ISSUES AND CONCERNS

Friends We are well in to the new year, with January having gone and traditional budget month coming. Hopefully unlike the winter session, which was washed off, the budget session of parliament shall go smoothly to pass both Railway Budget and the Union Budget 2010/2011. Month began with Justice Sri Krishna Commission presenting its report on the feasibility of Telengana State creation. As we are all privy, the commission has left the issue in a bit of limbo, advocating primarily status quo with some regional authority to see the growth of Telengana region within the greater Andhra Pradesh. Like all Commissions, this too was constituted primarily to buy time to dampen the passion. Having succeeded in its objective to buy time and douse the heat, the central government is left with, not many options. While it will keep dragging its feet, it may have to ultimately accede to the demand for Telengana. Of course the contentious issue of Hyderabad has to be amicably solved. Telengana has to ...

I am a regular reader of “ISSUES & CONCERNS” since last 2 years. Undoubtedly, your editorials and other articles by eminent personalities are not only, informative but also, truly educative. December 2010 issue editorial and articles are simply thought provoking on all accounts. Hearty congratulations to you on the 10th anniversary of the magazine. Your account of the sustenance of ISSUES & CONCERNS for the past 10 years was indeed relevant and touching. I am sending herewith a cheque for Rs. 1,500/- being my contribution for the good cause you are promoting. Being a well wisher, I would like to sincerely wish ISSUES & CONCERNS many more years of constructive, educative and purposeful journalism. .T.Karunakara Rai, Bangalore At the very outset, let me heartily congratulate you for your excellent work of publishing this News Magazine for the last one decade or so. I have been meticulously following it up and take time to read the contents of it, which i...

Dr Binayak Sen-the brazen injustice The charges that Dr Sen was the courier for Naxals simply cannot hold. That he carried letters from Narayan Sanyal, a Maoist ideologue under detention at Raipur prison, whom Dr Sen was treating, and gave them to Kolkatta businessman Pijush Guha is simply unsustainable. It is public knowledge that all visits to prison anywhere is under surveillance as per procedure. And nothing can possibly escape the elaborate jail supervision and frisking. Yet the court wouldn’t have any of them,despite there being not a single prosecution witness from among the jail officials confirming this. If being a postman was the earlier charge, later charge included that he is hobnobbing with ISI. Reportedly there was some communication to one Walter Fernandese of ISI, from Dr Sen’s wife Ilina. The prosecution argued and judge accepted that ISI is the Pakistan’s spy agency Inter Service Intelligence and not the Indian Social Institute as argued by Dr Sen, where Walter Fernan...

WHY JPC is a MUST The other day, while inaugurating the CNN.IBN Indian of the year award function, the Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee bemoaned the loss of entire winter session of parliament due to the intransigency of opposition parties (read BJP), by their unrelenting demand for Joint Parliamentary Committee to go into 2G Spectrum Scam. Yes, according to the media, the nation, on the face of it, has lost some Rs. 1.74 lakh crores. Opposition consists of BJP and other dozen political parties. Entire opposition is demanding the formation of JPC. Of course, how much JPC can unravel is a moot point. But it’s a legitimate demand of the opposition. There is absolutely no valid reason to reject such a demand. Congress party spokesmen have time and again labouriously tried to argue that there is no need for JPC, and all that JPC would do can be done by Public Accounts Committee. Surely opposition members are aware that both JPC and PAC are not the same. PAC has its own limits and ...

Want to be a doctor? Think before you leap! Prof. B. M. Hegde, hegdebm@gmail.com Wait! While medicine is a wonderful profession if practised ethically, it could be a curse if it is transformed into a business, like any other money making craft. Young as you are, at your age of 17-18, you are liable to be drawn by the medical claptrap that you witness daily in the media. The reality is far from what is seen in those advertisements. If your idea is to make a quick buck and “enjoy” life, please look for other easier avenues where your actions might not result in human misery. Medicine is not for those that are looking for a business. It is a long and arduous course in addition. Many of you, who have got very high ranks in the qualifying examinations, thanks to the multitude of coaching classes that teach the tricks of the trade in the present examination systems, might find it hard to master that enigma, the human body, which follows the non-linear mathematical rules and the science of ch...

Disobedient 11-yr-old boy kept in chains Bangalore: In a shocking incident, a 11-year-old boy was kept in chains like a dog by his uncle in Mysore because “he did not want the boy to mix with his little daughter”. A traumatised Sameer Khan was rescued by an NGO when he was found chained in the hands and legs and struggling in the hot sun. He was so tightly chained that he could not get up and had to drag himself. The NGO, Campaign Against Child Labour Karnataka (CACLK), said Sameer was the son of one Nissar Ahmed. The local police with the help of the NGO rescued the hapless boy. Subsequently, the police detained Sameer’s uncle Asghar, an autorickshaw driver. Sameer a Class III student of a local school was sent to a child home in Mysore. According to Dhanajaya E, convenor of CACLK, a passerby informed him about the boy chained behind a house. “I immediately informed the Udayagiri police and reached Sathyanagar around 11.30 am. The police too arrived and found Khan sitting in a patheti...

SC sore at Dange ‘outburst’ on beggars, destitutes New Delhi: The Supreme Court took strong exception to the reported remarks of former State Chief Secretary J P Dange that beggars, destitutes from outside can go back to their native states and government was not obliged to implement all court directives. If such remarks were made, they amounted to contempt, the apex court has said. A bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma asked the State government counsel Sanjay Karde to bring to the chief minister’s notice Dange’s purported remarks and file an affidavit in three weeks if such utterances had been made. “Homeless people are outsiders and not from the state of Maharashtra. They should go back to their respective states. We cannot implement all directives from the court. The issue of homeless is not so important. There are many directives in waiting and this one is just an addition. Don’t care much about it,” the chief secretary is reported to have told an NGO when it sough...

Development gone haywire- School for mall Mumbai: Parents and teachers of the Marathi-medium MG School in Bandra (east) are up in arms against a government order, asking the school to shift its premises and to make way for a plush shopping mall. Teachers from the school say that the redevelopment plan, which the school got from the collector’s office, shows a mall in place of the school. According to sources in the school, the matter came to light when the school authorities approached the education department regarding the grant it was stated to receive. The school authorities were told that since the school was to be shifted, they would not get any additional grant until the shifting took place. The source added that the school has been allotted a land near Mithi River in the Bandra-Kurla Complex that is about two kilometers away from the existing location and is in contravention of the norms laid down by the high court. No drinking water in 31% of Maharashtra schools: Survey A shoc...

Drunk bikers ram into cop Mumbai: A police constable attached with the Pant Nagar police station was grievously injured after three motorcycle-borne youths knocked him down during a nakabandhi in Ghatakopar. The trio who were allegedly under the influence of alcohol rammed into him when he tried to accost them. The injured constable identified as Vilas Maruti Sawant (49) was stationed near the Fame Mall at Ghatkopar station. M Suryavanshi, senior inspector of Pant Nagar police said, “Following the incident, other policemen stationed at the spot nabbed the youths few meters away while they were trying to flee. The accused have been identified as Manish Sahani (28), Ramesh Gopichand Mishra (25) and Sahu Jagatnarayan Singh (26), residents of Sakinaka. Meanwhile, Sawant is recuperating in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a private hospital in Mulund. Dog eats man’s ear after his girlfriend bites it off London: Angry girlfriend June Thomson bit off part of her boyfriend Trevor Wainman’s ear...

THE GROWING COLLAPSE OF VALUES The first decade of the 21st century has seen India that is Bharat slipping into scam-dom to an extent never before seen or felt in the country. This has coincided with the liberation of the economy and the great rush to make money – at any cost. Morals have been pushed aside as a mindless hurdle. Just in the last four months the country has been rocked by five major scams; the IPL ‘cricketainment’ involving Lalit Modi, the Commonwealth Games scam involving Suresh Kalmadi, the Adarsh Housing Society scam involving the then Chief Minister Ashok Chavan (and any number of top bureaucrats and senior army officers), the 2G Spectrum allocation scam involving not just A. Raja but a whole lot of others as well and the Housing Finance scam involving Ramachandran Nair. India has slipped to 87th spot in Transparency International’s latest ranking of nations, based on the level of corruption. And if one is to believe Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based r...