MONTH THAT WAS

HC ACTS ON ‘WORMS IN MEAL’
New Delhi: The Delhi High Court, taking a stringent view of an incident of worms being found in a mid-day meal leading to illness of children in the capital, has refused to revive the contract given to an NGO which had supplied the cooked meals.
Justice Manmohan, passing the order, said: “Since the presence of worms in the mid-day meal supplied by the NGO has been confirmed, this court is of the view that there is no patent error or illegality in the order passed by the government.”
The Delhi government on Jan 4, 2013, cancelled the contract given to the People Welfare Society on account of contaminated supply of cooked meals to a government school here on Sep 5, 2011.
All students, who had taken the meal, had complained of stomachache and uneasiness as a consequence of which they were taken to hospital by the school for medical treatment. Eight students had suffered from food poisoning.
The city government, while cancelling the contract, said the NGO had a past history of supplying “contaminated / unhygienic” mid-day meal as earlier also worms were found in the meals supplied by the society on July 21, 2011, to another government school here.
After the incidents of illness of children due to the consumption of mid-day meals, FIRs were lodged against the NGOs which have been providing food in these schools, including the petitioner in the present case. On the other hand, the NGO contended that the sample test report found the meal suzplied by it to the school to be fit for human consumption and that the children had suffered only mild pain in their stomach.

It said though there were other instances where cockroaches and dead lizards were found in cooked food supplied by other NGOs, the government did not take any action against some of them.

FROM THE TRAFFIC ARCHIVES

At a function at the traffic police institute recently, police commissioner Rakesh Maria said that it was the traffic police that had solved the 1993 serial blasts case. He was then a deputy commissioner with the Mumbai traffic police. 

Most people remember that the first link to Tiger Memon was the Maruti van that was found abandoned at Worli, near the scene of the Century Bazar blast. It had seven AK-56 rifles and four grenades and was registered in the name of Rubina, sister-in-law of Tiger Memon, with the address given as Al-Husseini building, Mahim. This was Tiger Memon’s home. 

However, few know that there was another vehicle which provided the clinching evidence. It was a brand new Bajaj scooter abandoned at Naigaon Cross Lane, which leads to Dadar station on the Central Railway side. A doctor had tipped off the cops about the scooter lying there, outside his clinic, for four days. The bomb squad found an unexploded RDX bomb in it. 

Matthew Varghese, then a sub-inspector with the traffic police, was one of those in the thick of the blasts probe. As soon as the Rubina Memon link was established, he accompanied Maria to Al-Husseini building. The Memon family had flown out of the country the night before the blasts. Varghese spotted a pair of shiny scooter keys on the table and wondered if they belonged to the Naigaon scooter. A traffic police hawaldar was sent to check and Varghese’s hunch came out to be true. This conclusively established that Tiger Memon was linked to the blasts. 

However, Varghese laments that this could never become part of the record as the keys had been missed out in the panchnama. It remains one of the untold stories of how the 1993 serial blasts were solved by the traffic police.  

In 5 years MPs net-worth shoots up 5 times

New Delhi: The average assets of MPs re-elected to the 16th Lok Sabha have almost doubled in the last five years, a study has found. 

Association for Democratic Reforms analyzed the affidavits of 165 of the total 168 re-elected MPs, as three of them were ‘unclear / incomplete’ as posted on the Election Commission’s website, and found that the average assets of these MPs fielded by various parties were Rs. 5.38 crore in 2009 but have risen to Rs. 12.78 cr in 2014. 

Reelected MPs of the Shiromani Akali Dal saw the maximum rise in their assets, which grew from Rs. 31.75 cr to Rs. 58.88 cr. MPs of the Communist Party of India Marxist were ones whose assets grew the least, from Rs. 0.7 cr to Rs. 0.78 cr. 

Shatrughan Sinha of the Bharatiya Janata Party topped the list with his assets growing from Rs. 15 cr in 2009 to Rs. 131.74 cr. He was followed by Pinaki Mishra of the Biju Janata Dal and Supriya Sule of the Nationalist Congress Party.

ADR also analyzed the rise in criminal cases as declared by these re-elected MPs. 

Of the 165 re-elected MPs, 71 declared criminal charges against them and 31 of them showed an increase in such charges in their affidavits. Twenty-one MPs who had no criminal charge against them in 2009 have disclosed such charges in 2014, while nine MPs who declared criminal charges in 2009 showed no increase in 2014. 

Ramashankar Katheria of the BJP, who declared no criminal cases in 2009, showed the maximum increase in 2014 by announcing 21 criminal charges. 

Raju Shetty of Swabhimani Paksha, who won from Hatkanangle constituency in Maharashtra, and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Congress MP from Baharampur in West Bengal, showed an increase of 12 criminal charges against them in the last five years.  

MEN DIE OF SUFFOCATION IN SEWER 

Mumbai: Three labourers working in a Mulund sewer died of poisonous gases at 3 am on Sunday. The fire brigade managed to save the lives of four others who had entered the main sewer that runs along the Eastern Express highway and ends at the Bhandup sewage pumping station. While three of them were discharged, one of them is still admitted at Rajawadi hospital.

The names of deceased are Sonu Pradhan (32), Dhanaksh Samadhi (30) and Ramkishan Dinsmat (47). The hospitalized labourer has been identified as Santosh Sahu. 

The labourers were on contract with Sriram EPC Ltd. The Kanjur Marg police is investigating the incident. The fire brigade’s rescue operation lasted three hours.

The BMC clarified that it had told the contractor not to send men into the sewer. “The work of a new sewer line in Bhandup Centre was postponed till October. As a supplementary measure in this work, an underground wall was being constructed to stop flow of the sewer line. A JCB machine was to be employed for breaking this wall from outside the manhole. But the contractor who was awarded the work tried to do this work by sending labourers through manhole which resulted into the tragedy,” said Sunil Sardar, executive engineer of the sewage department. 

He added that action would be initiated to register an offence against the contractor, Shriram EPC Ltd. 

Mumbai’s 1,500 km long sewer lines are cleaned manually by 4,000 labourers using rudimentary equipment such as iron rods and bamboo sticks. 

In 1996, following a Bombay High Court order to safeguard manhole workers’ rights, the BMC issued safety guidelines, listing the provision of earplugs, goggles for eye protection, oxygen masks, hand gloves, gumboots for workers entering manholes. According to Jan Jagruti, a non-government organisation, 19 out of 22 guidelines are violated. 

According to a study by the Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS), about 80 per cent of sewer workers die before the age of 60. The Safai Kamgar Vikas Sangh, one of the BMC conservancy workers’ unions, learnt through the use the Right to Information Act that around 25 conservancy workers engaged in cleaning and sanitation by the Mumbai civic body die every month, while on their employment tenure. 

   

MAN SUES STATE FOR WRONG CONVICTION

New York: A man in the US who was wrongly locked up in prison for nearly 25 years has sued the state for $25 million, a million each for the years he spent behind bars. Derrick Deacon who spent almost a quarter-century behind bars for a crime he did not commit, has hit the state with the USD 25 million lawsuit and hopes it will teach authorities a lesson about bending the rules to gain a conviction. “These people have to pay for every day they made me suffer behind the wall for no reason,” Deacon, 58, who was freed last year by new evidence, told The New York Post. Deacon, from Brooklyn, was convicted of murder on December 21, 1989, in the fatal shooting that April of Anthony Wynn, 16.    

Naxals burnt Rs. 15 crore worth vehicle

NAGPUR: Naxals in Gadchiroli district of east Maharashtra have burnt down as many as 417 vehicles, collectively worth over Rs 15 crore, in last 25 years as part of their anti-establishment operations, the police said on Thursday. “The Maoists, who sneaked in the backward region of State in 1980, gradually resorted to violence and arson. They have so far set ablaze 103 trucks, 151 tractors, 26 road-rollers and 33 tippers,” the Ant-Naxalite Operations (ANO), a specialized unit of Maharashtra Police, said on Thursday. The total damage to vehicles stood at Rs 15,38,10,649 during the last two-and-a-half-decades. In an incident dated April 21, a group of ultras set three trucks and 12 four-wheelers, collectively valued at Rs 20 lakh, on fire between Sindha and Dodgiri in Aheri taluka of the district. Naxals also targeted the Border Road Organization (BRO) whose mandate was to lay a national highway via Sironcha taluka. “BRO lost 15 trucks, 10tippers and JCB machines costing Rs 1,47,45,000 during its camping here,” ANO said in a release. According to ANO, year 2009 was the worst as a total of 49 vehicles were targeted. “While it was 30 vehicles in 2011, 28 in 2008, 26 in 2006 and 28 in 2013,” ANO added.

CHEAP DRINKING WATER FROM ATM  

Mumbai:  Residents of the city can now buy water from an ATM, that too at an affordable price of Rs 1 per litre. 

In a first-of-its-kind for Mumbaikars, non-profit group Vandana Foundation has started ‘AQUATM’, a water vending machine. “The ATM can vend up to 1,000 litres per day… The water from AQUATM will be available to consumers at the price of Re 1 per litre,” the Foundation said in a statement. Vandana Foundation and another non-profit group Aquakraft have come together for the water ATM. The vending machine has been set up at Mankhurd where there are water contamination problems. It can be operated through prepaid cards.