top cops. The Superintendent of Police of Sundargarh district asked him to keep quiet or face the police action. Nicholas says, “When the police came to know about my intervention on the case, they started searching for me therefore I have had to hide myself for a few months.” “There is constant phone enquiry where about, what I am doing, etc? This is I feel nuisance”, he adds. The most important question is where is our right to freedom of thought and expression gone?

The state of Odissa is known as emerging industrialized state, which has signed 90 MoUs with the corporate houses including POSCO, Vedanta and Tata Steel. However, the so-called economic growth is leading to rampant human rights violation in the state. The National Human Rights Commission also accepts it. Its chairperson K.G. Balakrishnan says, “As Odissa is emerging as an industrialized state, we apprehend more cases of human rights violation.” Is this a new face of growth and development, where people’s rights do not make much sense and especially when it is related to the Adivasis? Now the districts like Sundargarh, Keojhar, Mayurbhanj, Jharsuguda, Anugul are in chaotic situation. The people are facing water crisis, health hazard and livelihood crisis. There is a sharp decrease in the agriculture production, migration has increased due to displacement and harassment by the police and district administration. People also facing air, soil and sound pollution. The climate change can be experienced with extreme cold, hot summer and lack of heavy rain. There is clear violation of the constitutional provisions and PESA Act. There is constant unrest among the villagers, government authorities and the corporate houses. There are numbers of death cases, accidents, industrial violations and killings in the factory and mining areas. But no one is punished for committing such heinous crimes. Why?

In fact, the state of Odissa is heaven for the investors as the state government can do anything to ensure them lands and protection. Instead of taking action against the corporate houses, the state government has been fighting with the people on behalf of the corporate houses. For instance, when the villagers of Kuwarmunda of Sundargarh protested against the Adhunik Metallic, the company filed case against them and over 132 villagers were kept in the jail for 3 to 6 months. Similarly, in Kalunga close to Vedvyas in Sundargarh district in the case of Ms.Maa Tarini Sponge iron Plant, 86 women were put in the jail for a month, who were demanding to implement the laws. In the case of Lanziberna Stone query of OCL, Rajgangpur, the innocent youth (Bijay) was shot by the security guard of the company and when the villagers filed the FIR, police didn’t take any action, where many innocent villagers were taken to jail.

In the case of Korean company POSCO, which is the biggest Foreign Direct Investment in the country with proposed investment of Rs. 54,000 crore, the Odissa government even did not hesitate to declare the Adivasis as none existing in the proposed area. Similarly, 14 Adivasis were killed in police firing at Kalinga Nagar in 2006, who were protesting against the Tata Steel’s land acquisition but no action was taken against the Tata Steel. In the case of British mining company ‘Vedanta’ who has not only violated the laws of the land but also took illegal action against the Adivasis and also prepared a false Gram Sabha report but the Odissa government has been attempting to shield the Vedanta.

The National Human Rights Commission found that the local administration and the top cops’ involvement in intimidating to the Adivasis for filing false cases against them and also to deny them due compensation for the land they were forced to give up for the Vedanta. The commission found that false police cases like dacoity, loot and illegal possession of arms were registered against the Adivasis who protested against the company. In one such case, 32 Adivasis were thrown into jail in May, 2006 on a variety of charges. The Superintendent of Police and company officials forced them to sign land transfer agreements with Vedanta inside Bhawanipatna jail with the jailer attesting the signatures. The NHRC also accepts that a number of complaints have been filed in the commission regarding the human rights violation during the establishment of industries by Vedanta, POSCO and Tata. The irony is no any action has been taken against these corporate giants for violating and laws and terrorising the Adivasis but the innocent villages were victimised by the state instead.

Indeed, the so-called anti-Naxal Operation has put question mark in the future of innocent Adivasis and their children. The villagers are living with fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Children have stopped going to school. The major questions need to be answered are what kind of future these children will have? Why the state is not concerned about their future? Are they not children of this country? Do they have the same rights like what our city dweller children enjoy? And why those so-called civilized people have no concerns for these children? In the present era of growth and development, the police forces are deployed to protect the corporate interest not the people. These days, they also teach the development theory. And those who oppose their development theories will have to pay the price. And of course, it is not unexpected, as the Indian State has become the corporate state, where the programmes, policies and even the cabinet Ministers are decided by the corporate houses. However, does it mean the boy Anup’ cry for justice is nonsense? Is there anyone who can hear the cry of these helpless women and children whom the state has put in a stake in the name of cleansing the Maoists?

Living Economies: Learning From The Biosphere

2011-04-27T21:40:00.000+05:30

By David Korten

26 April, 2011
YES! Magazine

How we humans can redesign our failing systems by turning back to nature—and learning to live by the rules of life

This is the seventeenth of a series of blogs based on excerpts adapted from the 2nd edition of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. I wrote Agenda to spur a national conversation on economic policy issues and options that are otherwise largely ignored. This blog series is intended to contribute to that conversation. —DK

My favorite definition of life comes from evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulies: “Life is matter with the capacity to choose.”

The intricate self-organizing structure of Earth’s biosphere is the product of life’s extraordinary 3.5 billion year evolutionary quest to explore and expand the possibilities of its capacity to choose. The result is a complex and highly sophisticated fractal structure of nested, self-reliant, progressively smaller-scale ecosystems, each exquisitely adapted to its particular place on Earth to optimize the capture of energy to sustain matter in a living choice-making state.

To this end, trillions upon trillions of cells, organisms, and communities of organisms engage in an exquisite continuing dance of cooperative exchange. Each participant in this dance maintains its own identity and vitality while contributing to the needs of its neighbors and to the balance, stability, and resilience of the whole.

We humans, with our extraordinary capacity for choice, are a product of this wondrous process. In our species' immaturity, however, our dominant cultures have forgotten that our individual and collective well-being depends on the well-being of the whole. We must now step to a new level of species maturity, redesign the culture and institutions of our economic system to mimic the structure and dynamics of the biosphere, and learn to live by life’s rules. It is an epic test of our human capacity for learning, creative innovation, self-organization, and individual and collective choice.

The following are three defining characteristics of the living systems our human economies must emulate.

1. Cooperative Self-Organization: Ecosystems have no central control structure. Their health and vitality depend on processes of cooperative self-organization in which each species learns to meet its own needs in ways that simultaneously serve the needs of others. The more diverse and cooperative the bio-community, the greater its capacity to innovate and the greater its resilience in the face of crisis.

2. Self-Reliant Local Adaptation: The biosphere’s cooperatively self-organizing fractal structure supports a constant process of adaptation to the intricate features of Earth’s distinctive local microenvironments to optimize the capture, sharing, use, and storage of available energy.

Local self-reliance is a key to the system’s ability to absorb and contain most system disturbance locally with minimum overall system disruption. So long as each local subsystem balances its consumption and reproduction with local resource availability, the biosphere remains healthy and dynamic.

3. Managed Boundaries: Because of the way life manages energy, each living entity must maintain an active flow of energy within itself and in continuous exchange with its neighbors. Life requires permeable managed membranes at every level of organization—the cell, the organ, the multi-celled organism, and the multi-species ecosystem—to manage these flows and as a defense against parasitic predators.

If the membrane of the cell or organism is breached, the continuously flowing embodied energy that sustains its living internal structures dissipates into the surrounding environment, and it dies. It also dies, however, if the membrane becomes impermeable, thus isolating the entity and cutting off its needed energy exchange with its neighbors. Managed boundaries are not only essential to life’s good health; they are essential to its very existence.

These are foundational design principles for the cooperative, self-organizing, self-reliant adaptive living economies on which our human future depends. The institutional structures of living economies facilitate joyful non-monetized exchanges of life energy based on relationships of trust and caring—the social capital of vital cohesive living communities.

Reorganizing our human economies to function as locally self-reliant subsystems of our local ecosystems will require segmenting the borderless global economy into a planetary system of interlinked self-reliant regional economies. This does not mean shutting out the world. Vital living economies exchange their surplus goods for the surplus goods of their neighbors and freely share ideas, technology, and culture in a spirit of mutual respect for the needs and values of all players.

In a living economy, the rights and interests of living communities of living, breathing people engaged in a living exchange with the natural systems of their bioregion properly take priority over the presumed rights of artificial corporate entities that value life only as a marketable commodity and operate by the moral code of a malignant cancer. Protecting the boundaries of the community from intrusion by predatory corporations is an essential function of any responsible government.

We humans are the most advanced expression of life’s capacity to choose. We must now demonstrate our ability to use that capacity wisely.

David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, TheGreat Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group. This Agenda for a New Economy blog series is co-sponsored by CSRwire.com and YesMagazine.org based on excerpts from Agenda for a New Economy, 2nd edition.

The ideas presented here are developed in greater detail in Agenda for a New Economy available from theYES! Magazine web store — where there are 3 WAYS TO GET THE BOOK and a 22% discount!

More by David Korten (http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten)

The World of Our Dreams
Our world is made up of diverse populations—but really we all want the same things out of life. It's time we put our common dreams into action.

Our Human Nature
People often justify greed as simply human nature. Why our economic policies need to reward our caring, cooperative sides instead.

The End of Empire
Wall Street’s days are numbered. Ours need not be.

We need a clean man in black robe: CJI

2011-04-17T23:35:00.002+05:30

PTI NEWS
April 16, 2011

NEW DELHI: Concerned over judiciary‘s image coming under a cloud in the wake of corruption charges, Chief Justice S H Kapadia on Sarurday said there was a need for “clean man in black robe” and asked the political class not to protect corrupt judges. “We have to live by examples. We need a clean man in black robe to uphold the independence and integrity of the judiciary,” the CJI said while cautioning the judges from inevitably ending up in the political arena. The CJI said judges should maintain self restraint and avoid being in touch with lawyers, political parties, their leaders or ministers and high ranking judges should not interfere in the administrative work of court lower to it.

“Internal interference from a high ranking judge which, if resisted, could lead the lower ranking Judge being transferred or being denied promotion also needs to be deprecated. Similarly, political protection should not be given to corrupt judges,” Kapadia said at the fifth M C Setalvad memorial lecture.

“A judge must inevitably choose to be a little aloof and isolated from the community at large. He should not be in contact with lawyers, individuals or political parties, their leaders or ministers unless it be on purely social occasions,” he said. The CJI’s remarks assume significance as the issue of corruption allegedly involving sitting judges P D Dinakaran and Soumitra Sen, who are facing impeachment proceedings in Parliament, were raised by other speakers. Senior advocates Anil Divan and P P Rao voiced serious concerns over judges being involved in corruption.

The CJI began his speech by saying that “I am an eternal optimist and I can see that in future things are going to improve as far as integrity and as far as credibility of the Supreme Court is concerned.” Kapadia said the judges should not accept any type of patronage and stick to judicial norms. “The judge should not accept patronage through which he acquires office, preferential treatment or pre-retirement assignment. These can give rise to corruption if and when quid pro quo makes a demand on such judges”, he said. Kapadia stressed the need for protecting the integrity of judiciary saying “judges must keep the part of impartial, objective, fearless and independent justice alive”.

The CJI said he has avoided socialisation and even preferred not take the membership of any golf clubs as it would have left him mingling with advocates, politicians etc giving a negative impression to the people. “Frequent socializing with particular members of the legal profession or with the litigants, including potential litigants, is certain to raise, in the minds of others, the suspicion that the judge is susceptible to undue influence in the discharge of his duties,” he said. The CJI said there should be a fair criticism of judgements and irresponsible and illegitimate criticism should be avoided.

“Public and media criticism of judges and judgments is a common feature today throughout the common law world. Like other public institutions, the judiciary must be subject to a fair criticism. “But, what I am concerned with is response to criticism, particularly, criticism, that is illegitimate and irresponsible. “In the context of such illegitimate and irresponsible criticism, it must be borne in mind that love for justice is rare – what most people desire is justice which favours them.”

SC questions sedition charge & grants bail to Binayak

2011-04-17T23:30:00.001+05:30

APRIL 17, 2011 // PRESS REPORTS
MAIL TODAY
By Gyanant Singh in New Delhi

THE FAMILY of Binayak Sen and civil rights activists across the country cheered in unison as the jailed doctor was granted bail by the Supreme Court on Friday. The apex court also indicated that the Chhattisgarh trial court verdict that had sentenced Sen to life on charges of sedition on the strength of evidence produced by the prosecution did not inspire confidence.
“ He may be a sympathiser but this does not make him guilty of sedition,” a bench comprising Justice H. S. Bedi and Justice C. K. Prasad said on Friday after taking note of the evidence against Sen.
When state government counsel U. U. Lalit attempted to justify the sedition charge slapped on Sen, Justice Prasad said: “ Mr Lalit, keep in mind, we are a democratic country.” The judges, who seemed to have gone through the records of the case, stopped Sen’s counsel Ram Jethmalani midway and turned towards Lalit for the grounds on which he was opposing bail.
“ What is the evidence that invites sedition? Even if all allegations and the conviction are taken to be correct, why life sentence?” Justice Bedi asked.
The bench ordered suspension of Sen’s sentence till a decision on his appeal pending before the Chhattisgarh High Court. It also left it for the high court to decide the conditions for his release on bail.
Taking note of the fact that the appeal would have to be decided on merits by the high court, the bench refrained from passing any detailed order. “ Lest we should prejudice any party, we are not giving any reasons for our order,” it said.
Though the bench did not record any finding in its order, the observations made by it virtually amounted to questioning the very basis of conviction of Sen under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code ( IPC) for sedition.
Taking the court through evidence against Sen, Lalit pointed out that several pamphlets were recovered from his residence. The pamphlets stressed on the fight against the government by use of force.
Lalit said it was not necessary to prove that Sen was the author of the documents to bring home the charge of sedition. As per a Supreme Court judgment, distribution and circulation of such material also amounts to sedition, he said.
“ The worst that is against him is the possession ( of pamphlets and literature). You have not pointed to any action ( on his part)… All kinds of documents are circulated and that may come to us. Does this make one guilty?” Justice Bedi asked.
“ If ( Mahatma) Gandhi’s autobiography is found in somebody’s house, does he become a Gandhian?” Justice Prasad added.
L ALIT then submitted that Sen had visited Naxalite leader Narayan Sanyal in Bilaspur jail more than 30 times. Justice Bedi stressed that the meetings would have taken place in the presence of jail officers.
Jethmalani intervened to point out that jailors had admitted their presence during the meetings.
“ He may be meeting hundreds of people. Even after taking into account all your arguments, does this not make a case for grant of bail?” Justice Bedi asked.
Finding it difficult to convince the bench, Lalit suggested that the court may expedite hearing on appeal rather than granting bail. “ There is no presumption of innocence. There is a conviction,” he said.
Justice Bedi reminded Lalit that the court had suspended the sentences of many of his clients.
Not giving up, Lalit stressed that the court on several occasions had refused to suspend sentences in corruption cases where the sentence was much less.
“ If this had been a Prevention of Corruption Act case, we would have refused relief,” Justice Bedi said.
“ Sen is a sympathiser and nothing beyond that.” Senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi, also representing the state government, said Sen was not merely a Maoist sympathiser but had helped them seek a house on rent, open bank accounts and even get a job.
But failing to get his point across, Rohatgi suggested that Sen be barred from entering Chhattisgarh while he was on bail. He said a similar order had been passed against former Gujarat home minister Amit Shah. The court pointed out that in the case of Shah, investigation was going on and here the trial was over.
Earlier, the hearing began with Jethmalani contending that the high court, while rejecting bail, had gone by the colonial concept of sedition which was no longer good law. He said the charge against his client was that he was addressed by the Naxals as comrade, possessed material propagating Naxal ideology and met Sanyal.
“ Sen is not involved in any kind of violence nor has he fed anyone to resort to violence. Literature is available at everybody’s home and I’ll tell you there is much more dangerous literature at my house. The mere possession of literature does not make one a Maoist,” he told the court.
“ I must confess this is one of the cases where I am personally very happy about what has happened in the Supreme Court. It almost establishes a matter of great principle of democracy that everybody has the right to exercise his right to freedom of speech,” the lawyer said after the verdict.
Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh said in Raipur on Friday: “ We respect the Supreme Court’s decision. It has only granted Sen bail. The pending legal process will continue in the high court at Bilaspur. Whatever the final verdict be, we will respect that decision too.” The BJP, too, toed a similar line. “ We respect the judgment.
It is part of the legal process,” BJP chief spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said.
Sen’s wife Ilina said after the verdict: “ It’s a very emotional moment and I am relieved. The judgment by the trial court was unfortunate… But I have now started breathing again and am really feeling good.” Daughter Aparajita added: “ Our family was shattered and it was a tough journey with Baba inside jail.
This judgment is the result of everybody’s hard work. I am looking forward to meeting him.” Sen was arrested in Raipur on May 14, 2007, for his alleged links with the Maoists. He later got bail from the Supreme Court on May 25, 2009. On December 24 last year, the sessions court in Raipur convicted him.
With inputs from Sahar Khan in Raipur and agencies

First ever picture of a volcanic magma chamber

2011-04-10T01:45:00.003+05:30

During the first ever scientific expedition into a volcanic magma chamber, climber Einar Stefánsson rappels into Iceland's dormant Thrihnukagigur volcano in October. Magma chambers supply the molten rock that oozes or bursts onto Earth's surface during an eruption.

Thrihnukagigur, which last erupted about 3,000 years ago, contains only ancient magma—though the volcano could come back to life at anytime, experts say. (See "'Sleeping' Volcanoes Can Wake Up Faster Than Thought.")

"Thrihnukagigur is unique. … It's like somebody came and pulled the plug and all the magma ran down out of it," said volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson, who appears in Into Iceland's Volcano, a new documentary featuring the expedition, airing Friday on the National Geographic Channel. (The channel is partly owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)

Thrihnukagigur is located about a hundred miles (160 kilometers) from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which blew last April and grounded airplanes for several days with its ash clouds.

While people have ventured inside the relatively shallow volcanic craters located close to Earth's surface, the 2010 expedition was the first to explore a volcano's deeper chambers.

"It was a really amazing experience—just unbelievable," Sigurdsson said.

Japan Tsunami: Unforgettable Pictures from National Geographic

2011-04-10T01:26:00.005+05:30

Here's an old man who dared to challenge the Govt and own

2011-04-09T23:42:00.002+05:30

Entire nation today saluted an old man of 72 as he broke his 5-day fast after making the Govt. of India surrender and tow his line in the question of constituting the joint committee for drafting the Lokpal Bill. Anna Hazare ended his hunger strike only after the government issued a notification constituting the joint committee of ministers and civil society activists to draft the Lokpal Bill.

Not only did the Govt. underestimate the strength of the veteran Gandhian, it failed also to feel the mood of the people. In expressing solidarity with the fasting old man, the people of this country once again spontaneously raised its voice in condemning the corruption in the political systems and public institutions. Anna Hazare could not possibly choose a better time for the bet. People were holding their breaths in surprise as scams after scam kept rolling out into the public domain routinely.

I was wondering whether Anna Hazare would stop after achieving this much only, for making the Govt. agreeable to his terms in forming a joint committee only for drafting the bill cannot be a major milestone in his mission. And there emerged the signal of a bigger fight not too far away. Immediately after breaking the fast the old man said "this is only the beginning. Our real fight begins now. If the government does not pass Lokpal Bill, I will come back to fight again." (Read NDTV story at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/anna-hazare-breaks-fast-unites-india-97313?cp)

Hazare's open letter to the Prime Minister

2011-04-07T23:44:00.001+05:30

India Against Corruption
A-119, Kaushambi, Ghaziabad . 201010. UP Ph: 09868069953
www.indiaagainstcorruption.org

Date: April 6, 2011

To,

Dr. Manmohan Singh,
Hon'ble Prime Minister of India
New Delhi

Dear Dr. Singh,

I have started my indefinite fast at Jantar mantar. I had invited you also to fast and pray for a corruption free India on 5th April. Though I did not receive any reply from you, I am hopeful that you must have done that.
I am pained to read and hear about government's reaction to my fast. I consider it my duty to clarify the points raised on behalf of Congress party and the government by their spokespersons, as they appear in media:
1. It is being alleged that I am being instigated by some people to sit on this fast. Dear Manmohan Singh ji, this is an insult to my sense of wisdom and intelligence. I am not a kid that I could be "instigated" into going on an indefinite fast. I am a fiercely independent person. I take advice from many friends and critics, but do what my conscience directs me to do. It is my experience that when cornered, governments resort to such malicious slandering. I am pained that the government, rather than addressing the issue of corruption, is trying to allege conspiracies, when there are none.
2. It is being said that I have shown impatience. Dear Prime Minister, so far, every government has shown complete insensitivity and lack of political commitment to tackling corruption. 62 years after independence, we still do not have independent and effective anti-corruption systems. Very weak versions of Lokpal Bill were presented in Parliament eight times in last 42 years. Even these weak versions were not passed by Parliament. This means, left to themselves, the politicians and bureaucrats will never pass any law which subjects them to any kind of objective scrutiny. At a time, when the country has witnessed scams of unprecedented scale, the impatience of the entire country is justified. And we call upon you, not to look for precedents, but show courage to take unprecedented steps.
3. It is being said that I have shown impatience when the government has "initiated" the process. I would urge you to tell me - exactly what processes are underway?
a. You say that your Group of Ministers are drafting the anti-corruption law. Many of the members of this Group of Ministers have such a shady past that if effective anticorruption systems had been in place, some of them would have been behind bars. Do you want us to have faith in a process in which some of the most corrupt people of this country should draft the anti-corruption law?
b. NAC sub-committee has discussed Jan Lokpal Bill. But what does that actually mean? Will the government accept the recommendations of NAC sub-committee? So far, UPA II has shown complete contempt for even the most innocuous issues raised by NAC.
c. I and many other friends from India Against Corruption movement wrote several letters to you after 1st December. I also sent you a copy of Jan Lokpal Bill on 1st December. We did not get any response. It is only when I wrote to you that I will sit on an indefinite fast, we were promptly invited for discussions on 7th March. I wonder whether the government responds only to threats of indefinite fast. Before that, representatives of India Against Corruption had been meeting various Ministers seeking their support for the Jan Lokpal Bill. They met Mr Moily also and personally handed over copy of Jan Lokpal to him. A few hours before our meeting with you, we received a phone call from Mr Moily's office that the copy of Jan Lokpal Bill had been misplaced by his office and they wanted another copy. This is the seriousness with which the government has dealt with Jan Lokpal Bill.
d. Dear Dr Manmohan Singh ji, if you were in my place, would you have any faith in the aforesaid processes? Kindly let me know if there are any other processes underway. If you still feel that I am impatient, I am happy that I am because the whole nation is feeling impatient at the lack of credible efforts from your government against corruption.
4. What are we asking for? We are not saying that you should accept the Bill drafted by us. But kindly create a credible platform for discussions . a joint committee with at least half members from civil society suggested by us. Your spokespersons are misleading the nation when they say that there is no precedent for setting up a joint committee. At least seven laws in Maharashtra were drafted by similar joint committees and presented in Maharashtra Assembly. Maharashtra RTI Act, one of the best laws of those times, was drafted by a joint committee. Even at the centre, when 25,000 tribals came to Delhi two years ago, your government set up a joint committee on land issues within 48 hours. You yourself are the Chairperson of that committee. This means that the government is willing to set up joint committees on all other issues, but not on corruption. Why?
5. It is being said that the government wants to talk to us and we are not talking to them. This is utterly false. Tell me a single meeting when you called us and we did not come. We strongly believe in dialogue and engagement. Kindly do not mislead the country by saying that we are shunning dialogue. We request you to take some credible steps at stemming corruption. Kindly stop finding faults and suspecting conspiracies in our movement. There are none. Even if there were, it does not absolve you of your responsibilities to stop corruption.
With warm regards,

(K B Hazare)

Mr Hazare has become the icon of a nation tired of corruption

2011-04-07T23:28:00.002+05:30

From NDTV, April 07, 2011

Since he began his hunger strike on Tuesday, Mr Hazare has become the icon of a nation tired of discovering how it has been had by the people it elected to power. The 72-year-old Gandhian said he had no choice but to begin his die-unto-death fast -repeated discussions with the government for a Jan Lokpal Bill (Citizen's Ombusman Bill) were leading only to more discussion. So Mr Hazare ignored an appeal from the Prime Minister, and began his strike on Tuesday morning, unleashing a people's revolution.

The government seems to have been surprised that Mr Hazare's call to action has resonated so loudly with middle class India. Young school children, waving the tricolour, attend his rallies with parents or teachers. Housewives say they are needed more to campaign for the war against corruption than in their homes. On the internet and on the ground, the support for Mr Hazare is surpassed only by anger and mistrust of politicians.

Last night, the Prime Minister told his senior ministers to engage with Mr Hazare and of social activists who have joined forces with him, largely through an umbrella organization called India Against Corruption.

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal met with two of Mr Hazare's closest associates this morning- Swami Agnivesh and Arvind Kejriwal, known for his initiative in delivering the Right to Information Act to India.

No agreement was reached. But both sides made major concessions. The activists are now negotiating with one of the ministers they had attacked openly in recent days for ignoring corruption. And the government has agreed that the committee that drafts the bill will include representatives of civil society. Mr Sibal explained the differences that for now remain irreconcilable. "There is no agreement on two issues - that is issuing an official notification to form the committee and making Mr Hazare the chairman of the committee. So we need more time and we will meet again tomorrow and see we can evolve a procedure with which we can move ahead."

Activists want the government to issue a formal notification about the committee, conferring legal status. Mr Sibal and others point out that this would set a dangerous precedent - legislation being opened up to non-elected representatives. The government has offered instead to announce the committee. Mr Hazare and others say that's not enough.

The government also says that to have Mr Hazare chairing a committee that includes ministers would be politically incorrect.

Mr Hazare announced today that while he will not head the committee, he will be a member.

For the millions across India who have now placed their faith in him, that may not be enough.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/thank-you-sonia-but-please-do-more-says-anna-hazare-97037?cp

Anna Hazare and RTI

2011-04-07T23:22:00.001+05:30

Extracted from www.annahazare.org

In the Maharashtra State, a campaign was started demanding for the Right to Information. As Peoples Representatives and Civil Servants are public servants and the citizens of Maharashtra are owners of the public money, the citizens have the right to ask the public servants how and in what manner they spend the public money. He pressed for legislating an Act for Right to Information. The first campaign was organized at the Azad Maidan, Mumbai, in 1997. The State Government was giving only promises, but it failed to crystallize it in many sessions of the Vidhan Sabha. He had to make agitations, dharnas, morchas, maun and fasts many times.

State-wide tours were held for awareness generation among people. Public addresses were organized in many towns and programmes were arranged specially for college students. Posters, banners and folders were printed and distributed in thousands. All this resulted in the awakening of the citizens and making them aware of their fundamental Right to Information.

The Government made many promises, but it failed to keep one. Any government never wants to decentralize its power and hand over power to people. Many politicians think that decentralization of power will lessen

their importance, status and respect. So the Government was reluctant to make legislation for Right to Information.

Finally, with zeal of ‘do-or-die’, Mr. Hazare went on fast-unto-death on August 9, 2003 at Azad Maidan, Mumbai. He decided that unless the Act is passed by the Government, he will not end his fast; rather he will sacrifice his life for peoples rights.

The Government of Maharashtra felt that his resolution is firm and He would not step back from his decision of ‘do-or-die’. On the 12th day of his fast, the Government of Maharashtra got the Bill signed by the President of India and enacted the law of ‘Right to Information’ in Maharashtra. The Act on ‘Right to Information’ is a revolutionary step towards strengthening democracy.

The Right to Information Act came into effect in Maharashtra from 2002. With Anna’s persuasion, the same Act came into effect for the whole nation.

Know more about Anna Hazare

2011-04-07T23:13:00.004+05:30

Read his life and work here:
http://www.annahazare.org/index.html

His contact -
91 - 02488 - 240401
91 - 02488 - 240581
info@annahazare.org
annahazare@hotmail.com

His association with:
RTI movement (http://www.annahazare.org/rti.html)
India Against Corruption (http://www.indiaagainstcorruption.org/)
RALEGAN SIDDHI : A MODEL OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT (http://www.annahazare.org/ralegan-siddhi.html)
watershed development programme (http://www.annahazare.org/watershed-development.html)

Anna Hazare - An old piece written about an old man

2011-04-07T23:04:00.003+05:30

This Judgement Defames Me
Dilip D'Souza, Rediff.com, September 16, 1998

I am fully aware that you should have incontrovertible proof, solid evidence, before you accuse a man of corruption. I am also fully aware that the corrupt are not exactly strewing the streets with evidence of their underhand acts. I am even more fully aware that the corrupt are also the powerful, thus very able to manipulate the strands of justice so that they remain untouched.

Nevertheless, I am outraged -- and that may explain the incoherence I think you will find in this column -- that a man called Anna Hazare has been sentenced to jail for defamation. As a similarly outraged friend of mine wrote in a letter to the press: "If this single judgment does not arouse the angst of the media and the people, we are a Nation of corpses."

Let's see. We have been unable to punish the guilty in, and forgive me, but this is a necessarily incomplete list: the Bofors gun scandal. The Urea scam. The Fodder scam. The St Kitt's forgery case. The Delhi Sikh massacre, 1984. The Jain diary case. The Stock scam. The J J Hospital glycerine adulteration deaths, 1986. The Bombay riots. The Bombay bomb blasts. Sukh Ram's money-in-the-sheets and telecom scam. The Housing scam. The LPG allotment scam. The Bhiwandi riots, 1970. The Babri Masjid demolition case. The Pickle baron bribe case.

Fifteen major crimes, off the top of my head, in which the guilty are laughing at me from behind their starched white suits and top-grade bristling-gun-variety security that I have to pay for. Yet the court sends to prison for defamation a retired soldier. Anna Hazare.

I know nothing about Anna Hazare but the few details that I will lay out here. He retired from the army and poured his own savings into the uplift of his home village, Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra. Though that is not very important to our story, Ralegan Siddhi is now a model in many respects. Hazare has done for its people more than all Maharashtra's politicians, ever, have managed together. Today, he lives what is, by all accounts, a simple life there.

Over the years, Hazare has had to deal with various departments in the government. He found signs of massive corruption in some of them. He spoke his mind about those signs, saying the minister concerned must accept responsibility for them. What the rest of us quite naturally understood from this was that the ministers themselves are corrupt. This is a contention I am willing to bet 95 per cent of India will agree with.

One of those ministers filed a defamation suit against Hazare. Now this case moved at what can only be labelled the speed of greased lightning. In less than a year, Hazare has been found guilty of defamation and sent to jail for three months. In contrast, and picking just one example, 14 years have been inadequate to punish the murderers of 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi.

I know even less about Babanrao Gholap, this particular minister. I have no idea if he is or is not corrupt. I can only say, from looking around at all that goes on in this country, that I am convinced nearly every minister in the land is corrupt. That there is only a handful of them that is clean. Perhaps that is irresponsible for me to say, perhaps I damn even some clean ones by saying so, but that's just too bad. I cannot be alone in thinking that most ministers, most politicians, are crooks and thugs.

It seems clear to me that by sentencing Hazare to a jail term, the court has only helped ensure that crooks and thugs stay untouched. Of course Hazare should have produced evidence. But let's see, how many of us have access to evidence, hard evidence, that ministers are corrupt? How many of us are optimistic about finding, about anyone finding, evidence of corruption?

I would have liked to see the court recognise this. Section 500 in the Indian Penal Code, which addresses punishment for defamation, prescribes that someone found guilty "shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both." That is, the judge can decide what the term of punishment should be. So I would have liked the judge in this defamation case to say: "Yes, Hazare has no evidence for his allegations. Therefore, I am sentencing him to imprisonment in this room until the court rises at the end of the day."

I would have liked that because every one of us, including that judge, knows that the majority of ministers are corrupt. Every one of us knows, too, that while it is a fine principle that you must have evidence, in practice it has turned into a smokescreen that covers up for continuing corruption.

This is how twisted the situation has become: today, at least in our minds, it is the minister who has to prove his innocence. Until then, we will assume he is guilty. If this muddies the occasional lily-white minister, it is also quite unavoidable. This upside-down state is entirely the fault of the ministers themselves. The lily-white ones too, for tacitly acquiescing in this mess.

But all that said and done, let's get back to evidence. Let's also be frank: if hard evidence is so hard to find, there is other evidence of corruption that surrounds us, visible to everybody. I think it is time the courts took notice of it. I'll offer up one example to make my point.

In Bombay, this monsoon season, the roads are in positively the worst shape I have ever known. Potholes are everywhere and several major roads are no more than a collection of stones and holes. What could be the reason the Municipality -- run from this year by a gang of politicians -- has not cared to repair the roads? Could it have something to do with contractors who are not being co-operative enough?

The point is that the services we get from our governments for the taxes we pay are simply pitiful. Dozens of scams beset us, steal our money. The country is steeped in sordid, criminal mediocrity in every direction we look, making life here a struggle for most Indians.

What might be the reason for all this? Who are we fooling if we think corruption has nothing to do with all this?

On the condition they have reduced this country to, and that's evidence enough for all of us, every politician, every mayor, every minister, stands accused. Guilty. That's why the court insults the country by punishing Hazare instead. It seems to me we should sue for defamation.

But as always, the greatest perversities in this whole sham come from the rest of us ordinary folk. For we are just as responsible as those possibly lily-white ministers for ourselves, as I wrote earlier, "tacitly acquiescing in this mess." After all, even knowing the corruption and criminality that afflicts the political class, we vote thugs into power over us. Time after time. This man speaks for the lower castes, that one protects Hinduism, that one over there is a defender of Tamil interests ... in our minds, we spell out all these rationalisations of the one truth we all know and acknowledge to ourselves: practically every one of these people is corrupt. Their only interest is in how much money they can cram into their pockets.

And there is one perversity that may be, if you can believe it, even greater. A substantial number of people reacted to Anna Hazare's sentence by saying: the court has shown that nobody is above the law and even "big men" get punished.

Now the day a court puts a Laloo in jail for his fodder machinations; or a Thackeray in jail for his instigation of rioting; or a Rao in jail for getting documents forged to implicate a political foe: the day one of these things happens, I will myself shout in delight that the court has shown that indeed, nobody is above the law.

Until then, it seems to me that nothing serves as well to keep politicians free of punishment as this particular attitude.

Fine, we may deceive ourselves pleasantly by thinking that Hazare's jail term proves nobody is above the law. But one day we will know: that is precisely why politicians remain above the law.

Riddles of Alphabet

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Q: What letter of the alphabet is an insect?
A: B. (bee)
Q: What letter is a part of the head?
A: I. (eye)
Q: What letter is a drink?
A: T. (tea)
Q: What letter is a body of water?
A: C. (sea)
Q: What letter is a pronoun like "you"?
A: The letter " I "
Q: What letter is a vegetable?
A: P. (pea)
Q: What letter is an exclamation?
A: O. (oh!)
Q: What letter is a European bird?
A: J. (Jay)
Q: What letter is looking for causes ?
A: Y. (why)
Q: What four letters frighten a thief?
A: O.I.C.U. (Oh I see you!)
Q: What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment but not once in a
thousand years?
A: The letter "m".
Q: Why is the letter "T" like an island ?
A: Because it is in the middle of waTer.
Q: In what way can the letter "A" help a deaf lady?
A: It can make "her" "hear.
Q: Which is the loudest vowel?
A: The letter "I". It is always in the midst of noise
Q: What way are the letter "A" and "noon" alike?
A: Both of them are in the middle of the "day".
Q: Why is "U" the happiest letter?
A: Because it is in the middle of "fun".
Q: What word of only three syllables contains 26 letters?
A: Alphabet = (26 letters)
Q: What relatives are dependent on "you"?
A: Aunt, uncle, cousin. They all need "U".
Q: What is the end of everything?
A: The letter "g".

Received as email. For some more funny riddles visit this site:
http://www.justriddlesandmore.com/Solved/riddlesolved.html

From Far Labs, a Vivid Picture Emerges of Japan Crisis

2011-04-03T02:12:00.001+05:30

By WILLIAM J. BROAD, New York Times, April 2, 2011

For the clearest picture of what is happening at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, talk to scientists thousands of miles away.

Thanks to the unfamiliar but sophisticated art of atomic forensics, experts around the world have been able to document the situation vividly. Over decades, they have become very good at illuminating the hidden workings of nuclear power plants from afar, turning scraps of information into detailed analyses.

For example, an analysis by a French energy company revealed far more about the condition of the plant’s reactors than the Japanese have ever described: water levels at the reactor cores dropping by as much as three-quarters, and temperatures in those cores soaring to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn and melt the zirconium casings that protect the fuel rods.

Scientists in Europe and America also know from observing the explosions of hydrogen gas at the plant that the nuclear fuel rods had heated to very dangerous levels, and from radioactive plumes how far the rods had disintegrated.

At the same time, the evaluations also show that the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi escaped the deadliest outcomes — a complete meltdown of the plant.

Most of these computer-based forensics systems were developed after the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, when regulators found they were essentially blind to what was happening in the reactor. Since then, to satisfy regulators, companies that run nuclear power plants use snippets of information coming out of a plant to develop simulations of what is happening inside and to perform a variety of risk evaluations.

Indeed, the detailed assessments of the Japanese reactors that Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave on Friday — when he told reporters that about 70 percent of the core of one reactor had been damaged, and that another reactor had undergone a 33 percent meltdown — came from forensic modeling.

The bits of information that drive these analyses range from the simple to the complex. They can include everything from the length of time a reactor core lacked cooling water to the subtleties of the gases and radioactive particles being emitted from the plant. Engineers feed the data points into computer simulations that churn out detailed portraits of the imperceptible, including many specifics on the melting of the hot fuel cores.

Governments and companies now possess dozens of these independently developed computer programs, known in industry jargon as “safety codes.” Many of these institutions — including ones in Japan — are relying on forensic modeling to analyze the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi to plan for a range of activities, from evacuations to forecasting the likely outcome.

“The codes got better and better” after the accident at Three Mile Island revealed the poor state of reactor assessment, said Michael W. Golay, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

These portraits of the Japanese disaster tend to be proprietary and confidential, and in some cases secret. One reason the assessments are enormously sensitive for industry and government is the relative lack of precedent: The atomic age has seen the construction of nearly 600 civilian power plants, but according to the World Nuclear Association, only three have undergone serious accidents in which their fuel cores melted down.

Now, as a result of the crisis in Japan, the atomic simulations suggest that the number of serious accidents has suddenly doubled, with three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in some stage of meltdown. Even so, the public authorities have sought to avoid grim technical details that might trigger alarm or even panic.

“They don’t want to go there,” said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert who, from 1993 to 1999, was a policy adviser to the secretary of energy. “The spin is all about reassurance.”

If events in Japan unfold as they did at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the forensic modeling could go on for some time. It took more than three years before engineers lowered a camera to visually inspect the damaged core of the Pennsylvania reactor, and another year to map the extent of the destruction. The core turned out to be about half melted.

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