ISSUES AND CONCERNS

Friends While 1st May represents the day of the labour the world over, as May Day, for the states of Maharashtra and Gujarath it was the date with the history when half a century ago these states came into being. Fifty years ago on this day in 1960, the then Bombay Presidency was divided into two states on linguistic basis, Gujarath for Gujarathies and Maharashtra for Marathi speaking people. Looking back, how the people of these two states recollect their journey of 50 years, shall be an exercise of interesting dimension. Both states officially celebrated the golden jubilee of their creation. Gujarath unlike Maharashtra have always been upbeat. The overall economic, educational and social indices have catapulted Gujarath as a progressive state. Of course having Narendra Modi as the Chief Minister has also added to the aura of the state despite the negatives of the communal disturbances of the past. Inaugurating the yearlong event he has reportedly stated that "We have contacted G...

Census 2011 & the Caste Cauldron Census in India is a stupendous task. Lakhs of enumerators filling millions forms with dozens of columns is no mean task. India’s census discontinued collecting data on castes since the 1931 census. But now under pressure from some quarters the government is having second thoughts on putting the wheels back to 1931. In all likelihood, one of the columns in those millions of forms will seek your caste. Strange while all political parties and every progressive section of our society agrees that caste divides our society, every politician in our country, cutting across party line, some way or other, supports the idea of enumerating caste. The arguments in favour of that exercise are while so many of the programmes of the government are based on backwardness of some or the other castes, how can the benefits of those programmes be delivered on the basis of data going back to 1931. How can affirmative action be effective unless the data is up-to-date? Has...

Modern Medicine in search of its Holy Grail Prof. B. M. Hegde, hegdebm@gmail.com The truth is something which can never be attained by scientific pursuits. Even in the hard sciences like physics, leave alone the not so perfect statistical science of medicine, the truth is an impossibility to get at. One could, at best, say that s/he has got "A truth but not The truth" at a given time. Any finding is true until it is proved to be untrue! JJ Thomson, from Cavendish Institute, got the Nobel in 1906 for showing that electrons were particles. His own son, George Thomson, got the Nobel in 1937 for showing that electrons were waves. That was the time that the de Broglie’s wave/particle duality became overwhelming and in 1932 James Chadwick gets the Nobel for that work. Erwin Schrödinger had other ideas and so on and so forth. Ultimately electrons are what they are depending on who looks at them at what time. When no one looks at them we do not know what they are like. Science can n...

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY A Book by : Sudhir Venkatesh As we drove through the neighborhood, past the blighted storefronts on Forty-seventh Street, J.T. told me that one of his sales groups was selling diluted product. The BKs’ crack-selling chain began with J.T.’s senior officers buying large quantities of powder cocaine from a distributor in the outlying suburbs or a neighborhood at the city’s edge. The officers usually cooked up the cocaine into crack themselves, using a vacant apartment or paying a tenant perhaps a hundred dollars a month to use her kitchen. Then the officers would deliver the prepackaged allocations to the sales directors. Sometimes, however, the street crews were allowed to cook up the crack themselves. In such a case, J.T. explained, they might surreptitiously use an additive to stretch their cocaine allotment into more crack. They could turn each 100-pack of $10 bags into a 125-pack, which meant earning an extra$250. This money obviously wouldn’t be susceptible to ...

Watching TV makes toddlers fatter and stupid London: Watching television make kids less intelligent and more likely to put on weight, according to a new research. In the study, scientists found that the more television children watched, aged two-and-a-half, the worse they were at mathematics, the more junk food they ate, and the more they were bullied by other pupils. As part of the research, study’s lead author Dr Linda Pagani, of Montreal University, and her colleagues followed 1,314 children born in the Canadian state of Quebec in 1997 and 1998. Parents were asked to report how much television their offspring watched aged 29 and 53 months, and teachers evaluated their academic, psycho-social and health habits when they reached the age of 10. On average the two-year-old watched 8.8 hours a week and the four-year-old 14.8 hours. Pagani and her research team found that for every extra hour of TV a week the two-year-olds watched there was a 6 per cent decrease in maths achievement, and ...

Swiss Court requested to allow I-T to probe Hasan Ali’s wealth A Mumbai court issued a letter rogatory to its Swiss counterpart to allow Income Tax authorities to investigate accounts of stud-farm owner Hasan Ali, who is alleged to have billions of dollars deposited there. "Letter Rogatory, which is issued by domestic court to its foreign counterpart to cooperate in investigation, will enable further probe into the matter the sources added. After a search on the premises of Ali in 2007, Income Tax department had found one of the documents containing information that he has around 8 billion dollars in the UBS AG, a Swiss Bank. Based on the various documents, tax demand of Rs. 71,846 crore was raised by I-T department in December 2008. Besides Hasan Ali, persons involved in the case are his wife Rheema Hasan Ali, Hasan Ali’s associate Kashinath Tapuriah and a related entity R M Investment Pvt Limited. The income tax department had also siezed Rs. 90 lakhs cash from Hasan Ali and thr...

Fighting Naxalism the Democratic way Mahi Pal Singh Since the biggest incident of massacre of 76 CRPF personnel by the Maoists at Dantewada, Chhatisgarh on April 6, 2010 heated debates have been taking place in the media about how to tackle the menace of Naxalite/Maoist violence in the country. In these debates, which take place on almost all channels of the electronic media, spokespersons of the major political parties, retired military and police officers appearing on these channels as defence experts and T.V. anchors always end up holding the commanders of these par-military forces and the Central and State governments responsible for the strategic loopholes in the planning, training and equipment of these forces for such disasters. They also put the responsibility of these killings squarely on the Naxalites/Maoists, sometimes touching upon the lack of development in the tribal areas also as being responsible. These speakers are also vocal in denouncing killings by Maoists and almos...

Dalit families flee Haryana village, vow not to return Mirchipur (Haryana): "I will rather die than return to the village," murmurs Kamla Devi, still in shock after her husband and physically challenged daughter were burnt alive in caste violence here. Devi, 45, along with her two sons, who are pursuing graduation, has been camping at the district headquarters at Hisar, about 60 km from here, along with nearly 30 dalit families which fled the village after houses belonging to the community were torched. The affected families have been demanding rehabilitation outside Mirchipur. Devi’s polio-stricken daughter Suman and her aged husband were trapped inside their burning house when about 18 dwellings were set ablaze allegedly by members of the dominant community over old enmity. "I have lost everything. No one can compensate my loss," says the distraught woman about the monetary relief announced by the Haryana government to her family. She wants the guilty to be punish...

Veggies, fish, fruit and nuts can reduce Alzheimer’s risk Washington: Eating lots of vegetables, fish, fruit, nuts and poultry, and less of red meat and butter may reduce a person’s risk of Alzheimer’s disease, says a new report. The report will appear in the June print issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Epidemiological evidence linking diet, one of the most important modifiable environmental factors, and risk of Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly increasing," the authors write as background information. "However, current literature regarding the impact of individual nutrients or food items on Alzheimer’s disease risk is inconsistent, partly because humans eat meals with complex combinations of nutrients or food items that are likely to be synergistic." Yian Gu, Ph.D., of Columbia University Medical Center, New York, and colleagues studied 2,148 older adults (age 65 and older) without dementia, living in New York. Participants provided i...

RTE & teachers suicide attempt Solapur (Maharashtra): Four women teachers who lost their jobs after the closure of a local Urdu school, tried to immolate themselves here, in a bid to draw the Maharashtra government’s attention to their unemployment. The women poured kerosene on themselves at the District Collector office here soon after the flag hoisting ceremony began to mark the 50 years of formation of the state, but the bid was foiled by the police, which immediately took them into custody. In a statement given to the police, Raisa Begum Patel, Saieda Begum Dawoodsaab, Mehboobbi Wahab Sheikh and Rashida Maniyar accused the district administration and the government of "apathy" and demanded rehabilitation or fresh jobs. According to the teachers, they lost their jobs when a Urdu primary school in Summaiya Nagar was closed down almost a decade ago. "Since then, we have contracted all the concern officers and ministers in the education department but no one helped u...

Cola user gets Rs 25K compensation Forum fines beverage firm after finding junk inside bottle New Delhi: Leading beverage company Coca Cola India has been asked by a consumer court to pay Rs. 25,000 as compensation to a person who had found junk inside a soft drink bottle he had purchased. "The junk inside the bottle is visible to the naked eye. Obviously, consumption of the contents of such a bottle by a human being could have proved injurious to one’s health," the Delhi District Forum, comprising President J P Sharma and members Premlata and S M Mazumdar, said. "We direct the Hindustan Coca Cola Beverage Private Limited to pay to Sheela Rs. 25,000 towards compensation and cost for the sale of defective goods to her which resulted in mental agony," the Forum said. Haryana resident Sheela had approached the Forum seeking Rs. five lakh in compensation from the company for deficiency in service by providing her the defective product. The company tried to wash off its ...

Indian torched car to get insurance money Melbourne: An Indian national was let off lightly with a suspended eight-months jail tern after it was found that he took advantage of racial tensions in Australia to falsely claim that he was set on fire after he accidentally burnt himself in a botched insurance claim bid. Jaspreet Singh, 28, had claimed that he was racially attacked in Melbourne after he reportedly burnt himself while torching his car to make an insurance claim. During a court hearing, it was found that Jaspreet Singh who had said that he was doused with petrol and set alight by four men after he parked his car near his home early January, was planning to claim insurance money to fund a holiday to India. Police found he had suffered the burns while trying to torch his Ford sedan, Melbourne Magistrates Court heard. Singh had pleaded guilty to criminal damage with intent to gain through arson, attempting to obtain property by deception and making a false report to police. Senio...

Solicitor murdered by partner for insurance An Indian – origin solicitor was murdered in Britain by a hitman who was hired by her business partner in a plan to claim a 1.5 million pound insurance payout, a court was told. Vina Patel, 51, died of asphyxiation and a broken neck in a contract killing allegedly arranged by John Cort, her colleague who had thousands of debts after purchasing three homes and eating meals at celebrity haunts following an expensive divorce, Daily mail reported. Cort had ‘put around rumours that he was very sick in the weeks before the murder. That had led him and Patel, who were the only partners in their firm, to hike the business insurance cover taken out on her life from 500,000 pounds to 1.5 million pounds. Cort then allegedly hired 37-year-old Brain Farrell to kill Patel and make it look like an accident, Nottingham Crown Court was told. Cort and Farrel have denied the murder. Patel’s husband, Surendra, and daughter, Anisha, found her with a broken neck a...

Cop beats-up NRI for overtaking Patna: An NRI businessman from Russia and his elderly father were allegedly beaten by policemen in Bihar’s Patna district for overtaking the vehicle of a probationer Indian Police Service (IPS) officer. A probe has been ordered, authorities said. Shajendra Bihari Singh, in his early 40’s, was beaten up after he overtook the car of IPS officer Vivek Kumar when he was on his way from Jehanabad to native Dharhara village in Punpun near Patna. "I was beaten like a criminal by policemen. I was innocent and I did not violate law of the land, but police treated me like a criminal and beat me with bamboo sticks and hands," Shajendra Singh, who owns a restaurant business in Russia, told news media. "My only crime was that I overtook the vehicle of a police officer of Jehanabad. He was angered and stopped my vehicle a few minutes later. He started abusing and beating me." He said the policemen thrashed his father Brijbihari Singh, who was with ...

IGNOU to waive fees for sex workers, prisoners Kolkata: Taking education to sex workers and prisoners in jail in West Bengal, the Indira Ganndhi National Open University (IGNOU) has decided to waive fees for them. "To start with, IGNOU has decided to select the red light district of Sonagachi here from where 26 sex workers are likely to join courses on healthcare and food and nutrition programmes" IGNOU Vice-Chancellor V N Rajsekharan Pillai said here. He said that the Kolkata Regional Centre would focus on entrepreneurship development and vocational programmes to help sex workers and their children gain economic independence. IGNOU runs a study centre to educate sex workers and their children. It was also providing certificate course to prisoners at the Alipore central jail. Besides sex workers and prisoners, IGNOU was helping the farming community in the use of Integrated Pest Management technology in potato cultivation, in collaboration with the West Bengal Agriculture Dep...