ISSUES AND CONCERNS

EDITOR'S COLUMN Friends Yes, we are into the new financial year 2012/13. With the month of April, also start All Fools Day. So when Union finance Minister presented his budget for 2012/13, there were expectation of myriad kinds from different sections of society. Has he lived up to their multiple expectations or let them down, depends upon – how do you look at it! Reactions as usual are mixed. Some called it damp squib while others complimented ‘best of the bad situation’. The Railway budget presented 2 days earlier led to a completely avoidable drama with the party politics of a petty kind hogging the media glare. Yes it takes all sorts to make the public life, from sublime to ridiculous. Looking in perspective over the month that passed by, as usual, India is alive and kicking, of course in some cases, in wrong places. Media generally had a field day hyping some and ignoring some others, depending on its own perceptions. In M-In-P we have taken up some of them for its larger rele...

Indian women & International Women’s Day Come 8th March, suddenly women all over the world take centre stage. Passing show continues year after year, same speeches, same rallies by girl students and same spectacle of honouring some ladies, The IWD comes at the day break on 8th March and curtains are wrung before 12 midnight. So its just another day, and its business as usual the next morning. Despite being just any day, such days, when it comes to public domain as IWD, they do leave a bit of its imprints and somewhere along the line make a small difference in the otherwise moribund thinking of both men and women. These symbolic days, when properly and meaningfully observed make us realise, how much the world has travelled in empowering the lady as a mother, as a daughter, as a sister and as a wife. Every role a woman plays has its own significance. Not withstanding all those traditional role a women dones, what really should concern all those who are interested in the welfare or th...

Schools of the future. Prof. B. M. Hegde, hegdebm@gmail.com "The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence." Rabindranath Tagore Life is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ceaseless change till death. "Anything that does not change does not come under the definition of science" wrote a Federal Judge in the USA while delivering his judgment in a dispute between the Creationists and Scientists. Human life history is the story of the evolution of this Universe itself. If one wants to understand the nature of Nature one has just got to understand human nature which is a miniscule of this Universe itself. We are obsessed with science today. The word science brings goose pimples on many of us. Indian schools do not seem to have changed ever since the East India Company destroyed our ancient school system some time in the early 19th Century. There have, of course, been some cosmetic changes...

In early 1995 the newspapers began to report another story of major import for the residents of Robert Taylor, this one with even greater consequences than the federal drug busts. Members of Congress and the Clinton administration had begun serious discussions with mayors across the country to propose knocking down housing projects. Henry Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, claimed that "high-rises just don’t work." He and his staff spoke of demolishing these "islands of poverty," with the goal of pushing their inhabitants to live where "residents of different incomes interact with one another." Cisneros singled out Chicago’s projects as "without question, the worst public housing in America today." The Robert Taylor Homes were said to be at the very top of the demolition list. They were to be replaced by an upscale townhouse development called Legends South, which would include just a few hundred units of public housing. Mo...

THE BUDGET : A DAMP SQIB? Dr.K.Shanker Shetty "A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that a fine is generally much lighter." – G. K. Chesterton Indian budget 2012 – 13 was presented in the parliament on 16 – 03 – 2012 with the background of a slow paced global recovery after the crisis. Though Indian economic performance has been quiescent there are sufficient alarming indications of declining trend in growth rate; double digit inflation ruling throughout 2011; strangulating monetary policies with, ever increasing rate of interest; fiscal profligacy continuing unabated widening the fiscal deficit increasing the deficit financing, rising prices; declining foreign and domestic private investments; languishing manufacturing sector etc. Simultaneously at the macro level, GDP is expected to be at 6.5%; agriculture 2.5%, industry 3.9% and service sector at 9%. External trade at $39billion has not improved the situation with trade balance and current acco...

35 monuments, sites untraceable At least 35 historical monuments/sites have been reported "untraceable" due to factors such as urbanisation, commercialisation, development of projects, and changing climatic and geographical conditions, culture minister Kumari Selja told the Lok Sabha. "It is not feasible to fix individual responsibility as there are many causes.. for the disappearance of the monuments," she said. When life was worth only Rs: 200/- Lucknow: A man in UP’s backward Gonda district killed his son for a meager Rs 200 and driven by guilt, committed suicide by jumping before a speeding train. According to reports, Mata Prasad Goswami, a resident of Kunwarpur Amaraha village in the district, hit his son Bhupendra several times with an axe, killing him on the spot following an altercation after the youth expressed his inability to return Rs 200 taken from him to go to Rajastan to find work. Goswami had borrowed the sum from a fellow villager and had given it ...

Britain won’t be Christian nation by 2030: Report London: Britain may no longer be a Christian country by 2030 as the number of non-believers is set to overtake the number of Christians, IANS cited a ‘Daily Mail’ report as saying. Christianity is losing more than half a million believers every year, while the count of atheists and agnostics is going up by almost 750,000 annually. Research by the House of Commons Library found that while Christianity has declined, other religions have seen sharp increases. In the last six years, the number of Muslims has surged by 37 percent to 2.6 million; Hindus by 43 percent and Buddhists by 74 percent. But the number of Sikhs and Jewish believers fell slightly. A group of MPs and peers - Christians in Parliament - claimed public policy was promoting "unacceptable" discrimination against Christians. The group’s chairman, former Tory justice minister Gary Streeter, warned that believers were having their faith "steamrollered" by a ...

Britons: Number numbs! From a nation of clever book-keepers to a nation of "barely numerates" who struggle to make sense of their payslips, comprehend long telephone numbers or train time-tables. Welcome to modern Britain. Until now, the problem was thought to be limited to schoolchildren but, according to a major new study, half of adult Britons have the numeracy skills of a primary schoolchild. Poor numeracy is so widespread that, experts say it is ruining people’s lives with many not able to get jobs because they cannot read graphs or do calculations. The study shows that some 49 per cent Britain’s working-age population is "numeracy-challenged", an increase of two million since a similar study was done in 2003. "At best these people have the maths ability of an 11-year-old, but for many it’s like a nine-year-old. They can’t understand deductions on their payslips; they can’t calculate the change they give and receive. It’s a very basic weakness that can imp...

Western threats to Indian interests Dr. M. V. Kamath The West is doing everything possible to prevent Iran from getting into the nuclear arms field and is applying sanctions against it to the fullest possible measure. It may be remembered that the West in its Nuclear-Arms-For-White-Nations only approach, applied similar sanctions against India in the 1990s when it exploded its first nuclear device. The Five Permanent Members of the U.N. Security Council can do no wrong but let other nations beware was the idea. And Japan, a subaltern nation went along with it to India’s grief. What did the U.S do when Pakistan, with the active assistance of China went on to produce nuclear bombs? Has the U.S – and the West in general made any effort to confiscate over a hundred bombs that Pakistan allegedly has in store? If Pakistan and Israel can go nuclear, why shouldn’t Iran? The West now is putting pressure on India to stop buying oil from Iran. Iran accounts for 12% of India’s crude oil imports an...