ISSUES AND CONCERNS ಸಮಸ್ಯೆಗಳ ಮೇಲೆ ಕ್ಷಕಿರಣ

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 h...

No more plastic menace-        bottles that can be eaten   London: Finished drinking your bottle of water? Now eat it! A design student in UK has developed an edible ‘bottle’ of water that could rid the world of excess plastic waste. Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez along with fellow Imperial College London students has been working on the Ooho water bottle for the past few years. The bottle is made out of edible materials, looks like a jellyfish, and has the potential to put an end to the bottled water industry, ‘Smithsonian.com’ reported, according to PTI. Mountain on rent  London: An extremely rich mother in China rented out an entire mountain just so that her 9-year-old daughter can learn about nature, it has been revealed. According to Daily Express, when 33-year-old Gan Lin learned that her daughter, Yin Gan, who’s in fourth class of a primary school, knows very less about plants, vegetables, or anything related to nature, she paid a local council to ...

IS INTER-LINKING OF RIVERS WORTHWHILE? Dr. M. V. Kamath On April 16, addressing a meeting at Salem in South India, Narendra Modi said that linking rivers will solve the water woes of states like Tamil Nadu and an NDA government, if voted to power, will achieve in 60 months what the Congress could not do in 60 years. A couple of days earlier, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister had charged the BJP with betraying the state’s interests over sharing the Cauvery’s water with Karnataka. The idea of linking water surplus Himalayan rivers with water scarce part of western and peninsular India has been doing the rounds for the past 150 – not 60 – years. Never in the past has the idea generated as much discussion and debate as during the recent years after the Supreme Court of India enjoined the Government of India to implement the grandiose project by 2016. Modi is either not fully aware of all the facts regarding river linking or he is just over-enthusiastic, considering that there is a strong body o...

Friends We are at the end of Financial Year. It is a month where union budgets are discussed across the media. Election to the Loksabha being only a few months away, customary budget was given a go by. The vote on a/c, by both the Railway Minister and the Finance Minister have been presented to the parliament. Railway Minister, although, belonging to Karnataka, did not show any special favours to his state. While this being a fair policy, it has its own valid arguments against it. But what most ministers in railway, in fact all railway ministers in the past, have only played the development card, instead of development per se. Budget allocations are done according to the demand from either the political class or the general public. Announcement in the budget, not necessarily leads to the project. It takes its own time to start, having started, it never runs through a planned programme of completion. There are any number of projects started, but languishing at different levels of ...

TAMIL NADU: A politico-family drama is on in Tamil Nadu. Accusations and counter accusations by Karunanidhi (MK) siblings is bound to hasten the political eclipse of Karunanidhi family. With number of wives, M Karunanidhi is already having problem keeping everybody happy with appropriate political positions. Thus DMK has become a family affair of MK, with Maran’s on the sidelines. If Alagiri has been accused of cursing Stalin, that he would die soon, Alagiri’s complaint is that both his father and brother Stalin did not greet him on his birthday. Adding to this was “Cruel remarks on Stalin broke my heart” by M.Karunanidhi. Now this indeed is a height of comedy. Father is a seasoned politician with over 60 years political life and both sons similarly in politics for over 2/3 decades. It is really funny to hear their petty public spat. Surely their beite noire Jayalalitha is having a hearty laugh, and is already preparing to use such bickerings to her advantage by showing the dram...

INDIAN IN COWBOY COUNTRY THE INTERVIEW Tom Holcombe was a jovial and jocular Texan who belonged to a prominent family that owned ranches that had turned into oilfields. He grew up in Fort Worth, but rather than joining the family ranks in managing ranches and production fields, he became an accountant at an American bank with worldwide operations. He had worked for over twenty years, and had recently taken a sabbatical to rethink his life.  Satish and Priya had met him at a festival of Satyajit Ray films at Rice University. He, like them, saw every film in this festival. After the third film or so, they began to acknowledge each other in the lobby. After the fifth film, they had discussions on the master’s work during a break, and after the last film, he invited the two of them to join him for dinner at a great Ethiopian restaurant that he’d just discovered.   He regaled them with his stories and experiences, especially in Asia and India. He had gone on a tige...