ISSUES AND CONCERNS

NEW DELHI: It is deeply disturbing to see that a section of Indians whose determined agenda is only to destabilize the present dispensation at the centre in joining hands, ostensibly in support of agitation by Punjab farmers. Prima facie they are not supporting farmers at all. Trudeau from Canada supported Indian farmers’ agitation because of his local politics to keep Canadian sardars happy who are his voters. But Canada has forgotten it's the same Khalistani Sardars who bombed Air India Boing KANISHKA in the middle of Atlantic killing some 400 innocent civilians of all nationalities including most Indians by making fool of Canadian Security apparatus at the Toronto airport. Ritudaman Singh Malik, one of the masterminds, who is a Canadian, was acquitted on questionable grounds. Then you have those 40 or so MPs from the UK. They are mostly Khalistaani supporters or Pakistanis and those who are on the pay roll of Pakistan. Then you have Badals of Punjab having lost power to Congress...

NEW DELHI: A master mariner became a Chairman of an Indian port. He was married to a family of political heavy weights. Naturally the brilliant son of the master mariner could have had a chosen career. But he opted to work for an International NGO. On enquiring why he opted to work for an NGO, was it because he is socially oriented and inclined towards social work?! The answer from the master mariner was shockingly frank and truthful. He said “These days in NGOs there is big money coming from many sources”. So, if anyone thinks if one is working for an NGO he is inclined towards service, you are mistaken. He need not be a concerned individual at all. He could just be a money making career junky, out to enjoy life and still keep earning in $. Writer Gurcharan Das was the Chief Executive of an American multinational company Proctor & Gamble. He recently wrote a piece in TOI-“Doing Good in India Gets Harder”, while stressing “philanthropy should be regulated by an independent regulat...

WARD COMMITTEES IN MANGALOORU CITY CORPORATION: AN EXPERIMENT IN GRASSROOT DEMOCRACY Democracy, we are told, is a form of “government of the people, by the people and for the people”, so said Abraham Lincoln while addressing at Gettysburg on November 1, 1863, after abolishing slavery in the United States of America. The principle, that a government of the people has to live and work for the people is the corner stone of governance, was never in doubt. However, it was the possibility of corruption, in the use of national resources that introduced a dimension of concern for the success or failure of governance, within a democratic milieu. All of us are privy to the knowledge that every administration of a country needs financial and human resources. But since it was the human resources that needed management skills so that resources of the nation are made use of, in the best possible way of getting the best at least cost. This aspect always ran the risk of committing error, both intenti...