The Government has taken the following initiatives for unorganised workers, including landless agricultural workers.

The “Aam Admi Bima Yojana” providing for death and disability cover to rural landless households between the age group of the 18 to 59 years, with effect from 02.10.2007.

The Rashtriya Bima Yojana for BPL families (a unit of five) in unorganized sector on 01.10.2007. The scheme providing for smart card based cashless health insurance cover of Rs. 30,000/- per family per annum on a family floater basis became operational from 01.04.2008.

Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme provides for old age pension of Rs. 200/- per month to persons above the age of 60 years and for the persons above the age of 80 years the amount of pension has been raised to Rs. 500/- per month.

Raising concerns over declining sex ratio in the country, Minister of State for Women and Child Development Krishna Tirath called for more steps to prevent the issues related with girl child and women. 

The government needs to work on better policies in collaboration with other public and private institutions, Tirath said while speaking on the occasion of the National Girl Child Day celebrations here on Tuesday.

Declining sex ratio has become a major issue in India as in the last decade 27 states have seen a decline in child sex ratio, she said.

“We have to take steps towards preventing lingering issues related with girl child and women across states. Sex select abortions and dowry cases are not the only issues aggravating these problems.

FOR MORE READING. . .

Done at the Centre for Development Studies here, this is fifth in the series of comprehensive studies on international and internal migration from Kerala since 1998.

According to the study, the number of Kerala migrants living abroad in 2011 was estimated at 2.28 million, up from 2.19 million in 2008, 1.84 million in 2003 and 1.36 million in 1998.

The report said the total remittances in Kerala in 2011 were worth about Rs.49,695 crore compared to Rs.43,288 crore in 2008.

The proportion of Hindus among the non-resident Keralites also has shot up — it was 37.5 per cent in 2011, but only 29.9 per cent in 1998.

However, the vast majority of the migrants from Kerala in 2011 were Muslims (about 45 per cent), although the community’s share in the total population of the state was only about 26 per cent.

On the other hand, though the Hindus formed about 56 per cent of the total population, their share among migrants was only 37.5 percent.

The 2011 study is based on primary data collected from 15,000 households selected through random sampling covering all the 63 taluks or sub-districts in the state.

According to the study, conducted by researchers K.C. Zachariah and S. Irudayarajan, the main countries of destination for Kerala migrants have remained more or less unchanged over these years – 90 per cent of the state’s migrants going to the Gulf countries.

Nearly 40 per cent of Kerala’s migrants live in the UAE and 25 per cent in Saudi Arabia.

At the time of presentation of the budget for the year 2010-11, the Government had announced its decision to introduce a special scheme to address the development of 33 Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected districts.   It was inter-alia, stated that the Planning Commission would prepare an Integrated Action Plan (IAP) for the affected areas and that adequate funds would be made available to support the action plan. The 33 districts (later expanded to 34) referred to in the Finance Minister’s announcement were a sub-set of the 83 LWE affected districts identified by the Ministry of Home Affairs for coverage under its Security Related Expenditure (SRE) Scheme.  This sub-set consisted of those districts where more than 20% of the Police Stations experienced some incidents of naxal violence.  Subsequently, West Medinipur district of West Bengal was added to the list due to the situation prevailing there, taking the total to 35 districts.

Implementation of IAP

            IAP was formulated as an additional central assistance scheme on 100% grant basis in November 2010.  To begin with, the Integrated Action Plan (IAP) for 60 tribal and backward districts was to  be implemented with a block grant of Rs.25 crore and Rs.30 crore per district during 2010-11 and 2011-12 respectively for which the funds were to be placed at the disposal of the Committee headed by the District Collector and consisting of the Superintendent of Police of the district and the District Forest Officer.

The district level committee will have flexibility to spend the amount for development schemes according to need, as assessed by it.  The Committee would draw up a Plan consisting of concrete proposals for public infrastructure and services such as School Buildings, Anganwadi Centres, Primary Health Centres, Drinking Water Supply, Village Roads, Electric Lights in public places such as PHCs and Schools etc. The concerned Development Commissioner/ equivalent officer in charge of development in the State shall be responsible for scrutiny of expenditure and monitoring of IAP.

The Planning Commission will undertake macro level monitoring of the scheme and implementation of the scheme will be reviewed and suitable decisions taken on the modalities for implementation of the scheme as a part of the 12^th Five Year Plan.

Salient features of the scheme

            The salient features of the guidelines are:

(i)                 The district level committee should draw up a plan consisting of concrete proposals for public infrastructure and services such as school buildings, Anganwadi centres, Drinking Water supply, Village Roads, electric lights in public places such as PHCs and schools etc. The schemes so selected should show results in the short term.

(ii)               A suitable form of consultation is to be ensured with the local Members of Parliament on the schemes to be taken up the under the IAP.

(iii)             The expenditure on the projects should be over and above the expenditure being incurred for the regular State/Central/Centrally Sponsored Schemes.   The district level committee should ensure that there is no duplication of expenditure on the same project.

(iv)             The State Government will release the funds directly into the bank account opened for this purpose by the District Collector or District Magistrate. The State Government will ensure that funds are transferred to this bank account within 15 days of the release of the funds to the Consolidated Fund of the State Government failing which the State Government should transfer to the district penal interest at RBI rate.

Achievements Under IAP

            The implementation of the scheme commenced in the year 2010-11 and Rs.25 crore per district i.e. total Rs.1500 crore for the year 2010-11 was released in December, 2010.  The districts immediately finalized the works to be taken up, completed the tender processes wherever required and the works on the ground commenced immediately in all the 60 districts.  Currently, the implementation of IAP in the districts is in full swing. The total funds released so far for the year 2011-12 is Rs.1090 crore and the total funds released so far since the commencement of the Scheme is Rs.2590 crore.  Against the total amount of Rs.2590 crores released so far to the 9 States, the expenditure as on 27.12.2011 is Rs.1468.83 crore i.e. 56.71% of the funds released.

            Under the IAP, so far 62327 projects for an amount of Rs. 3230.02 crore have been taken up in the 9 States.  These include construction of School Buildings/School Furniture, Anganwadi Centres, Drinking Water facilities, Rural roads, Panchyat Bhawan/Community Halls, Godowns/PDS shops, livelihood activities, skill development/trainings, minor irrigation works, electric lighting, health centres/facilities, Ashram Schools, construction of toilets, construction of multi-purpose chabutra, construction of passenger waiting hall, special coaching classes for students, construction of ANM centres, development of play grounds etc. 44.42% of projects taken up so far have been completed i.e., 27687 projects have been completed so far.   State-wise details of physical progress as on 27.12.2011 vis-à-vis projects sanctioned are: Andhra Pradesh- 702 (1140), Bihar – 2367 (12889), Chhattisgarh – 6115 (14718), Jharkhand- 5621 (11769), Madhya Pradesh – 1446 (5352), Maharashtra – 2667 (4398), Orissa – 6829 (15087), Uttar Pradesh – 1337 (1548) and West Bengal - 603 (1272).

Parameters to Qualify under IAP

While formulating the scheme, the Planning Commission considered that the scheme should not be limited only to the severely LWE affected districts.  It was proposed by them that the scheme should cover other tribal and backward districts also and the following criteria was adopted to identify districts for inclusion in the scheme:

(a)                Whether the district is included in the list of 83 SRE districts identified by the Ministry of Home Affairs;

(b)               Whether the tribal population exceeds 25%;

(c)                Whether the forest area exceeds 30%;

(d)               Whether the poverty ratio in the district exceeds 50%; and

(e)                Whether the district is covered under the Backward Regions Grant Fund (BRGF).

Districts meeting four of the above-mentioned five criteria and forming a contiguous block were selected for coverage under the proposed scheme.  Thus, with this criteria, a total of 60 districts were selected for coverage under the scheme.

Districts Covered

The 60 districts comprised 48 districts covered under the SRE scheme and 12 other districts not falling under the SRE scheme.  The 60 districts thus selected are : Adiliabad and Khammam (2 districts) in Andhra Pradesh; Arwal, Aurangabad, Gaya, Jamui, Jehanabad, Nawada and Rohtas (7 districts), in Bihar; Bastar, Bijapur, Dantewada, Jashpur, Kanker, Kawardha, Koriya, Narayanpur, Rajnandgaon and Surguja (10 districts) of Chhattisgarh; Bokaro, Chatra, Garwha, Gumla, Hazaribagh, Kodarma, Latehar, Lohardaga, Paschim Singhbhum, Palamu, Purbi Singhbhum, Ramgarh, Saraikela and Simdega (14 districts) of Jharkhand; Anuppur, Balagahat, Dindori, Mandla, Seoni, Shahdol, Sidhi and Umaria (8 districts)  in Madhya Pradesh; Gadchiroli and Gondiya (2 districts); Balangir, Debagarh/Deogarh, Gajapati, Kalahandi, Kandhamal/Phulbani, Kendujhar/Keonjhar, Koraput, Malkangiri, Mayurbhanj, Nabrangpur, Nuapada, Rayagada, Sambalpur, Sonapur and Sundargarh (15 districts) of  Orissa; Sonbhadra (1 district), Uttar Pradesh; Paschim Medinipur (1 district) in West Bengal.

Monitoring

            The Development Commissioner of the State/equivalent officer incharge of development in the State is responsible for scrutiny of expenditure and monitoring of the IAP in the State.  In order to facilitate the monitoring, the States are required to send district-wise monthly progress reports in the prescribed format and also upload the information on the Management Information System(MIS) along with photographs of the works.

Regular monitoring of the IAP is being carried out by the Member-Secretary, Planning Commission through video conferences with the District Collectors/District Magistrates and Development Commissioner of the States concerned.  So far 14 such video conferences/meetings have been held including the Video Conference meetings held by the Union Home Minister, Union Minister of Rural Development and MoS (Independent charge) for Environment and Forests. In addition, the Review Group headed by the Cabinet Secretary also reviewed the progress of implementation of IAP with the Chief Secretaries of 9 States through video conference meeting.

Provisions for change in IAP

            The Ministry of Home Affairs has also constituted an Empowered Group of Officers with Member-Secretary, Planning Commission as its Chairperson.   The Empowered Group, inter-alia, has overriding powers to modify existing norms/guidelines on implementation of various development programmes and flagship schemes in consultation with the Ministries/Departments concerned.

States’ Response to IAP

            The implementation of IAP has been successful and the scheme has had a very good response.  A number of requests had been received from the Chief Ministers, Members of Parliament and State Governments for inclusion of more districts under the IAP.  On the basis of requests received from the State Govts., the Govt. of India has decided on 07.12.2011 to include additional 18 LWE affected districts under IAP from the financial year 2011-12 onwards and to provide block grant of Rs.30 crore to each of these districts during the current financial year.

Conclusion:    The Government’s approach is to deal with Left Wing Extremism activities in a holistic manner, in the areas of security, development, rights of local communities, administration and public perception.  In dealing with this decades old problem, it has been felt appropriate, after various high-level deliberations and interactions with the State Governments concerned that an integrated approach aimed at the relatively more affected areas would deliver results.  With this in view, a detailed analysis of the spread and trends in respect of LWE violence has been made and 83

affected districts in nine States have been taken up for special attention on planning, implementation and monitoring of security situation and development schemes.

There are nearly 16 crore children in India below the age of six years. According to Singh, the health of the economy and society lies in the health of “this generation”.

“In the years to come, these children will join our workforce as scientists, farmers, teachers, data operators, artisans and service providers. We cannot hope for a healthy future for our country with a large number of malnourished children,” Singh said.

FOR MORE READING. . .

“Isko to ECG ke liye yahan bhijaye hai. Tum isko ultrasound ke liye kyon le gaye? (He has been sent here for an ECG, why did you take him for an ultrasound?)” asked the RMO, poring over the convict’s medical records, very angry.

FOR MORE READING. . .

(Uma Sudhir is Resident Editor, NDTV, based at Hyderabad and a documentary filmmaker)

INCREASED TARGETING

While experience has shown that targeting policies for food security are counter-productive, the present bill adds new categories of targeting. Indeed the bill is a classic example of the absurd levels to which policies of targeting can reach and the extent of social cruelty embedded in a targeted framework.

So far there have been three categories for targeting for food access in the PDS, namely the APL, BPL and Antodaya. The last category was carved out from the BPL population with an added price advantage of 35 kg of rice at two rupees a kilo. The present bill eliminates the Antodaya category. Henceforth all the 2.5 crore Antodaya families will come under the BPL category and will have to pay one rupee a kilo more for rice which has been pegged in the new bill at three rupees. Thus for these 2.5 crore families the present version of food security means an added cost of 35 rupees a kilo per month. 

ARBITRARY CATEGORISATION

The bill has the following categories:

(1) BPL: The first category is the BPL category renamed as the “priority sections.” These sections are eligible for 7 kg of foodgrains per person (it is not clear whether a child is considered a person under this definition), if it is rice it will cost three rupees a kilo and wheat at two rupees a kilo, millets or coarse grains at one rupee a kilo.

The number of BPL households at the national level is declared in the law to constitute 46 per cent of the population in rural India and 28 per cent in urban India with state-wise variations which will be decided by the centre. Since several states are giving rice at two rupees a kilo today, BPL sections in those states will also be paying one rupee a kilo more for rice.

(2)   APL: The second category is the APL category renamed the “general sections.” The Bill declares these sections to constitute 29 per cent in rural areas and 22 per cent in urban areas. This is less than the number of APL cardholders today. Therefore a substantial  section of APL cardholders will be excluded by law. Those who manage to retain their APL cards will get only 3 kg of foodgrains per person. Assuming a family of five members, the bill provides a maximum of only 15 kg of foodgrains which is less than what the APL sections are getting now. The price will be 50 per cent of what the minimum support price (MSP) is at any given time. Since MSP increases every year because of the increase in the prices of farm inputs, APL sections will lose the advantage of the fixed price they have today and will have to contend with an increased price every year. Therefore, in terms of numbers, price benefit and amount of grain, APL sections stand to lose their present entitlements. There is another highly objectionable new provision, which will be dealt with later in this analysis — namely, even the reduced entitlements of the APL sections are linked to the implementation of reforms.

(3) Excluded Sections: There is a third category which has been introduced, for the first time, in the public distribution system. The Bill mandates the exclusion of 25 per cent of the population of rural India and fifty per cent of the population of urban India from the benefits of the bill. The guidelines for exclusion are to be decided by the central government from time to time. This is a new contribution of the UPA government to the concept of food security — legally sanctioned automatic exclusion.

(4) BPL Census Automatic Exclusions Category: However, there is yet another exclusion, the fourth exclusion, which may occur. The questionnaire of the BPL census has already defined the categories of those sections which would lead to an automatic exclusion. The questions themselves are highly problematic. But assume that the numbers reached through this exercise do not add up to 50 per cent of the population in urban areas or even 25 per cent in rural areas, which is what is required in the Food Security Act. Then what will occur is a fourth exclusion category to make up the gap between the two, the arbitrary exclusion percentage requirement of the Bill on the one hand, and the actual numbers identified through the BPL census on the other.

Apart from the ethical issues arising out of arbitrary exclusions from what should be recognised as the universal right of food security, even from a purely economic and administrative point of view, the multiple levels of categorisations will lead to added expenditures, guaranteed leakages and increased corruption.

ABSURDITIES IN DEFINITIONS

The definitions section in the bill further expose the folly of targeting . In the section on “special groups” there are provisions for further affirmative action for some sections. But how are these defined? Persons living in starvation are to get two free meals a day once they are so identified by the state government. Starvation has been defined in Chapter 1 Clause 2 (24) as “prolonged involuntary deprivation of food that threatens the very survival of the person.” But who will decide when survival is threatened? At present, even after a person has died due to starvation, official medical teams prompted by governments declare the person had died due to some other ailment. There is rarely an acknowledgement of a starvation death. Then again, what will happen to the semi-starving? Will they have to wait till they come into the category of starvation to get the benefit? Another example is that of “destitution.” In the bill in Ch III Clause 8 (a)  a destitute person “shall be entitled to at least one meal every day” — so there is a differentiation being made in the benefits for those in starvation and those in destitution. While the former is entitled to two free meals, the latter gets only one. This absurdity is taken further in the definition of a destitute person. In Ch 1, Clause 2 (3) destitute persons are those who “have no resources, means and support required for food and nutrition enabling their survival, to the extent that makes them vulnerable to live or die of starvation.” Can any sane person find any difference between a person in starvation whose life is threatened by food deprivation and a destitute  who is vulnerable to death by starvation? But World Bank trained or indoctrinated economists can find the subtle differences between equally hungry people to decide who will get two free meals and who will get only one. These abhorrent differentiations between equally poor and deprived sections are fundamental to the ideology of neo-liberalism and targeting. The logical corollary of targeting — we can now have inspectors to confirm how often people eat, whether they are destitute or starving or whether they are cheating the treasury by eating two free meals when they deserve only one.

In the 1930s when the capitalist crisis had created “the Great Depression,” free soup kitchens were run in the United States. But at that time no one needed a card to prove that they were hungry, it was assumed that only those in need would stand in the queue for free food. Even that sensitivity gets eliminated in the present dominant philosophy of neo-liberalism where targeting and cuts in subsidies in welfare schemes has become the mantra of governments.

In a country with the highest malnourished population in the world, free meals to a small number are an inadequate response. What is required to prevent starvation and hunger is universal access to cheap foodgrains and a basket of essential commodities. The Food Security Bill, however, does the opposite.

LINKING ENTITLEMENTS TO REFORMS

The Food Security Bill has an additional provision which was not there in the earlier drafts. Even the reduced entitlements for APL sections have been made conditional to the reform process. Ch II Clause 3(3) states, “Provided that the entitlements of those belonging to the general households shall be linked to such reforms in the public distribution system and from such date as may be prescribed by the central government.” In a new chapter VII entitled ‘Reforms in the Public Distribution System,’ the central government details eight reforms of which the most toxic are the “introduction of schemes such as cash transfer, food coupons or other schemes for targeted beneficiaries in lieu of foodgrains;” and “use of aadhar for unique identification with biometric information for proper targeting.” Thus contentious policy measures which are against the interests of the people are sought to be legalised on the back of the Food Security Bill. This is a highly objectionable strategy which amounts to using the Food Security Bill to blackmail states to accept the so-called reforms or else be held responsible and guilty of depriving the APL households of their entitlements.

LEGAL SANCTION FOR BOGUS POVERTY ESTIMATES

In any case, how has the government arrived at the percentages of BPL and APL that it wants included as the law? Contrary to media hype, there is no change in government policy regarding estimations of poverty, nor is there any delinking between the Planning Commission’s bogus estimates and poverty “quotas” given to the states as promised by the prime minister in response to the public outrage against the government affidavit in the Supreme Court case. Chapter V1 Clause 15(1) states, “The central government may from time to time prescribe the guidelines for identification for priority households, general households and exclusion criteria for the purposes of entitlements under this Act and notify such guidelines in the official gazette.” The next provision 15 (2) gives responsibility to the state governments to identify these sections “in accordance with the guidelines” but here again the central linkage is made “provided that no household falling under the exclusion criteria to be prescribed by the central government, shall be included either in the priority households or general households.” Further, in Clause 17, in case the state government wants to update the lists it has no right to do so and such updating can only be done “in a manner prescribed by the central government.”

Thus the present highly objectionable method used by government to distribute poverty quotas to the states is sanctioned by the law itself. The notorious 26 rupees a day destitution line used for calculating BPL in rural India and 32 rupees for urban India remains as the anchor for the various categories, with the government arbitrarily increasing it by a certain percentage as a “compromise.”

ENCROACHMENTS ON STATES’ RIGHTS

If the government has learnt any lessons from it’s attempts to steamroller the rights of states in the Lokpal Bill, then it should revise the even more blatant encroachments it has made in the food security bill. Under the Food Security Bill the central government has appropriated all rights in deciding a slew of issues in violation of the federal structure. In as many as 20 clauses the words “…..as may be prescribed by the central government have been used.”  Everything, from deciding poverty quotas, to the amount of food security allowance, to the qualifications of even the district level griveance officer working under the state government, to when and how wheat flour can be given instead of grain, all is to be decided by the central government. The centralised thrust of the bill is illustrated well in Ch XV titled Miscellaneous in Clause 46 which states.” The central government may from time to time give such directions as it may consider necessary, to the state governments for the effective implementation of the provisions of the Act and the state governments will comply with such directions.”…..Such is the commitment of this government to push through reforms that it does not maintain  even the pretence of consultations with the states, many of whom are running much  better food security programmes than those envisaged in this Act.

ISSUE OF EXPENDITURES

Equally objectionable, as far as rights of states are concerned, the bill has no provision for consultation with the states as far as cost sharing is concerned. The expenditures for the states are going to be quite substantial. But even as far as foodgrains supplies are concerned, while the state governments are mandated by the bill to pay the food allowance the bill includes a provision in Ch X clause 31 which allows the centre to substitute food grains supplies with payment to the states. This means that the state would have the responsibility to purchase the foodgrains but there is no guarantee in the bill that the central government would meet the full cost. The states are mandated to fulfil all the schemes including the supply of free meals or rations to special groups. However, the centre according the Clause 30(4) in Ch X will charge the states prices equivalent to the price given for BPL grain. In both these provisions the state governments are expected to subsidise the central scheme from their funds.

As a postscript, the bill has a special “gift” tucked away in the last section under Clause 52. This provision states that if there is a natural calamity which leads to failure of supply of foodgrains then neither the central government nor the state government, as the case may be, can be held liable. The list of conditions where there is no liability includes floods and drought. Since large parts of India are perennially affected by conditions of  floods or drought or sometimes both in different regions of the same state, the law  to ensure food security will be suspended precisely at the time when people will need it the most, when blackmarketeers and profiteers are out to make profits from the vulnerability of the affected population. The government has no liability in these conditions,  and in the non-secular language of the bill, any other “acts of God.”

CONCLUSION

The Congress spin masters have propagated the bill as the “pet bill” of the UPA chairperson Mrs Sonia Gandhi. If indeed it is so, it only shows that contrary to media creations, the UPA chairperson is very much in sync with the neo-liberal framework of the Manmohan Singh government, which is why such a deeply flawed bill should be flaunted with her stamp of approval. The bill in its present form is unacceptable. Concrete amendments should be moved before the standing committee and a widespread campaign launched to explain to the people the fraud being perpetrated on them in the name of food security.

Sexual Harassment at the workplace is a violation of women’s right to equality, life and liberty. It vitiates the work environment and serves to discourage women from participating in work, gravely affecting women’s social and economic empowerment.

In 1997, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that sexual harassment at the workplace is a form of discrimination against women and that it violates the constitutional right to equality. Despite its direction to the government to enact a suitable legislation for prevention of sexual harassment at the workplace, it took more than 13 years for the government of India to introduce the Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill in the Lok Sabha on 7 December 2010. This, despite the repeated demands for such a legislation by trade unions, women’s organisations and other sections, since the incidents of sexual harassment at the workplace have increased at a rapid pace, often with tragic consequences.

The Bill introduced in the Parliament has several shortcomings which tend to defeat its very purpose. Several changes need to be incorporated to make it effective in achieving its objectives.

The workplace should include all premises where women are employed, including houses and homes where women domestic workers work. But, the draft bill specifically excludes domestic workers, thereby leaving out a huge number of working women who comprise around 30% of the female workforce in the service sector. These women are especially vulnerable for abuse since they work in a private, restricted space as has been evidenced by many recent cases highlighted by the media, in India and abroad. Their economic compulsions often force them to work in difficult conditions, at odd hours, in the solitary company of males, and there are many reported cases of sexual abuse and harassment of domestic workers in this sector. Domestic workers should be included in the ambit of this legislation.

The first part of section 14 (1) woman will prevent women from lodging a complaint, since the situation is often one in which a subordinate has to muster up the courage to complain against her superior in the workplace, and also has to face social stigma from the others in her workplace. Hence it should be deleted. The section also goes against the Supreme Court judgement which had stated clearly that no action should be taken against a woman for making a complaint. If any complaint by a woman is found to be false or malicious, then it can be dealt with as per the service rules prevailing in that workplace. This need not be incorporated in the Bill.

The Bill should specify the nature and range of punishment for different forms of sexual harassment– from minimum to maximum, commensurate with the degree of gravity of the offence.

Further, the Bill should specifically incorporate a provision that if the moral character of the complainant is challenged there should be strong punishment for the respondent.

The process of conciliation, if requested by the aggrieved woman, should be a part of the enquiry proceedings of the Internal Complaints Committee/Local Complaints Committee, with a record maintained by it of all such proceedings. In case of violation of the settlement, the complainant should have the right to reopen the complaint.

The compensation should be determined not only on the basis of compensating the victim on the counts mentioned, but should be a heavy fine which can act as a deterrent.

Since the Bill states that every employer shall provide a safe working environment at the workplace which shall include safety from the persons coming into contact at the workplace, punishment should be prescribed for employers/administrative heads that do not form the redressal mechanism at the workplace. Punitive measures and penalty should also be imposed on those employers/administrative heads/district officers who try to shield or defend perpetrators of sexual harassment and those who take vindictive action against complainants.

The aggrieved woman should be allowed the option to have someone to assist her in the conduct of the enquiry by the Internal Complaints Committee/Local Complaints Committee, in case she is in need of such help and requests it.

Time limits should be set for imposition of the punitive measures on the perpetrator/s and delivery of the compensation to the victim. The mechanism for recovery of the compensation should be specified.

Trade unions, as representatives of workers and committed to the protection of workers’ rights, have an important role to play on the entire issue of sexual harassment at the workplace. Trade unions should be involved at every stage in the effort to prevent sexual harassment at workplace and provide a safe and democratic work environment to working women – in the formulation of policies, in their implementation and in monitoring their implementation. However, where no trade unions exist, NGOs that have experience/expertise in dealing with cases of sexual harassment may be associated with complaints committees. Sensitisation on the issue and creating awareness among the workers/employees and employers, both men and women, is of crucial importance in preventing sexual harassment.

The New Pension Scheme notified in December 2003 envisaged a contribution of 10% of wages by the employees with a matching contribution from the central government as employer which together will form the pension account for the concerned employee. The Fund will be managed and handled by fund managers appointed by the PFRDA and the employees will get pension by the end of their service life and the pension amount will be determined by the return on investment of their pension fund made by the appointed fund manager. Originally government employees used to get pension at 50% of their last drawn pay and the pension amount used to get revised with the changes in price indices. It was an assured amount. To get this system of assured pension system in place, the government employees had to forego their right to contributory provident fund, i.e., employer’s matching contribution to PF. In lieu of that surrender of right, assured pension was granted to them to be paid from the consolidated fund of India. This system of assured pensionary benefit is called “defined benefit” pension system.

The New Pension Scheme brought about a paradigm shift in the entire concept of pension as a social security measure. Now the pension will be based on “defined contribution” meaning thereby that the pension amount will be governed by what the employee’s “pension fund account” can earn from investment in the market. The NPS does not ensure any assured amount of pension to the employee despite his life-long contribution to his own pension fund. Both the Pension Scheme notified by the government and the PFRDA Bill (both 2005 and 2011) mentioned in clear terms that “ There shall be no implicit or explicit assurance of benefits except market based guaranteed mechanism to be purchased by the subscriber”. (Sec 20(2)(g) of the PFRDA Bill)

Can market ever guarantee any assured return on investments ? In the present day market situation with extreme volatility in both the money market and the share market, the return on investment of public funds like pension-funds is destined to be uncertain and low. Moreover, the Fund managers appointed by the PFRDA will handle the fund not for charity but for their own profit. Hence whatever return on pension fund investment that will reach the pensioner will be the net amount after ensuring profit of the fund managers as well. In the context of natural uncertainty of the market, fund managers are naturally expected to neutralize their risk first and then take care of the risk of the pensioners who actually supply capital to the fund managers through their life time savings in pension fund. Therefore the PFRDA Bill has paved the new regime of replacing assured pension by a pension system governed by the market forces playing with the employees’ life time savings. Thus PFRDA Bill and the pension system it enforces is an onslaught on the social security right of the government employees, a loot on their pension fund.

But the situation under which the PFRDA Bill 2011 has been put in place has opened another dangerous dimension. It is no more limited to the pension earnings of the central government employees alone or the state government employees in the states where state governments have also adopted the new pension scheme. The bill empowers the government to extend the ambit to all the existing pension schemes. But most alarmingly, through PFRDA Bill the government now plans to attract the savings of the 46 crore unorganized sector workers for investment in the stock market on the same scheme of market based uncertain returns.

The government has introduced New Pension Scheme, now named as “National Pension System” for unorganized sector workers. As per the scheme, which is now known as “Swabalamban” and being advertised a lot, the workers will have to contribute to pension fund minimum Rs. 1000/- per year and maximum Rs 12000/-. After making contribution for 30 years or so, at the age of 60 years the worker will be eligible to get 60 per cent of his contribution as lump sum and a pension of not less than Rs 1000 per month provided rest of his fund can ensure such return from the market. If his fund earns less, then the portion of lump sum receipt after retirement will go down and if his/her entire fund(100% of his/her contribution) fails to earn the minimum stipulated amount of pension (Rs 1000/-) he/she has to make more contribution to be eligible for getting the minimum pension. To allure people towards this scheme, the government has announced that it will contribute Rs 1000/- per year for five years till 2015-16, for those who joined the scheme in 2011-12.

Already, government started making aggressive effort to enrol workers in the Swabalamban Scheme. Anganwadi employees who have been struggling since long for pensionary benefit are now being pressurised in many states to accept “Swabalamban” by the respective state governments.

How far the unorganized sector workers are going to be benefited by this scheme ? As they do not have any pension benefit at present, it is but natural that a good section of them will be attracted towards the scheme. Will they get any assured pensionary benefit after making contribution for the scheme ? No.

The Scheme is silent if there is a break in continuity of contribution which is but natural for the unorganized sector workers, frequently losing jobs and changing employment. What will happen if he contributes for five years thereafter for one year he fails to make contribution or after making contribution for say ten years became incapacitated to earn say at forty years of age and could not continue contribution. Will he have to wait up to sixty years either to claim pension or lump sum payment. All these possibilities are not exceptional cases but a natural phenomenon in the life of the unorganized sector workers.

As per calculation,a worker after making contribution for 30 years at the rate of Rs 100 per month(Rs 1200 per year) will accumulate Rs 1,49,035/- which, if fully invested at 8 per cent return can ensure a monthly return of Rs 993/- to him. Now as per the scheme, if he is to get the minimum stipulated pension amount of Rs 1000, he will not get any thing as lump sum. And there is no guarantee whether the investment of his fund will continue to fetch him 8 per cent return at all points of time. If it does not earn 8 per cent in any year, what will happen to his pension earning, the scheme is not clear about such happenings.

The whole game-plan is altogether different. The share market needs a continuous flow of liquidity to keep up its temperature for the speculators and brokers earnings. Pension fund can be one such source for such liquidity as it belongs to none but the poor workers which can be risked for speculative purposes. In the name of providing pension to unorganized sector workers who do not have any social security benefits, the present scheme of Swabalamban has got a prospect of attracting crores of hapless workers to contribute for their old age security cutting their stomach at present. It has a propensity to garner lakhs of crore of rupees from a market in which 46 crore unorganized sector workers will be the customers. Obligation for paying pension will come after twenty or thirty years. The PFRDA Bill has already provided for the exit route for the fund managers and aggregators by section 20(2)(g) as quoted in the foregoing paragraph and also giving wide arbitrary power to PFRDA to decide and also denying the trade unions to have their say on the investment and delivery of the benefit to the workers as is the practice in case of Employees Provident Fund.

The Union Cabinet has given the final nod to this retrograde PFRDA Bill 2011 in its meeting held on 16th November 2011 after taking into consideration the 40th Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance on the same. The Union Cabinet practically brushed aside all the pro-employee positive recimmendations of the Standing Committee in the framing of which, the members of the ruling UPA combine were also a party.

The Standing Committee recommended ensuring assured return on the pension fund of the employees in the form of pension. The Standing Committee also recommended greater flexibility for the subscribers to the pension fund for premature withdrawal from pension fund in case of exigencies. The Manmohan Singh Cabinet rejected both the recommendations. It rather decided to further tighten the facilities for premature withdrawal which tantamount to further cut on the rights of the subscribers to access their own savings at the time of exigencies. And the most dangerous is that the PFRDA Bill 2011 did not mention anything about the ceiling of FDI in the pension fund management business. The intention of the Govt to allow unhindered access of the foreign companies to the pension fund generated by the country’s workers to be done through executive order. The Union Cabinet decided for the time being to allow FDI up to 26% in pension sector but consciously kept such decision out of the domain of the Bill so that they can raise the ceiling of FDI further whenever they feel through executive order avoiding the parliament.

Pension will no more remain a secure social security, it will become a funding source for unscrupulous investors, both domestic and foreign, which will be used through speculative share market. The Government in order to please the foreign pension fund operators, in USA, has kept the avenue fully open for FDI investment. With this bill, if passed, the hard earned money of crores of unorganized sector will be utilized for speculation. Can the working class and the country as a whole tolerate such open and shameless fraud in the name of social security of millions ?

If anyone uses a word or phrase from the department’s list, American spies might read the posts, investigate the online account and even attempt to identify the person from it, the Daily Mail reported.

Some words which reportedly attract attention are outbreak, drill, strain, illegal immigrant, virus, recovery, deaths, collapse and trojan, according to a report filed by a private group — the Electronic Privacy Information Centre.

It was not clear how this information was being used.

The group said the US government has used scans of social media earlier to analyse specific events — such as the 2010 BP oil spill.

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/russian-court-rejects-ban-gita-plea/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/anna-supporters-in-chennai-disappointed/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/anna-supporters-in-chennai-disappointed/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:12:21 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/anna-supporters-in-chennai-disappointed/ Chennai, Dec 28 (IANS) The general mood of India Against Corruption (IAC) members here supporting Anna Hazare’s demand for a strong anti-graft law was of disappointment after the Lok Sabha passed the Lokpal Bill Tuesday night but they were determined to take their protest to the next level, said an activist Wednesday.

‘We didn’t get what we expected. Now we have to see what is going to happen in the Rajya Sabha. We don’t want this bill to be passed,’ C. Mohan, a civil engineer on fast here, told IANS.

‘There is a sense of betrayal as well as renewed vigour to take the protest to the next level,’ Banu Gomes, media coordinator for IAC, told IANS.

She said a total of 26 people are on fast and 200 on relay fast.

Around 400 people visited the fast venue Wednesday to express their solidarity with the IAC activists.

She said the condition of Chandra Mohan, a protester on fast who was hospitalised Tuesday, is stable now.

Refuting that the response to the protest was poor, Gomes said the venue for the fast was finalised Dec 26 and there was not much time to publicise the event.

‘Despite that, the response is good with 400 people visiting the venue Wednesday,’ she said.

Jan 21: Life term upheld for Australian Graham Staines’ killers Ravinder Kumar Pal alias Dara Singh and Mahender Hambram in Odisha.

March 3: Appointment of Central Vigilance Commissioner P.J. Thomas struck down.

March 7: Court rules Aruna Shanbaug to live but permits passive euthanasia (passive mercy killing) under certain circumstances.

March 7: Nod for common MBBS entrance test.

April 15: Rights activist Binayak Sen granted bail.

April 19: Diktat by khap panchayats ordering coercion held illegal.

May 12: Apex court orders CBI probe in rural job scheme implementation in Odisha.

May 13: Insecticide endosulfan banned.

July 4: Probe team set up on money laundering during the hearing on black money case.

July 5: Court stops Chhattisgarh from using tribals in fight against the Maoists.

July 6: Land acquisition in Greater Noida quashed.

July 6: Court allows French firm to mine in Meghalaya.

Aug 9 : Students allowed to inspect their evaluated answer sheets.

Nov 23: Court says bail should be the rule and jail an exception for accused.

In the process, the court also broke many a new ground, saying there were no limitations to its monitoring the work of central probe agencies and that bail in a case should be the rule and jail an exception. Another landmark ruling laid down guidelines paving the way for passive euthanasia.

Transparent governance remained centric to the decisions of the Supreme Court, which March 3 quashed the appointment of then central vigilance commission P.J. Thomas as ‘non-est’, meaning not existing in law.

Unhappy over the central government’s probe into black money, the apex court June 4 set up a special investigation team headed by former apex court judge B.P. Jeevan Reddy to investigate the stashing away of the ill-gotten money in tax heavens abroad.

In the 2G scam case, central government counsel P.P. Rao’s remark that there was a ‘Lakshman Rekha’ of court monitoring Sep 22 evoked a tough response from a bench of Justice G.S. Singhvi and Justice A.K. Ganguly.

The court referred to the epic ‘Ramayana’ and told Rao that Ravana would not have been killed if Sita had not crossed the ‘Lakshman Rekha’ — a veiled reference that the truth in the 2G scam would not have seen the light of the day if the court had not decided to monitor the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe.

In the same case, the court granted bail to five corporate executives Nov 23. ‘It is not in the interest of justice that the accused should be in jail for an indefinite period’, said a bench of Justice G.S. Singhvi and Justice H.L. Dattu, holding that bail should be the rule and jail an exception.

Besides taking up cases of corruption in high places and police high-handedness, the court also dealt with environmental issues including imposing interim ban on insecticide endosulfan May 13 and mining in iron ore-rich districts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh Aug 26.

‘Our republic cannot bear the stain to kill its own children,’ said the court earlier this month on a plea seeking a CBI probe into the alleged staged killing of Maoist leader Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad and his colleague Hem Chandra Pandey in 2010.

Bringing transparency in the country’s examination system, the Supreme Court Aug 9 held that under the Right to Information Act, students could inspect and take photocopies of their answer sheets after their evaluation.

Another key judgment in the education sector was delivered March 7 when the court paved the way for implementing the Medical Council of India notification providing for common a entrance test for undergraduate medical courses.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati received a setback when the apex court July 6 quashed the acquisition of land in and around Greater Noida for constructing residential complexes.

On a plea related to bed-ridden Mumbai hospital nurse Aruna Shanbaug, the apex court March 7 laid down guidelines paving the way for passive euthanasia.

Taking up issues related to women, the court, in a verdict Aug 24, formulated a rehabilitations and resettlement of sex worker who are willing to abandon their way of life.

Showing concern for the poor during the hearing on a case involving Delhi Jal Board and its sewerage workers, the court July 12 said: ‘We are praised when we rule for the rich, slammed when we uphold rights of poor.’

The Planning Commission sparked a public outcry when in September it told the apex court that the poverty line in urban and rural areas was Rs.32 per capita per day and Rs.26 per capita per day, respectively.

Justice Dalveer Bhandari kept up the pressure on the central and state governments for removing the religious structures from public places. On July 6, the court ordered the cataloguing and securing of the crores of rupees worth treasure of the Sri Padmaswamy Temple in Kerala.

Faced with public outcry over its observation in Australian missionary Graham Staines’ killing, the apex court Jan 25 recalled its judgment upholding the life sentence of Dara Singh and his associate and expunged a controversial portion of the verdict related to alleged conversion of tribals.

Apex court judges cautioned law enforcement agencies against using excessive force. It took suo motu cognizance June 6 of Delhi Police action past midnight June 4 for evicting yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his followers from Ramlila ground in Delhi.

Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia also had some advice for his colleagues on Law Day in November, saying: ‘The judiciary needs to work in the area demarcated by the constitution.’

(Parmod Kumar can be contacted at parmod.k@ians.in)

The Siberian court is scheduled to hear the views of the Russian human rights ombudsman on the Bhagavad Gita and upholding the rights of minority Hindus, before it delivers its verdict, Hindu petitioners told IANS over phone from Tomsk city in Russia.

The court had posted the hearing for Wednesday in its earlier sitting Dec 19 after Hindus pleaded with the judge that the human rights panel of the nation be heard first.

It also simultaneously introduced a constitution amendment bill that seeks to amend the procedures for appointment of judges and provide for the retirement age of high court judges to be increased from 62 to 65.

Introducing the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill, 2010, and Constitutional 114th Amendment Bill, 2010, Law Minister Salman Khurshid appealed to the Lok Sabha members to give their nod to the important legislation that will enable setting of new probity standards in the Indian judiciary.

The judiciary related bill lays down judicial standards and provides for accountability of judges, and, to establish credible and expedient mechanism for investigating into individual complaints for misbehaviour or incapacity of a judge of the Supreme Court or of a high court.

It also provides to regulate the procedure for such investigation; and for the presentation of an address by parliament to the president in relation to proceeding for removal of a judge and for matters connected with such matters.

The judicial accountability bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha last year and was then sent to the parliamentary standing committee on personnel, law and justice, which made a crucial recommendation that seeks to ‘restrain’ judges from making ‘unwarranted comments’ against other constitutional bodies or persons.

In Tokyo, several Indians and India Against Corruption (IAC) volunteers submitted a memorandum to the Indian ambassador, demanding a strong Lokpal bill, activists informed IANS by email.

‘We pointed out that the constitution begins with the phrase ‘We The People Of India’ and not ‘We the elected people Of India’. Hence it is our request that objections raised by the civil society activists to the proposed (Lokpal) bill should be given due consideration,’ said activist Rohan Agrawal.

Sameer Haldavanekar, another activist, said corruption impaired the aspect of social and economic justice and expressed regret that the government was more concerned with short-term political goals rather than addressing the disease of corruption.

Their colleague, Swapnali Puradkar, expressed the hope that ‘dilutions or diversions’ would be rectified in the final bill.

She urged the government to keep peoples’ interest above its political ambitions and empower Indians with a strong tool to tackle corruption.

Puradkar said Hazare supporters from Japan had come to Mumbai to show solidarity.

‘From Friday (Dec 30), we will start calling our local MPs and the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) from Japan,’ Agrawal said.

On the US west coast, many Indians in different cities also come out in support of Hazare’s latest agitation in Mumbai, according to IAC.

They held meetings expressing favour for a strong Lokpal bill which would root out the evil of corruption from India, one of the co-ordinators Bhairavi Doshi said in an email.

‘As in the past, we plan to have similar programmes, garner support through social networking sites, emails, personal contacts and other forms to lend support to Hazare,’ she said.

‘Without highly contentious legal reforms, an extremely powerful agency, which the Jan Lokpal Bill (advocated by Hazare and his team) promises to establish, can at best marginally improve investigation rates and filing of chargesheet in corruption cases without securing more convictions,’ they assert.

The scholars also fault the Jan Lokpal bill as well as the central government’s Lokpal bill that is being debated in the Lok Sabha, for not taking into account the experience of Lokayuktas (state ombudsmen).

‘We conclude that a bill that does not assimilate the experience of existing anti-corruption agencies in states like Karnataka is doomed to fail,’ A. Narayana, Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Vikas Kumar of Law, Governance and Development Initiative of Bangalore-based Azim Premji University said in their recently released study.

‘The presumption of a criminal conviction model is at the core of the Lokpal bill, which means that it will come up against the same environmental limits – the efficacy of the criminal justice system – that the Lokayukta in Karnataka confronts.

‘The proposal for the Lokpal at the moment fails to address this core problem and for that reason is bound to fail to achieve its primary purpose: the criminal conviction of corrupt officials,’ the study said.

Narayana has a Ph.D. from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Krishnaswamy a D.Phil in Law from Oxford and Kumar was a doctoral fellow in economics at university of Hamburg.

Their findings are based on a study of the debate that has been raging for several months on the Jan Lokpal bill as proposed by Hazare and his team and the working of the Karnataka Lokayukta, the most active state ombudsman in India.

The Karnataka Lokayutka was the first in India to be set up in 1986 but became highly active only since 2001 and made history in July this year by indicting the then chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa for corruption in illegal mining scandal.

Yeddyurappa, the first Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister in south India, was forced to quit July 31 following the indictment.

Noting that while there was ‘agreement on the core moral imperative to tackle corruption seriously’, the study said the debate ‘has quickly moved from this agreed premise to the questionable conclusion that we need a powerful national institution to prosecute and convict the corrupt under the criminal law.

‘To our knowledge the choice of appropriate legal instruments to deal with corruption has not been debated,’ it pointed out.

The study said: ‘There has been no systematic effort to evaluate or assess the experience of existing anti-corruption agencies in the states.’

‘Our analysis suggests that the policy debate on the Lokpal has focused on issues that have been anticipated and largely resolved by existing legislation and institutional design of the Lokayukta in, say, Karnataka and has ignored critical issues that may have little or nothing to do with the design of the Lokpal itself but affect its performance,’ it said.

The study said the Karnataka experience showed that sanction of prosecution and completion of investigation were not an issue at all as both were done in overwhelming majority of the cases handled by the state Lokayukta.

‘The Indian public debate on the Lokpal has focused extensively on the need to equip the institution with extraordinary powers of investigation. Our analysis leads to the conclusion that much of the Indian debate has sought to extinguish a problem that does not have a very significant impact on the effectiveness of anti-corruption agency,’ the study said.

However, it noted, that ‘the story changes after chargesheets are filed’, that is at the trial end.

It said the average time taken for the trial to be completed was over five years and conviction rate was very low.

‘The Indian debate on the Lokpal has focussed extensively on the remedying institutional inefficiencies at the complaint and investigation stage in the Lokpal. No matter how successful these innovations are, they will not tackle the core problem with a criminal trial in India: the trial stage,’ the study said.

‘If we use criminal conviction as the measure of success then the best Lokayukta in the country (that is Karnataka Lokayukta) is undoubtedly a failure. But a caveat is in order: the Lokayukta does not administratively control the criminal court. Hence, we should attribute this failure to the choice of a criminal conviction model as the centrepiece of our anti-corruption strategy,’ the study advocated.

It noted that between 1995 and 2011, Karnataka Lokayukta carried out only 357 raids on its own – the power to conduct raids on its own was given only early this year – against individual officials but received and responded to over 2,159 complaints against 2,681 officials.

‘Interestingly, institutional leadership (a reference to the head of the Lokayukta panel) is seen to have a significant impact on the agency’s performance. For instance, in Karnataka more than 66 percent of the raid cases by the Lokayukta were initiated between 2006 and 2011, when Justice N. Santosh Hegde was the Lokayukta.’

The five-year term of Hegde, a former Supreme Court judge, ended Aug 2.

Delivering the second K.P. Singh Memorial Lecture on ‘People, Development and Globalisation’ at the Aligarh Muslim University, she said topics like Sensex and GDP had overshadowed the more important issue of development of the common man.

She said the right to livelihood is not guaranteed since liberalisation and globalisation had halted the people’s movement.

Patkar added that besides the poverty line, there is a need to demarcate the ‘amiri rekha’ (rich line) as well.

The high court, which had stayed the order of the lower court Dec 16, cancelled the bail on the ground that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was investigating his role in the scam.

Justice N.R.L. Nageswara Rao pronounced the order on a petition by the CBI challenging the verdict of the special court.

Rajagopal, a former vice chairman and managing director of the state-owned Andhra Pradesh Mineral Development Corporation (APMDC), allegedly played a key role in granting iron ore mining leases to OMC.

The investigating agency had sought the cancellation of bail, saying the investigations were at a crucial stage. It also argued that if released on bail, the accused could influence and threaten the witnesses.

The CBI counsel had argued that the grant of bail to the accused would jeopardise the ongoing investigation. He told the court that CBI was yet to recover ill-gotten wealth running into thousands of crores of rupees.

The special court Dec 15 had granted bail to Rajagopal, but within three hours stayed the implementation of the order till Dec 19 on a petition by the CBI.

The next day, CBI moved the high court challenging the bail order.

Meanwhile, Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Y. Srilakshmi Monday filed a counter to the CBI petition in the high court.

Srilakshmi was released on bail Dec 2, four days after the CBI arrested her on charges of approving mining leases in violation of rules.

The high court is to hear Dec 28 the CBI petition, challenging the special court’s order.

Janardhana Reddy, his brother-in-law and OMC Managing Director B.V. Srinivasa Reddy and Rajagopal are currently lodged in Chanchalgida central jail here.

The special court, which has rejected three bail petitions of Janardhana Reddy and Srinivasa Reddy, has reserved its orders on the fourth. The orders are scheduled to be pronounced Dec 28.

While activist-cum-journalist Kodopi, 25, was arrested in September, Soni Sori, 36, a tribal teacher and mother of three, was arrested in October. Both belong to India’s worst Maoist-affected district of Dantewada and are in jail for allegedly receiving money on behalf of Maoists from a corporate house.

According to police, Kodopi was caught red-handed at a weekly market in Dantewada Sep 9 while he was receiving Rs.1.5 million from a contractor. As per police theory, the money was provided by Essar Company as protection money and Sori too was present at the spot but escaped.

Sori was nabbed in Delhi Oct 4 and Chhattisgarh Police brought her to the state on transit remand.

However, not all believe the police theory.

‘The police role is under serious question in the arrest of Sori and Kodopi because they were gunning for them for a long time as they were vocal against police excesses in Dantewada,’ Rajendra K. Sail, former state president of People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), told IANS.

He said the police were gunning for the two much before the Essar protection money issue erupted. He said Kodopi was declared the mastermind behind the attack on a Congress leader’s house in Dantewada last year even as he was in Delhi, pursuing a course in journalism.

A total of four people were arrested in the alleged Essar pay-off case. The arrested include Essar general manager D.V.C.S. Verma, who is posted in Dantewada.

Though the judicial custody of all four is scheduled to end Dec 26, in all probability their remand would get extended again.

‘Police are biased against them. If it was not the case, then why was Sori tortured during police custody repeatedly. An independent medical report submitted to the Supreme Court has confirmed that some foreign objects were inserted in her private parts while she was in custody,’ Sail said.

In October, Sori sustained serious injuries on her back and a leg in Dantewada while in police custody. She had to be admitted in a hospital in Raipur where she had gone on a hunger strike, alleging police were treating her like a hardcore criminal and had chained her.

Last week, Chhattisgarh Home Minister Nankiram Kanwar assured the state assembly that the state government would not spare anyone and would ensure the toughest punishment to those who channelised Essar’s money to Maoists.

He rejected reports that the government had slowed down investigation in the case in a bid to defend Essar.

‘The state government has constituted a SIT (special investigation team) to speed up the alleged pay off probe case and get to the bottom of the issue,’ Kanwar said but refused to comment when Congress sought his statement on why the case was handed over to SIT when Dantewada police was doing excellent work.

The SIT was formed over two months back but is yet to formally begin investigation.

Speaking to IANS on the condition of anonymity, a Dantewada police officer said the police were more interested in ‘settling the enmity with Kodopi and Sori than working on the larger issue of exposing the corporate-Maoist nexus in the Bastar region’.

In the entire interiors of the 40,000 sq km conflict zone of Bastar, the ‘tribals are subjected to extreme human rights abuses since late 1980s. Maoists have given them the option to either join their ranks or get killed. The police also either like tribal civilians act as informers or meet the same fate as of Sori and Kodopi’, he said.

(Sujeet Kumar can be contacted at sujeet.k@ians.in)

The charge sheet, which also names Lashkar founder Haafiz Sayeed, was filed in a special NIA court here.

The Patiala House court will rule Jan 7 whether or not to accept the charges for which the probe agency had filed a first information report (FIR) in November 2009.

‘The matter is listed for Jan 7 for further consideration,’ special Judge H.S. Sharma said.

Headley, who is undergoing trial in a US court, has entered into a plea bargain with the American judicial authorities under which he cannot be extradited to any country, including India.

Also named in the charges are alleged Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Al Qaeda operative Illyas Kashmiri, Headley’s accomplice Pakistani-Canadian Tahawwur Rana, Rehman Hashmi, formerly with the Pakistan Army, and Major Iqbal and Major Samir — believed to be working for Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

They have been charged for waging war against India.

Those named in the charge sheet are alleged to have conspired in a ‘Karachi Project’ to strike at select Indian targets. Indian security agencies allege the project was sponsored by the ISI.

Lakhvi is in a Pakistani jail undergoing trial for the terror attack that killed 166 people, including foreigners, when a band of 10 Pakistani terrorists sneaked into Mumbai Nov 26, 2008, and went on a rampage. Over 300 innocent people were injured.

The government Wednesday gave the go-ahead to the NIA, which was formed in the aftermath of the Mumbai mayhem, to file charges against the accused.

However, sources say the case in an Indian court may not be of any significance because it would not lead to the deportation of Headley, who has confessed to having surveyed potential targets in India for the Lashkar.

The NIA has based its charges on inputs from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the interrogation of Headley by a team of Indian investigators in the US earlier this year.

Administrative civil judge Mukesh Kumar ordered all the websites to file a compliance report by Feb 6, affirming that they have removed the derogatory content from their sites.

If they fail, the websites will face contempt charges, the court said, hearing the petition of Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi, who objected to images hurting religious sentiments posted on these websites.

Appearing before the court, the representative of two websites companies, Yahoo India Pvt Ltd and Microsoft, told the court that they have not been provided copies of the complaint.

They said they have come to know of the case after reading media reports and sought to be provided with the copies of the complaint.

Qasmi’s advocate Santosh Pandey told the court that he would provide the copies of the complaint with related document to all the companies concerned.

The court said on Tuesday: ‘The defendants are directed to remove the (offending) photographs from their social networking sites.’

The court ruling came after Qasmi produced some pictures which the court said had ‘content of defamation and derogation against the sentiments of every community’.

In a similar matter, another court, of Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar, had on Friday issued summons to 21 websites, including social networking site Facebook, search engine Google, Yahoo and video sharing website YouTube for allegedly hosting obscene and derogatory content.

The magistrate had observed that the material submitted by the complainant contained obscene pictures and derogatory articles pertaining to various Hindu gods, Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ.

Internet world was in an uproar in December after a report said Communication and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal had asked social networking sites like Facebook and Google, which operate the social video platform Youtube, to censor content which were offensive to religious sentiments and degrading some individuals.

‘I have asked them to give us suggestions…the reach of the social media is enormous but the people using them are limited. It should not be, what we are fed is an elitist point of view or represents the point of view of a certain section of the society,’ Sibal said after the meeting the representatives of social networking sites on Dec 15.

Sibal met the representative of social networking sites to evolve mutually agreeable guidelines to ensure that such content do not go on their platforms.

In earlier interactions with the media, the minister had said he was compelled to think of guidelines for barring objectionable content on social networking sites after they declined to do anything about the issue.

The court ordered all the websites to file a compliance report by Feb 6, stating they have removed the derogatory content from their sites.

If they fail, the websites will face contempt charges, the court said.

Administrative civil judge Mukesh Kumar passed the order on a petition of Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi, who objected to images hurting religious sentiments posted on these websites.

The court said on Tuesday: ‘The defendants are directed to remove the (offending) photographs from their social networking sites.’

The court ruling came after Qasmi produced some pictures which the court said had ‘content of defamation and derogation against the sentiments of every community’.

In a similar matter, another court, of Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar, had on Friday issued summons to 21 websites, including social networking site Facebook, search engine Google, Yahoo and video sharing website YouTube for allegedly hosting obscene and derogatory content.

The magistrate had observed that the material submitted by the complainant contained obscene pictures and derogatory articles pertaining to various Hindu gods, Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ.

The magistrate had directed the central government to take immediate appropriate steps on the objectionable contents of the sites, and file its report by Jan 13.

The court ordered all the websites to file a compliance report by Feb 6, stating they have removed the derogatory content from their sites.

The order said the websites will face contempt charges if they fail to remove the objectionable content.

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/remove-derogatory-content-by-feb-6-court-tells-webites/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/plea-against-indian-science-congress-thrown-out/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/plea-against-indian-science-congress-thrown-out/#comments Sat, 24 Dec 2011 06:31:26 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/plea-against-indian-science-congress-thrown-out/ Bhubaneswar, Dec 24 (IANS) The Orissa High Court has dismissed a petition filed by a man seeking cancellation of the 99th Indian Science Congress (ISC), the largest national science event, to be held here next month, or shifting of its venue, a lawyer said Saturday.

Quashing the petition filed by Manoj Das as ‘frivolous’, Justice B.P. Das and Justice B.K. Nayaka of a division bench of the court at Cuttack, about 26 km from here, Friday observed that the petition has been filed with an ulterior motive without any public interest, the lawyer told IANS.

The five-day mega event, in which over 15,000 delegates, including 500 foreign scientists and 20 Nobel laureates, are to participate, is scheduled to be held at the KIIT University complex here Jan 3-7. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is slated to inaugurate it.

Manoj Das recently moved the court for cancelling the science meet or shifting its venue on the ground that the place is unsafe and high-tension power lines passing through the area might pose threat to the lives of the delegates.

The KIIT and the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) are jointly hosting the 99th edition of the ISC.

A court in the capital Minsk sentenced Nov 30 two men to death for carrying out a bomb attack that killed 15 people and injured 200 in the Minsk metro.

Belarus is the only European country still with the death penalty. Sentences are carried out by a shot in the neck.

Human rights activists have urged Belarus not to apply the death penalty in the case.

‘The relevance of the death penalty has not declined today in Belarus,’ Lukashenko was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

The European Union has called on Belarus to join the rest of Europe in prohibiting capital punishment.

‘When I was accused by the EU, I advise them to look at the other side of the ocean. Let the US abolish the death penalty, we’ll be next,’ Lukashenko said.

Maja Kocijancic, spokeswoman for EU foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton, said: ‘We believe that the death penalty is a cruel and inhuman punishment that does not allow any reversal, and it fails to provide a deterrence to any criminal behaviour and is an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity.’

Lukashenko said double standards were being used on the issue of death penalty.

‘If the majority of people in our country are for abolition of the death penalty, I will abide by that decision,’ he said.

Granting bail to accused Om Prakash, Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau said: ?No doubt, the allegations made against the accused if proved are serious but misuse and abuse of the special legislation by Jai Kishan is correct.?

Complainant Jai Kishan had alleged that Om Prakash had caused injury and insulted him. He alleged the accused committed the offence which was punishable for acts done with intent to cause injury, insult or annoyance to any member of Scheduled Caste, or Scheduled Tribe.

Jai Kishan falls under category of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe.

ASJ Lau said that it is a serious matter. The complainant, a democratically elected representative of people is ‘misusing and abusing the provisions of the Special Enactment to score a point over his political rivals’.

The court observation came after the defence counsel told court that Jai Kishan is a habitual litigant who often abuses and misuses provisions of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 for his personal benefit.

The court observed a copy of one FIR filed in an earlier case placed before it by the defence counsel. The allegation made in the document were virtually identical to the ones made in the present case.

?I have also gone through the complaint and the contents of the present FIR. I have perused the complainant Jai Kishan reflecting abrasion over right elbow and right knee and bruise over right thigh,? ASJ said.

ASJ added that the Investigating Officer had failed to get the opinion of the doctor on the complainant’s injury.

?Without going into the merits of the allegations involved or expressing any opinion on the aforesaid and also keeping in view the age of the accused, he is granted bail,? ASJ said.

The court allowed bail to 54-year-old Om Prakash on furnishing personal bond to the tune of Rs.10,000 with one local surety of the like amount.

The accused Om Prakash was facing the case for causing insult or annoyance to a member of a Scheduled Caste, or a Scheduled Tribe.

A Delhi-based lawyer, Shanmuga Patro approached the Delhi High Court after being refused by CIC to initiate a criminal complaint against the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, its aides and affiliates, who, according to him, misled CIC by filing forged and fabricated documents in evidence and succeeded before CIC.

Justice V.K. Shali hearing the matter sought response from DOPT before the next date of hearing March 16, 2012.

Through the petition, Patro raised the issue as to whether the CIC could be treated as a court for prosecuting persons for the offence of perjury or not.

Patro, the petitioner, argued: ?If a person or entity is permitted to give false documents and evidence before CIC with impunity, then how can CIC be expected to enforce Right to Information??

The petitioner said that in June 2011, he approached CIC to institute proceedings under Section 340 of CrPC and sought initiation of criminal case against the foundation, its aides and affiliates for filing forged and fabricated documents in evidence before the panel.

In December 2011, CIC had refused to initiate prosecution for the offence of perjury against foundation and ordered that ?it has no powers to take action for perjury under Section 340 of CrPC?.

Based on the information and reports filed by Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, the CIC had in October 2010 declared that Rajiv Gandhi Foundation is not a `Public authority? in terms of RTI Act and is not bound to provide information under Right to Information Act.

Patro, however, alleged: ?While Rajiv Gandhi Foundation informed CIC that only about 4 percent of its revenue is received from Government, in reality it receives a greater percentage of its revenue from Government.?

Being aggrieved with CIC?s order of expressing inability to examine whether Rajiv Gandhi Foundation committed perjury or not, Shanmuga Patro approached the Delhi High Court.

?Outcome of this case will decide CIC?s powers to commence criminal cases against parties who have been committing perjury, offences against public justice and offences relating to documents given in evidence before CIC,? said Patro.

The petitioner in his petition also raised the question whether the Information Commissioners, including the CIC, could be treated as ‘public servants’ within the definition of section 195 of the CrPC.

Taking cognizance of the case on a private criminal complaint filed by journalist Vinay Rai, Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar observed that the material submitted by the complainant contained obscene picture and derogatory articles pertaining to various Hindu gods, Prophet Mohammad and Jesus Christ.

The magistrate directed the central government to take immediate appropriate step on the objectionable contents of the sites, and file its report by Jan 13.

‘It appears from a bare perusal of the documents that prima facie the accused are selling, publicly exhibiting and have put into circulation obscene, lascivious content which also appears to the prurient interests and tends to deprave and corrupt the persons who are likely to read, see or hear the same,’ the court said.

‘It is also evident that such contents are continuously openly and freely available to everyone who is using the said network irrespective of their age and even the persons under the age of 18 years have full and uncensored access to such obscene contents,’ it said.

The magistrate has summoned the accused companies to face trial for allegedly committing the offence punishable under section 292 (sale of obscene books etc), 293 (sale of obscene objects to young person etc) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

On Monday, a civil court of Delhi had ordered these sites to remove objectionable images.

‘We are afraid that such issues cannot be decided by the court. This court cannot come to the conclusion as to whether this agitation is in public interest or politically motivated,’ a division bench of Justices P.B. Majmudar and Mridula Bhatkar observed.

The court also rejected the petition on the ground that the petitioner’s organisation – Jagrut Nagrik Manch – was not a registered social organisation, a mandatory requirement for seeking concession from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA).

‘It cannot be said that the petitioners have undertaken a national event for the MMRDA to exempt them from rent for the ground,’ Justice Majmudar observed.

The court observed that if Team Anna wanted to agitate, they must pay the hire charges for the venue.

‘We cannot allow parallel canvassing when parliament is seized with debate on the Lokpal bill. You can propagate the bill sitting at home. Till now the bill has not been passed. No one knows what form and what features it will have. Is public debate permissible at this stage,’ the court questioned.

Team Anna members had filed a writ petition in the Bombay High Court Thursday demanding the MMRDA grounds free of cost since the proposed agitation was in public interest.

‘How is country’s interest involved? We are a democratic set up. We have elected a government. Wouldn’t your agitation interfere in the functioning of Parliament? The bill will be debated in parliament where our elected representatives will plead our case,’ Majmudar said.

The bench, however, said that a fresh application from a registered social organisat

‘He is a created false witness and this is my ultimate case,? Raja’s counsel and senior advocate Sushil Kumar told special CBI Judge O.P. Saini.

He asked Achary if he had received any threat before he was discovered by the CBI as witness in March 2011.

Testifying as a CBI witness, Achary replied: ‘I had a perception of threat, but no specific incident warranting any action had occurred before.’

He said he reported the incident (of the threat) to the CBI.

Kumar argued that Achary’s statement Thursday was planted to influence bail of Raja’s ex-private secretary R.K. Chandolia. Chandolia’s bail plea is scheduled for hearing in the Supreme Court Jan 2.

‘Achary was repeatedly saying that the man (accused for threatening Achary) was sitting with Chandolia,’ the lawyer said, adding that this could influence Chandolia’s bail plea pending in the Supreme Court.

To this, Judge Saini said had Achary made the disclosure earlier, many of the accused in the case would not have been granted bail.

However, Achary denied the allegation and said he was not aware of Chandolia’s bail. He stressed that it was incorrect to say Thursday’s statement was planned by him in collusion with the investigating agency.

‘It is incorrect to say that yesterday’s disclosure by me about that person was pre-planned,? Achary said.

Drama ensued in the court Thursday when Achary told the court that a threat to his life was given and the person who had threatened him was sitting in the room.

When Achary said this, a man ran out of the court but was immediately overpowered by the police.

During his cross-examination, Achary said he knew of Janata Party president Subramaniam Swamy though he did not know him personally.

He said he had visited Swamy’s house off and on, but did not know about the book he had written on the scam.

‘I am not acquainted with the book titled as ’2G spectrum scam’ written by Swamy. I do not know the name written in the book as ‘Ashirvatham Achary’ refers to me,’ Achary said.

Speaking about his responsibilities as Raja’s aide, Achary said if anybody wanted to meet Raja, then he would bring it to the notice of the minister and fix an appointments.

He also used to oversee the three charts — daily engagements, tour programme, monthly programme — prepared at the camp office of the minister.

According to the government auditor, the 2G scam allegedly masterminded by Raja pertained to a biased distribution of mobile airwaves and operating licences, in lieu of kickbacks, to telecom firms that could have cost the treasury up to Rs.1.76 lakh crore in lost revenue.

The number of individuals accused in the case now stands at 19, while the companies against which charges have been framed add up to six.

Except for Raja and former telecom secretary Siddhartha Behura, all other arrested accused have been freed on bail.

The Bombay High Court Friday refused to grant any cut in ground rent, which Anna Hazare flayed as ‘improper’, but his activist supporters nevertheless managed to get the MMRDA ground here at concessional rates for their agitation from Dec 27.

The Maharashtra government-run Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) agreed to give its ground at concessional rates to Team Anna that would entail a saving of nearly Rs.450,000 to the organisers, India Against Corruption member Mayank Gandhi said.

Now, the organizers will pay around Rs.680,000 instead of the earlier demand of Rs.11,80,000, plus heavy deposits for the use of the ground, Gandhi said. The daily rental of the ground in suburban Bandra-Kurla Complex area in posh central Mumbai is Rs.3.80 lakh.

Earlier, Team Anna got a ticking off from the Bombay High Court, which they had approached challenging the high commercial rates – amounting to around Rs.19 lakh, including a hefty deposit of around Rs.700,000 – for the use of the ground from dec 27 to 31.

The court made sharp observations on the need for Hazare to hold an agitation ‘outside’ when the Lokpal bill was being debated in parliament.

The court also observed that if they wanted to agitate, then they must pay for the hiring charges for the venue and demanding it free was not proper.

Ultimately, the court declined to interfere in the matter of the MMRDA’s fees and disposed of the petition.

Team Anna has agreed to pay the concessional charges which the government body agreed to levy.

Gandhi said that following the court’s order, the IAC would now re-apply through another registered organisation to book the venue for the agitation scheduled Dec 27-31.

Anna Hazare Friday flayed as ‘improper’ the decision by his activist supporters to move the court seeking concessions for the MMRDA ground for his proposed Dec 27-31 agitation demanding a strong Lokpal bill.

‘The decision by my activists was not correct. They are inexperienced and have committed a mistake. But now they have learnt a lesson,’ Hazare told media persons at his village, Ralegan-Siddhi in Ahmednagar district, shortly after the court decision.

‘I am told that the MMRDA will give us some concessions and we are also getting donors to cover that cost. So, I have given the green signal for the venue,’ said Hazare, who Friday morning threatened to agitate from the jail if a proper venue was not given.

Earlier, Team Anna had wanted to hold the agitation at Azad Maidan in south Mumbai, but the state sports ministry had raised objections to a hunger strike being held there.

‘The venue which they (Team Anna) want is reserved only for sports or religious activities, not for such agitations, so we have objected. They can seek any other venue within the Azad Maidan,’ state Deputy Director, Sports, N.B. Mote told IANS.

The MMRDA ground was earlier booked by IAC’s Jagruti Nagrik Manch, which is not a NGO recognised by the state government, and the MMRDA authorities had thus levied commercial rates plus a steep deposit fee.

After the MMRDA agreed to give concessions, Gandhi said Team Anna would now re-apply for the venue in the name of a Delhi-based organisation – Public Cause Research Foundation, another of IAC affiliates, which is a registered organisation.

Told about Hazare saying he did not approve of their seeking concessions, Gandhi said if Hazare felt his team had committed a mistake, they accepted it.

Meanwhile, in New Delhi Team Anna claimed that Delhi Police had given them the nod to hold their protest at Ramlila Maidan from Dec 27 for five days. The police, however, refused to comment.

‘All of us have biases and these can’t really be removed, so creating acceptance is the better objective than trying to remove everyone’s biases,’ Pramada Menon, a prominent LGBT rights activist, researcher and consultant, told IANS.

Menon, who has been associated with several women’s and gay rights groups in past two decades, was speaking at the ‘Charcha, Chai and Coffee’ initiative by the American Center here.

According to Menon, even after two years of decriminalisation of homosexuality, there still persists a significant fear in the gay community to come out of the closet in front of their families, friends and at workplaces.

‘If the people come out to themselves and are happy about it, eventually the society’s acceptance would grow.’

On the question of whether the wider aspect of suppression of sexuality was a bigger issue than that of the LGBT community, she replied that both the issues are important and need simultaneous efforts to remove them.

‘While the issue of suppression of sexuality needs a lot of work, we have to keep creating places where the LGBT can have their voice,’ she said.

Menon’s views were corroborated by Lydia Barraza of American Center, who said that the US is committed to LGBT rights.

‘Hillary Clinton’s Dec 7 speech, proclaiming the fight of LGBT rights as the new frontier of the fight for human rights, is a bold statement for the cause,’ she said.

IAC member Mayank Gandhi said that following the court?s order, the IAC would now re-apply through another registered organization to book the venue for the agitation scheduled Dec 27-31.

Gandhi said the MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority) has also agreed to give concessional rates for the venue whereby the organizers will pay to MMRDA around Rs.6,80,000 instead of Rs.11,80,000, plus heavy deposits, for the venue.

Achary, a key witness in the case, had Thursday said in the special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court that there was a threat to his life.

Raja’s counsel Sushil Kumar told special CBI judge O.P. Saini that the drama created by Achary was meant to impact the hearing on the bail plea of Raja’s ex-private secretary R.K. Chandolia.

Chandolia’s bail plea is scheduled for hearing in the Supreme Court Jan 2.

To this, Saini said if Achary would have made the disclosure earlier, many of the accused in the case would not have been granted bail.

Chinese prosecutors from January to November launched investigations into a total of 31,616 criminal cases involving 43,265 such suspects, Xinhua reported citing the figures provided at a national meeting of procurators.

Prosecutors across China approved the arrests of a total of 837,736 suspects and prosecuted nearly 1.07 million people.

Among them were 1,801 people involved in the manufacture and sale of poisonous or harmful food products.

At least 120 government employees have been investigated for food-related graft and dereliction of duty this year.

Indu Mills’ 12.5 acres premises in central Mumbai is located adjacent to Chaityabhoomi where Dalit icon B.R. Ambedkar’s mortal remains were cremated.

The activists were demanding that the central government allot land at Indu Mills to the state government free of cost for the construction of Ambedkar’s international memorial.

‘We shall make efforts to solve the issue and get the activists to vacate the mill premises voluntarily within a week. If the government does not succeed, then they would be evicted forcibly within three days after that,’ Additional Government Pleader G.W. Mattos told the division bench of Justice D.K. Deshmukh and Justice A.V. Mohta.

The petition was filed by the National Textiles Corporation seeking directions to police to evict the Republic Sena activists.

‘You should remove them by force. Would you have negotiated with the terrorists who entered the Taj Hotel? The mob has entered, illegally, land which belongs to the government of India,’ the court said.

On Dec 6, a large number of Republican Sena activists broke into the mill premises and refused to move out till the land was allotted for the memorial.

This week, the Maharashtra legislature adopted a unanimous resolution moved by Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, demanding that the land be handed over free of cost to the state government to construct a memorial at its own cost.

The board and Noor Charitable Society countered by saying they had complied with the court’s order.

‘Order of closing of the Sundram Hall is hereby set aside,’ Additional Session Judge V.K. Bansal said Tuesday on a plea filed by a functionary of Gurdwara Baba Banda Bahadur at Bhai Parmanand Colony.

‘IAC Mumbai has filed a writ petition in the Bombay High court this evening. The petition is against MMRDA (Maharashtra Metropolitan Region Development Authority) and the state government,’ said IAC volunteer Praful Vora, who filed the petition.

‘Citizens have a constitutional right to protest at a venue which is free of cost and has adequate infrastructure and this is being denied in Mumbai. It will be heard Friday by Justice P.B. Majumdar,’ he added.

IAC had appealed to Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan to waive or reduce the charges at MMRDA grounds.

IAC has received permission for two sites in the city — MMRDA grounds in central Mumbai and Azad Maidan.

While organisations can hold protests in south Mumbai’s Azad Maidan free of charge, IAC says it cannot accommodate the kind of crowds it is expecting.

‘Azad Maidan cannot hold more than 5,000 people. We are expecting over a lakh agitators to come in support of Annaji everyday,’ said Piyush Bhatia, another IAC volunteer.

Bhatia said even Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi has a token charge of only Rs.5,000 a day.

‘Earlier, MMRDA had charged Rs.2 lakh per day, but according to officials, that was the charge for NGOs. We have secured the ground through our NGO Janhit Manch but are yet to receive our certificate, and hence we have to pay commercial charges for the ground,’ Bhatia said.

The cost of using the ground for three days of the agitation and for one day each before and after for the protest comes to Rs.10.26 lakh.

‘With service tax, it is Rs.11,31,678 lakh. The MMRDA has also sought a deposit of Rs.7.7 lakh for the ground.

Meanwhile, Hazare has announced that he will fast for three days from Dec 27-29 to demand a strong Lokpal bill.

Reiterating that the Lokpal bill tabled in parliament Thursday was ‘weak’, Hazare said that it will not eradicate corruption and reissued his threat of a ‘jail bharo’ agitation from next week.

The European Court of Justice has banned their deportation back to Greece, a key entry point for illegal immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East heading for Britain.

However, it is now feared the ruling could lead to an explosion in ‘asylum shopping’, the Daily Express reported.

The row erupted Wednesday when the Luxembourg court – the EU’s highest legal authority – upheld claims of asylum seekers in Britain and Ireland.

Tory MP Priti Patel said: ‘This decision is an absolute disgrace that flies in the face of common sense. Once again, European judges are making a mockery of human rights.’

Thousands crossing the Turkish frontier into Greece are held in often degrading conditions in camps while claims are processed, the newspaper said.

Officials feared the Home Office could face a string of costly legal claims if they pressed ahead with deportations to Greece, it said.

‘It (Lokpal) is a very dangerous bill…The removal, suspension and selection of the Lokpal will be decided by the government,’ Kejriwal said addressing a press conference here.

‘We reject the Lokpal bill and demand the entire bill is taken back and redrafted in the right manner. Those who drafted the bill seem to be either incompetent in law or want to promote corruption through the Lokpal bill,’ he said.

The bill aimed at crushing the rights of people, Kejriwal said.

‘Through this bill, the government wants to act like a big brother. While 90 percent of the politicians are out of the ambit of the Lokpal, temples, churches, schools and other public institutions are under the ambit of this dangerous Lokpal,’ he said.

‘Even doctors and priests will be deemed to be public servants. The government considers that all the citizens are corrupt but the leaders and (its) employees are clean,’ he said.

Kejriwal said this Lokpal was the handmaiden of the government.

He expressed fear over the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) being rendered ineffective if the government’s Lokpal bill was passed in parliament.

‘Through this bill, the CBI will be made ineffective as its right of preliminary inquiry will be snatched,’ said the activist.

At a press meet here by five organisers of the rail roko agitation Dec 3 to mark the 27th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy, the people also alleged that the 14 arrested were not told about their charges, nor given food or access to their lawyers and families.

‘My father, grandfather and myself fought for the freedom of country to bring democracy, but this government has ended democratic rule,’ said Mufti Abdul Razzak, whose relative is among those held.

Satinath Sarangi of Bhopal Group for Action and Information said: ‘Among the 14 arrested, six were not even present on the spot.’

Activists also alleged that women demonstartors were beaten up and cases have been slapped against an 80-year-old woman Rampyari Bai and others.

While District Collector Nikunj Srivastava could not be contacted for comment, Senior Superintendent of Police Yogesh Choudhary told IANS: ‘We have kept some arrested persons with us for some more time for investigation, but it does not mean they were tortured. And whoever have been arrested, it has been on concrete evidence. Else, we would have arrested 500 people.’

On registering a case against an elderly women, he said: ‘The case may have been registered but it is not necessary that they will be arrested.’

He was testifying as a witness before special CBI judge O.P. Saini.

The court of administrative civil judge Mukesh Kumar was hearing a petition filed by Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi who objected to images hurting religious sentiments.

The court said: ‘The defendants are directed to remove the photographs from their social networking sites’.

The court ruling came after viewing photographs shown by Qasmi, which the court said had ‘content of defamation and derogation against the sentiments of every community.’

A day after several BJP leaders said they will protest the bill and called it ‘cheating the people’, party leader S.S. Ahluwalia said no statement could be made without seeing the bill.

‘Even a full stop or a comma changes the meaning of a sentence… we will see the bill and only then give any comment,’ Ahluwalia said.

‘Why should we take up the gun, without even knowing what is there in the bill,’ he said.

Special Judge S.M. Modak of Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court extended her judicial custody, Vora’s lawyer Jayesh Vithlani told IANS.

Working as a deputy bureau chief with a Mumbai daily, Vora was arrested Nov 25 by the Crime Branch in connection with the June 11 killing of Dey, the editor (special investigations) at Mid-Day.

According to police, Vora had provided Dey’s mobile number and his exact location to absconding mafia don Chhota Rajan.

Dey was gunned down near his residence in Powai, central Mumbai, by motorcycle borne assailants.

‘The respective chief secretaries of these states have been issued notices and asked to reply within six weeks,’ a NHRC statement said Tuesday.

According to the media reports, 680 farmers committed suicide in six districts of Maharashtra in 2011 and 90 farmers took the extreme step in six districts of Andhra Pradesh in October-November 2011.

Wayanad district in Kerala has witnessed eight cases of farmer suicides in November this year.

The Commission has observed that the contents of the media report, if true, raise a serious issue of violation of human rights of the poor farmers in these three states.

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/court-declares-five-haryana-lawmakers-as-unattached/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/non-baptised-sikhs-can-vote-in-sgpc-polls-court/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/non-baptised-sikhs-can-vote-in-sgpc-polls-court/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:50:34 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/non-baptised-sikhs-can-vote-in-sgpc-polls-court/ Chandigarh, Dec 20 (IANS) Quashing an October 2003 central government notification, the Punjab and Haryana High Court Tuesday allowed voting rights to Sehajdhari or non-baptised Sikhs in elections to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), the mini-parliament of the religion.

The bench comprising Justice Surya Kant and Justice M. Jeyapaul, quashed the Oct 8, 2003 notification of the central government under which the Sehajdhari Sikhs were barred from voting in the SGPC polls.

Sehajdhari Sikhs are those who cut or trim their beards and hair in violation of the Sikh religious tenets. Otherwise, such Sikhs follow the religion, its gurus and the Sikh holy book, Granth Sahib.

The Sehajdhari Sikh Federation, a registered political party, had filed a petition before the high court seeking voting rights for such Sikhs in the SGPC polls.

The number of IPR infringement cases heard by the courts nationwide has risen significantly since China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, from 5,265 in 2001 to 42,931 in 2010, with an annual increase of 26 percent, Sun Jungong, SPC spokesperson, said at a press conference Tuesday.

‘China has made great progress in the protection of intellectual property during the past 10 years,’ Xinhua quoted Sun as saying.

‘As the status of intellectual property has increased in national development, its judicial protection has become an indispensable part in the national development strategy,’ Sun added.

‘We pledged to process the Parent and Grandparent Super Visa in less than eight weeks,’ Jason Kenney, minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, said in a statement.

‘We’ve issued the first of the Super Visas in just two weeks and we remain committed to reuniting families through the Super Visa in a timely manner.’

The Parent and Grandparent Super Visa allows parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens and permanent residents to visit their families in Canada for as long as 10 years, reported Xinhua.

The visas need to be renewed every two years.

Until the Super Visa was launched Dec 1, 2011, visitors to Canada usually could only visit for six months at a time and visitors who wished to stay longer had to apply for extensions and pay a new fee every six months.

Super Visa seekers use the same application form as applicants for the standard six-month visitor visa. They must also submit proof that the host child or grandchild meets a minimum income, demonstrate that they have purchased comprehensive Canadian medical insurance and undergo the immigration medical examination.

The first Super Visa was issued at the Canadian mission in Manila Dec 14, two weeks after the Citizenship and Immigration Canada began accepting applications, Kenney said.

‘With the Super Visa, we have taken a common sense approach that allows parents and grandparents to spend extended periods of time with their loved ones in Canada, while at the same time, acting responsibly in protecting Canadian taxpayers,’ Kenney added.

‘I’m pleased that the response to this program has been so positive.’

The new visa is part of the Conservative government’s plan to battle an enormous backlog of about 165,000 parents and grandparents who are trying to join family in Canada.

Earlier this year, Kenney told a parliamentary committee that the new system will help many families to be re-united. He said the requirement that visa holder buy health insurance will prevent them from abusing Canada’s medicare system.

‘The department informs me that they’re confident that the approval rate for these parent Super Visas will actually be very high,’ Kenney told the committee.

‘One of the reasons we are requiring that people demonstrate they have health insurance when they come into Canada, is to add greater certainty for our visa officers that admitting people is not going to end up representing a net cost to Canadian taxpayers,’ he said.

While defending its step to shut down these night shelters, the Delhi government said that people were not turning up there.

‘Mobilisation of people is very low, people are not going there (night shelter),’ said counsel appearing for the state government.

However, rejecting the argument, the bench said that the poor and the needy were not showing up at these night shelters because of lack of proper infrastructure. ‘There is no proper infrastructure, that’s why people are not going in the night shelters,’ the court said.

Observing that NGOs have to don the responsibility of disseminating awareness about the night shelters, the bench of Acting Chief Justice A.K. Sikri and Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw said: ‘Such social organisations should try to bring in more needy people to the shelters.’

During the hearing, the petitioner, an NGO, blamed the Delhi government and the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) for demolition of night shelters without any prior information.

The NGO, that runs few night shelters, has alleged that the government have stopped funding them, forcing them to shut down the facilities.

On the other hand, the government Monday submitted that it has already asked for land from Delhi Development Authority (DDA) for construction of new night shelters. It also informed the court that within a week, seven new shelters will be opened for children.

The city government also informed the court that 64 permanent and 54 temporary (portable cabin) shelters are already functioning in the city.

Irked over the closure of 84 temporary night shelters in the national capital against its orders, the Delhi High Court had on Dec 13 directed the city government to reopen them immediately.

The court also pulled up the Delhi government for shutting down the night shelters, citing low occupancy.

The court had taken a suo motu cognizance on the basis of media reports about the demolition of a night shelter in December 2010 and the civic bodies doing nothing to protect the homeless from the biting cold.

Meanwhile, the court has sought the status report of the night shelters functioning by Wednesday.

The minister told the Rajya Sabha in reply to a written question that till Oct 31, 2011, a total of 56,383 cases were pending in the Supreme Court. As on Sep 30, 2010, the number of cases pending in high courts was 4,217,903.

The minister identified granting of excessive adjournments, indiscriminate closure of courts and the lack of priority to disposal of old cases as other reasons for the case backlog.

Other factors preventing quick disposal of cases included disproportionate concentration of work among some members of the bar and long arguments by counsel, he said, adding that staff attached to courts was also inadequate.

The minister said the time taken for the disposal of pending cases was exclusively within the domain of the judiciary.

He said the government had taken a number of measures under the National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms to reduce the backlog. A drive launched by the department of justice for the purpose in July was continuing in December.

Chief justices of high courts had been asked to initiate a ‘campaign mode’ approach towards clearing petty and long pending cases, he said.

During the campaign, cases related to women, senior citizens and other marginalised groups would be given priority for disposal, the minister said.

The court, while accepting a re-investigation report by the CBI, asked Vijayan and the other accused to appear before it on April 10. The probe agency has exonerated senior Congress leader and present speaker of the Kerala assembly G. Karthikeyan in the case.

In June 2009, the CBI filed charge sheets against nine accused in the Rs.374 crore scam related to the company SNC Lavalin.

Vijayan, as the state power minister, had inked the final agreement in 1997 for renovating three power plants in the state which, according to the accountant general, was a failed project.

The other accused in the case include six former officials of the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB); Canada based SNC Lavalin and Claus Trendl, former vice-president of SNC Lavalin.

The CBI court Monday directed that summons be issued to the Canadian company and also ordered an arrest warrant to be issued against Trendl who, according to the court, was the main conspirator in the flawed deal.

It was Karthikeyan who had signed the MoU with Lavalin company and Vijayan took it forward and inked the contract with the Canadian company. The CBI found that Karthikeyan had no role in the actual implementation of the renovation project of the three power plants.

Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia, in his address on law day last month, put the figure of the pending cases in high courts and subordinate courts at 3.19 crore. Of these, 74 percent were less than five years old and the rest were pending for more than five years.

The apex court has held that astronomical delays in disposal of cases impinge upon the right of the accused to speedy trial and were violative of Article 21 and 14 of the constitution that deal with the protection of life and liberty and equality before law.

Senior counsel Ranjit Kumar blames ‘lack of infrastructure, woefully low judge-population ratio, frequent adjournments and the absence of deterrents against those seeking adjournment’ for the delays.

The existing judge-population ratio was poor and a large number of vacancies made it worse, he said.

Of the total sanctioned strength of 895 high court judges, there were 268 vacancies. The Allahabad High Court with a sanctioned strength of 160 judges was working at half its strength with 81 vacancies, he said, quoting a Supreme Court report.

According to a Law Commission of India report, the gravity of the situation could be gauged from the Allahabad High Court where more than 8.5 lakh cases were pending. Criminal appeals of 1980-82 and criminal revisions of the year 1990-95 were still pending.

Of the 17,151 subordinate courts in the country, only 13,981 are functioning as the rest do not have judges.

The Law Commission in its 120th report recommended an increase in the strength of judges from 10.5 to 50 judges per 10 lakh population.

Former Delhi High Court judge Rupinder Singh Sodhi said: ‘Arrears of pending cases are mounting due to indecision – meaning judges not taking decisions promptly. This leads to adjournments and also gives an impression that the courts are not completely in control of the cases.’

It was for the judges and the prosecution to ensure that cases were tried at a reasonable pace and concluded well in time, said the former judge.

Besides the low judge-population ratio, frequent transfer of cases from one court to another also compounded delays, said Sodhi.

Making a strong case for increasing the strength of the judiciary, Sodhi said the lack of governance too was resulting in unnecessary litigation and multiplication of cases.

The long trial of the 1975 bomb attack on then railway minister Lalit Narain Mishra, has now caught the attention of the apex court, which has asked who is responsible for it.

In the last over three decades, the Mishra trial travelled to 22 different judges. During this period, 31 witnesses and four defence counsel have died.

Accused Ranjan Dwivedi was 27 years old when he allegedly threw a bomb at the dais where Mishra was addressing a public meeting in Samastipur in Bihar Jan 2, 1975. Today, he is 64 and the trial is far from over. He has now pleaded for quashing of charges and criminal proceedings.

Senior counsel M.L. Lahoty, who appeared for Dwivedi, said delay in the case was on account of the fact that after years of trial against three original accused, they were eventually discharged as investigators.

He said after the Janata Party headed by late prime minister Morarji Desai came to power, the trial was shifted from Bihar to Delhi. The recording of evidence took 10 years from 1994 to 2004 and thereafter the Central Bureau of Investigation said they wanted to bring more evidence on record.

The man’s body was recovered from the Gadloch, a fresh water lake situated at the edge of Lenzie town in East Dunbartonshire, following an extensive search involving divers and a police helicopter, the Daily Mail reported police as saying.

Police said investigations are continuing but they believe it was an accident and there were no suspicious circumstances.

The incident in central Scotland came as thermometers hit -5C in Eskdalemuir village,10 miles north-east of Lockerbie, Saturday.

They underlined the twin needs for raising social awareness on the issue and strictly implementing the laws against sex determination and female foeticide.

The occasion was a one-day state-level media workshop on the subject organised by the Shikshit Rojgar Kendra Prabandhak Samiti (SRKPS), a voluntary organisation working on development issues for the last 23 years, under the project ‘Let Girl Be Born’ launched with the support of Plan India.

Media persons who attended the workshop in large numbers were informed that Jaipur has emerged as the foremost place in Rajasthan denying the girls the right to be born.

Over 250 small sonography centres in Jaipur alone are reportedly indulging in sex determination tests of foetuses and aborting the female unborn children.

‘Jaipur has the highest number of sonography and abortion centres and the laws against sex selection and female foeticide are being flouted with impunity at these places,’ SRKPS secretary Rajan Choudhary said.

According to the 2011 Census figures, the number of girls per 1,000 boys in Rajasthan is still less than 900.

Choudhary said about 300 female foetuses are aborted every day in Rajasthan after the sex determination test and this abhorrent practice is making a serious impact on the sex ratio in 0-6 years.

During April 2010-March 2011, a total of 13,36,505 children were born in Rajasthan and they included 7,08,383 males and 6,28,122 females, revealing the sex ratio of 887.

While affirming that the main cause for the decline in sex ratio was the sex determination tests, Choudhary said over 1,800 sonography centres are functioning in Rajasthan and of them, 1,000 regularly violate the Pre conception and Pre Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex selection) Act (PCPNDT Act).

‘Jaipur is the biggest ‘mandi’ (market) in Rajasthan for sex determination and murder of female foetuses in the womb,’ he said.

It was pointed out at the workshop that 50 percent of the 600 sonography centres in the Rajasthan capital had never been inspected by the authorised officers.

The three, originally from Lebanon and Somalia, are believed to have planned to shoot as many soldiers as possible until they were shot dead themselves, at Holsworthy Army Base in Sydney between February and August 2009, Xinhua reported.

A jury had found Wissam Fattal, 35; Nayef El Sayed, 28; and Saney Edow Aweys, 27, guilty of terrorism offences after a six-week trial in the Victorian Supreme Court.

The court this Friday sentenced the three to 18 years in jail, with a non-parole period of 13-and-a half years.

Justice Betty King during his judgement said it would have been totally terror act if their planning had ever come to pass and all three should hang their heads in shame for planning an attack on a country that embraced them.

Justice King said all three showed no remorse and had not renounced their extremist beliefs.

The trio were against the Australian troops’ presence in Afghanistan, believing it was oppressing innocent Muslims.

Deposing in support of his contention of Chidambaram’s alleged complicity in the 2G spectrum scam, Swamy said: ‘Former telecom minister A. Raja could not be guilty of this charge alone but committed the offence in active connivance with Chidambaram, presently home minister.’

‘The prime minister’s speech delivered on the floor of parliament in February clearly proves that the pricing of the spectrum was taken on the basis of cabinet decisions of 2003, which specifically left the issue to be determined by the finance minister and DoT (department of telecommunications),’ Swamy told Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Special Judge O.P. Saini.

Chidambaram was the finance minister in the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government from 2004-09 when the spectrum saga began.

‘Former telecom minister A. Raja could not be guilty of this charge alone but committed the offence with active connivance with Chidambaram, presently home minister,’ Swamy said.

Swamy sought to make Chidambaram a party in the case, saying the decision on spectrum pricing was taken in 2008 jointly by him and Raja, now lodged in Tihar Jail since Feb 2.

‘Chidambaram and Raja were empowered by the 2003 cabinet decision to determine the spectrum price jointly,’ said Swamy.

‘Chidambaram was aware at least one day before what Raja was planning to do in selling the spectrum,’ he added.

He told the court that Chidambaram informed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the finance ministry and DoT would discuss and finalise the spectrum pricing formula.

Chidambaram and Raja met on four occasions. The two met the prime minister July 4, 2008, and conveyed to him the message of agreement on the price fixed for spectrum and other aspects, including entry fee charges of spectrum and revenue shares.

He said Chidambaram and Raja were equally guilty of recommending spectrum prices based on 2001 rates.

Swamy alleged that despite being ineligible, Unitech Wireless and Swan Telecom were awarded licences.

‘Swan and Unitech were allowed to offload their shares to Etisalat and Telenor, respectively, even before the roll-out, selling their shares at several times of what they paid to the government for the licence,’ said Swamy.

Swamy submitted three documents for seeking prosecution of Chidambaram. These included evidence extracted from a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report and other sources.

As Swamy sought some time to bring more documents related to the scam, the court adjourned the matter till Jan 7, 2012.

Raja was the first one to be arrested in the scam. The DMK leader is among the 14 people, including corporate honchos, who have been arrested in the scam. Kanimozhi, a DMK Rajya Sabha MP and daughter of former Tamil Nadu chief minister K. Karunanidhi, was also arrested in connection with the scandal.

The Janata Party president also sought to examine CBI officials ‘to establish the nexus of accused persons with others who have intentionally not been made accused by the prosecuting agency’.

On Oct 10, the Supreme Court reserved its order on a plea for a probe into Chidambaram’s alleged role in the scam.

The quantum of punishment will be announced Dec 19 by Judge V. R. Revankar of the fast track court here.

The convicted are Mohammed Riaz-ur-Rehman of Andhra Pradesh, Afzar Pasha, Mehboob Ibrahim Saab Chopdar, Noorulla Khan, Mohammed Irfan (28) and Nazim Uddin alias Munna, all from Karnataka.

Revankar acquitted the seventh accused, Chandh Pasha of Bangalore.

The six were found guilty of the first major terror attack in Bangalore. In the attack on the evening of Dec 28, 2005, delegates coming out of an international conference at the famed institute in north Bangalore were fired on, leading to the death of M.C. Puri, a retired professor of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and injuries to four people.

The seven were arrested Jan 14, 2006, and charged with sedition, terrorism and religious disharmony.

All the seven were in central prison at Parappana Agrahara in east Bangalore.

The final pronouncement in the case will come two days after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during his Dec 15-17 official visit for a bilateral summit with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev consolidated bilateral trade and strategic ties and personal friendship.

The case, which has been going on in Tomsk court since June, seeks ban on a Russian translation of ‘Bhagavad Gita As It Is’ written by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

It also wants the Hindu religious text banned in Russia and declared as a literature spreading ‘social discord’, its distribution on Russian soil rendered illegal.

In view of the case, Indians settled in Moscow, numbering about 15,000, and followers of the ISKCON religious movement here have appealed to Manmohan Singh and his government to intervene diplomatically to resolve the issue in favour of the scripture, an important part of Indian epic Mahabharata written by sage Ved Vyas.

The ISKCON followers in Russia have also written a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office in New Delhi, calling for immediate intervention, lest the religious freedom of Hindus living here be compromised.

‘The case is coming up for a final verdict on Monday in Tomsk court. We want all efforts from the Indian government to protect the religious rights of Hindus in Russia,’ Sadhu Priya Das of ISKCON and a devotee of a 40-year-old Krishna temple in central Moscow, told IANS.

The court, which took up the case filed by the state prosecutors, had referred the book to the Tomsk State University for ‘an expert’ examination Oct 25.

But Hindu groups in Russia, particularly followers of ISKCON, say the university was not qualified as it lacked Indologists who study the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent.

The Hindus pleaded with the court that the case was inspired by religious bias and intolerance from a ‘majority religious group in Russia’, and have sought that their rights to practice their religious beliefs be upheld.

The prosecutor’s case also seeks to ban the preachings of Prabhupada and ISKCON’s religious beliefs, claiming these were ‘extremist’ in nature and preached ‘hatred’ of other religious beliefs.

‘They have not just tried to get the Bhagavad Gita banned, but also brand our religious beliefs and preachings as extremist,’ Das said.

The ISKCON devotees have taken up the matter with the Indian embassy in Moscow too for an early diplomatic intervention before things get worse and the court passes an adverse verdict banning the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna consciousness teachings.

In the Nov 1 letter addressed to Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Pulok Chatterji, ISKCON’s New Delhi branch Governing Body Commissioner Gopal Krishna Goswami, said the prosecutor’s affidavit claims Lord Krishna ‘is evil and not conforming to Christian religious view’.

Goswami also urged Manmohan Singh to accord priority to the matter during his Moscow stay and take it up with the Russian authorities.

Indian diplomatic corps officials at the embassy here, who were unwilling to be named, told IANS that they have been following up the case since the time it was brought to their notice earlier this year.

They had also taken up the matter at the appropriate levels in the Russian government to get the case either withdrawn or get the defence to fight the case to obtain a favourable verdict.

Officials at the Indian Prime Minister’s Office, who were part of the Indian delegation accompanying Manmohan Singh, confirmed to IANS the case and the letter they received from ISKCON in this regard.

‘This matter is receiving the highest attention and the Indian embassy officials in Moscow have been instructed to follow up the case with the Russian authorities,’ they said.

(N.C. Bipindra can be contacted at ncbipindra@gmail.com)

Swamy told Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) special Judge O.P. Saini: ‘The prime minister’s speech delivered on the floor of parliament in February clearly proves that the pricing of the spectrum was taken on basis of cabinet decisions of 2003, which specifically left the issue to be determined by the finance minister and DoT (Department of Telecom).’

Chidambaram was the finance minister in the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA-I) government when the spectrum saga began.

Swamy has sought to make Chidambaram a party in the spectrum case, saying the decision on spectrum pricing was taken in 2008 jointly by him and then communications minister A. Raja, who is lodged in Tihar Jail since Feb 2.

‘Chidambaram and Raja were empowered by the 2003 cabinet decision to determine the spectrum price jointly,’ said Swamy.

‘Chidambaram was aware at least one day before what Raja was planning to do in selling the spectrum,’ he added.

As Swamy sought some time to bring more documents related to the scam, the court adjourned the matter till Jan 7, 2012.

According to prosecutor-general Askhat Daulbayev, the violent clashes broke out in the central square when a group of men attacked police officers, burned nearby buildings and several cars, Xinhua reported.

‘The police demanded to stop the riots, but the hooligans assaulted officers and tried to seize their weapons. They were using cold steel and firearms,’ the prosecutor-general said.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev sent a task force led by the interior minister to stop the riots, to put to justice their organisers and to restore law and order in the city, he added.

The attackers were employees of the state-run energy company, who have staged strikes for about six months seeking better salaries, local media reported.

Justice R.C. Mishra also slapped a fine of Rs.10,000 on the petitioner saying that it was a frivolous plea with no substantial evidence to prove the allegations, the minister’s advocate, Mrigendra Singh, said.

Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Manoj Kumar Agrawal had challenged Chitnis’ election, alleging that she had won using the religious card as well as misusing government machinery in gross violation of the model code of conduct and hence her election should be set aside.

Interacting with reporters here, Noeleen Heyzer, executive secretary of the United Nations, Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), said the work relating to gender equality was only ‘half-done’ and more needed to be done to achieve a society where both men and women were treated equally.

Appreciating the legislation which provides 50 percent seats in panchayats for women, Heyzer said these kind of measures will help women assume leadership.

Taking on a question on the anti-corruption agitation in India, Heyzer said: ‘First, it is essential to have a legislation to curb corruption, and implementation comes only in the next stage.’

The United Nations Asia-Pacific development arm has opened a new office in the capital for improved support to the region that has one of the largest concentrations of poverty-stricken people.

The New Delhi office will cover Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

‘They did to Baba Ramdev exactly what they did to Anna Hazare two months down the line,’ amicus curiae Rajiv Dhawan told a bench of Justice B.S.Chauhan and Justice Swatanter Kumar, referring to a statement by the home minister saying that he (Ramdev) would be thrown out if he does not agree with the government.

The apex court took suo motu cognizance of the incident after counsel Ajay Agarwal moved a petition seeking its intervention. Though the court declined to entertain his petition, it took suo motu cognizance of the police crackdown.

Dhawan told the court that ‘this was one of the huge campaigns that the government wanted to get rid of. It feared that it may go out of hand’.

‘A decision was taken that Baba Ramdev would not be allowed to organise any protest or undertake any fast-unto-death at Ramlila ground and that if he persisted in his efforts to do so, he would be directed to remove himself from Delhi,’ Dhawan said quoting from a press release issued by Home Minister Chidambram on June 8.

Dhawan told the court that the decision to remove Ramdev and his supporters was taken but was kept in abeyance since the government was talking to him (Ramdev). But the moment the talks broke down, the police was asked to enforce the decision.

‘Ultimately, when talks failed or he went back on his words, police were told to enforce the decision,’ he said.

Slamming the covert manner in which government acted, Dhawan said: ‘Sometimes I believed that it was only the CIA or FBI which did such covert actions but now I realize that even our government is capable of covert operations.’

At this Justice Chauhan observed: ‘If you are willing to lead this kind of agitation then you should be prepared to face such situations provided they were within the law.’

‘Baba Ramdev has a big following. He is not just a yoga guru and therefore he is a threat to the government,’ Dhawan told the court, while contesting the police claim on the large number of people expected to be present on the next day.

‘If numbers were there, they were still within the capacity,’ he added.

The court will continue with the hearing on Jan 6, 2012.

** The petitioner cannot claim the benefit of parity with the other co-accused persons merely without any application of mind by the court in as much as the role of Behura as a ‘public servant’ was expected to different than the other accused persons.

**A public servant was under a greater obligation to discharge his functions as a holder of public trust with transparency, probity and to watch the interests of the public exchequer, which he failed to do.

**The allegations against the petitioner and the nature of evidence, which has been gathered against him, is very serious and if proved, it will entail life imprisonment for an offence under section 409 IPC (breach of trust by a public servant).

**That, no doubt, merely because doctrine of presumption of innocence is in favour of the petitioner and grant of bail is the rule and the denial being an exception, it cannot be said said that Behura’s role in the entire gamut of facts can be overlooked, keeping in view the severity of charges, and the quantum of punishment so as to defeat the larger public interest.

**Admittedly, this is a case, where it impinges the personal liberty of the petitioner but it has been taken away with due process of law.

**There is no threat of the petitioner fleeing from the process of law but certainly there is a reasonable apprehension or likelihood of Behura influencing the witnesses especially of the department of telecommunication, as he has been a member of an elite bureaucracy for such a long time that their influence is of a pervasive, even though he may not be a high profile accused.

**Behura was one of the main perpetrators of the entire commission of offence, along with former telecom minister (A. Raja) and his private secretary R.K. Chandolia, being the ‘public servant’ and, therefore, constituting the core of the conspiracy, who have to dealt with differently in comparison to the other accused persons.

**Behura’s wife has been suffering from a dreaded disease but it is not of such a nature, at this stage, which would immediately move the court to release the petitioner on interim bail even at this stage because she seems to have already undergone the surgical intervention or presently, she is taking the chemotherapy treatment.

**I do not agree with Behura’s counsel that simply on the ground of parity, either of the apex Court or that of the order passed by this court, the petitioner deserves to be extended the benefit of bail automatically. If that be the intention of the apex court, then the apex court would have made an observation in this regard and this court would have, had no difficulty in granting bail to the present petitioner.

**I feel that merely on the principle of parity, the petitioner in not entitled to the grant of bail.

**No doubt, the present petitioner (Behura), along with sixteen others, has been charged in common criminal conspiracy to commit the offence of breach of trust, cheating, forging and document and using forged document as genuine, etc, but Behura has been separately and substantively charged along with Raja for offence under section 409 for breach of trust by a ‘public servant’ read with section 120B and alternatively under section 420 for cheating read with section 120B IPC along with principal accused (Raja).

**If Raja can be said to be kingpin or a pivot of the alleged conspiracy to commit the offence of breach of trust and cheating, then certainly the role of Behura and Chandolia, the other co-accused, has been that of a propeller of giving effect to the said idea of committing the offence of breach of trust or cheating as far as the allocation of 2G spectrum or Unified Access Services is concerned.

**Prima facie, there is ample evidence, in this regard, that the three persons namely Raja, Behura and Chandolia have been the core of the conspiracy in implementation of the policy of first come and first basis in a distorted manner so as to cause benefit to specific parties.

**Behura may not have gained out of the entire transaction but he has certainly caused a wrongful loss to the public exchequer and if one goes by the allegation in the charges then this wrongful loss to the exchequer is allegedly to the tune of Rs.7,105 crore though that figure is also debatable regarding the actual loss having been suffered by the exchequer.

Justice V.K. Shali, pronouncing the order, said: ‘I do not agree with Behura’s counsel that simply on the ground of parity either of the apex court or that of the order passed by this court, the petitioner deserves to be extended the benefit of bail automatically.’

‘If that be the intention of the apex court, then the apex court would have made an observation in this regard and this court would have had no difficulty in granting bail to the present petitioner,’ observed the court, adding it, therefore, felt that the petitioner is not entitled to bail merely on the principle of parity.

Former communications minister A. Raja, along with his former private secretary R.K. Chandolia and Behura, were arrested Feb 2 for allegedly abusing their official position and manipulating the tendering process to benefit certain telecom companies in getting licences for scarce radiowaves.

The three face charges of criminal breach of trust by public servants under the Indian Penal Code which carries a maximum punishment of imprisonment for life or imprisonment for a term which may extend up to 10 years with penalty.

‘No doubt, the present petitioner (Behura), along with 16 others, has been charged in common criminal conspiracy to commit the offence of breach of trust, cheating, forging and document and using forged document as genuine, etc, but Behura has been separately and substantively charged along with Raja for offence under section 409 for breach of trust by a ‘public servant’ read with section 120B and alternatively under section 420 for cheating read with section 120B IPC along with principal accused (Raja),’ the court said.

Now only Raja and Behura of the 14 people, who were arrested by the CBI in the corruption scandal that rocked the nation, remain in jail pending trial.

Dismissing Behura’s bail plea, the judge said: ‘I feel that Behura being a ‘public servant’ was under a higher degree of probity and duty as he was holder of public trust and therefore, he was expected to discharge his duties with a more sense of responsibility, transparency and integrity.’

The court in its 35-page order observed that if Raja can be said to be kingpin or a pivot of the alleged conspiracy to commit the offence of breach of trust and cheating, then certainly the role of Behura and Chandolia, the other co-accused, has been that of a propeller of giving effect to the said idea of committing the offence of breach of trust or cheating os far as the allocation of 2G spectrum or Unified Access Services is concerned.

‘Prima facie, there is ample evidence, in this regard, that the three persons namely Raja, Behura and Chandolia have been the core of the conspiracy in implementation of the policy of first come and first basis in a distorted manner so as to cause benefit to specific parties,’ said the court.

The court also observed that Behura may not have gained out of the entire transaction but he has certainly caused a wrongful loss to the public exchequer and if one goes by the allegation in the charges, then this wrongful loss to the exchequer is allegedly to the tune of Rs.7,105 crore though that figure is also debatable regarding the actual loss having suffered by the exchequer.

The special court, trying the scam, had Nov 29, granted bail to Swan Telecom promoter Shahid Usman Balwa, citing the ‘principle of parity’ after the apex court Nov 23 granted bail to Unitech’s Sanjay Chandra, Swan Telecom’s director Vinod Goenka and Reliance Group’s executives Hari Nair, Gautam Doshi and Surendra Pipara.

The same court Nov 28, granted bail to DMK MP Kanimozhi, Kalaignar TV chief Sharad Kumar, Cineyug Films’ Karim Morani and Kusegaon Fruits and Vegetables Pvt. Ltd. directors Rajiv B. Aggarwal and Asif Balwa.

Police registered FIR No.211 against daily wage labourer Amarchand and his wife Laxmi Devi over the death of Swati on June 15 last.

The parents have protested the police move. ‘If we wanted to kill her, why would we have taken her to hospital for treatment? Since she died, the police have harassed us. The investigating officer demanded Rs.12,000 from us and we gave him Rs.5,000 as bribe. Despite this, they implicated us in our own daughter’s death,’ Amarchand told IANS.

The cops, meanwhile, have defended their move. ‘We lodged the FIR on the basis of the post-mortem report which shows signs of injury on the body of the girl. Top officials have conducted the inquiry and nobody has taken any bribe,’ police officer Santosh told IANS.

Malnutrition is high in Madhya Pradesh, much higher than the national average. According to state government statistics, 60 percent of children in the state are underweight.

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/2g-case-siddharth-behuras-bail-plea-dismissed/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/cbi-is-967-employees-short/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/cbi-is-967-employees-short/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:44:22 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/cbi-is-967-employees-short/ New Delhi, Dec 15 (IANS) The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is not facing staff shortage but it has 967 vacancies, parliament was informed Thursday.

Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office V. Narayanasamy told the Rajya Sabha that the maximum of 690 vacancies were in the executive wing of CBI.

This was closed followed by its legal department (108 vacancies), ministerial department (103), technical wing (39) and canteen staff (27).

‘Despite some vacancies in CBI, speedy investigation of various cases is ensured through effective use and deployment of existing personnel,’ he said.

Stating that it was the constitutional responsibility of the central government to intervene for the resolution of dispute between the two states, the apex court’s constitution bench of Justice D.K. Jain, Justice R.M. Lodha, Justice Deepak Verma, Justice C.K. Prasad and Justice Anil R. Dave expressed its inability to suggest to the prime minister to convene a meeting of the two states in the face of stiff opposition from Tamil Nadu.

‘This may not be possible,’ the court told senior counsel Harish Salve who had appeared for Kerala.

‘Very scheme of the federal structure mandates the Union of India to take steps to resolve disputes between two States,’ the court said adding that ‘it is constitutional scheme’.

It further said that ‘Union of India must take a lead role and not be a mute spectator’.

The court’s pronouncement came when senior counsel Raju Ramachandran appearing for Tamil Nadu opposed the suggestion by Salve that the court should ask the prime minister to convene the meeting of the two states.

Salve said that ‘water disputes are resolved and not adjudicated’ and cited the instance of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asking the chief ministers of Punjab and Haryana to sign the water sharing accord way back in the 1970s.

At this, Ramachandran told the court not to make such a suggestion as it was premature. He told the court there was not sufficient scientific data for the prime minister to convene such a meeting. Let the high-powered empowered committee that is visiting the dam complete its work first and collect the data, he suggested.

In the face of persistence opposition by Ramachandran, the court asked him: ‘Shall we take that State of Tamil Nadu is not interested in the intervention by the prime minister.’

As Salve witnessed his suggestion being sunk by Tamil Nadu, he told the court that no award of any tribunal has ever solved the water dispute. In the instant case, if the verdict goes in the favour of Kerala, then Tamil Nadu would move an appeal and if Tamil Nadu succeeds then Kerala will challenge it, the senior counsel said.

At the outset of the hearing Salve told the court that Kerala would provide full security to the dam and other facilities and infrastructure being manned by Tamil Nadu. He said that if some thing happens to the dam, Tamil Nadu will not only not get water but the area of the dam in Kerala will get inundated.

Earlier, in response to Tamil Nadu’s plea for central forces to protect the dam and its installations, the central government told the court that it could deploy the central forces, including the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) to protect the dam, provided there was direction of the apex court or a request by the state government to that affect.

Meanwhile, earlier in the day, the court pulled up a Kerala-based NGO which sought to know what National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) was doing to deal with the situation in the event of a crisis. The petitioner NGO also wanted the drying up of the dam.

The court said that the NDMA was headed by the prime minister and what made the petitioner think that the authority and the prime minister were not alive to the situation.

When counsel for the NGO said: ‘We do not know what discussions are taking place’, the court asked him if he was aware of what is transpiring between the PMO and the NDMA, and dismissed the plea describing it ‘misconceived’ and saying: ‘It (these discussions) can’t be made public for making political mileage.’

The 115-year-old dam is located in Kerala but its waters serve Tamil Nadu, which also manages the dam’s affairs.

Tamil Nadu wants the dam’s storage capacity to be increased from the current 136 feet (41.5 metres) to 142 feet (43 metres) as per a Supreme Court order, while Kerala wants a new dam in its place.

The trial court Oct 14 had asked the Lok Sabha member to appear before it Nov 3.

Justice Suresh Kait allowed Rewati Raman Singh’s plea to quash the trial court’s summons and said: ‘I am not giving any opinion on this issue for the reason that I am of the view that the trial court special judge has wrongly, without application of mind and only on the submission of the accused’s counsel has issued the impunged order.’

Keeping in mind the observation of another bench of this court and its Nov 11 order granting bail to six accused, he said: ‘I find that there was no material available before the special judge. Accordingly, I quash the summoning order against the petitioner (Rewati Raman Singh).’

Justice Kait also said: ‘The members of the parliamentary committee have also given dissenting views with regard to the recommendation of initiation of action against the petitioners.’

On July 22, 2008, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs Faggan Singh Kulaste, Mahavir Bhagora and Ashok Argal waved wads of currency notes in the Lok Sabha ahead of a trust vote, alleging they were given the money to vote in favour of the Manmohan Singh government.

After a Supreme Court rap for a shoddy probe, Delhi Police July 17, this year, made their first arrest in the case, taking Amar Singh’s secretary Sanjeev Saxena into custody.

Three days later, middleman Suhail Hindustani was arrested and Sep 6 Kulaste and Bhagora, who are no longer MPs, were taken into custody.

Sudheendra Kulkarni, the media advisor to Atal Bihari Vajpayee when he was the prime minister, was the sixth accused to be arrested in the case when he appeared before the court Sep 27.

A second supplementary chargesheet filed Oct 3 made Argal, a BJP MP from Bhind in Madhya Pradesh, an accused in the case. However, all the accused are already out on bail.

The high court earlier issued notice to police asking them to submit the audio-video CDs of a sting operation in which Rewati Raman Singh was allegedly seen talking to BJP MPs.

The court said that none of the petitioners were the beneficiaries of the amount received by three MPs from Saxena. ‘In fact it was the prosecution’s own case that the MPs did this act to entrap Congress and Samajwadi Party so as to expose them.’

‘There is no need to hurry as attempts are made (by the government) to harmonise and reconcile divergent views,’ Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said at a party briefing.

Regarding Anna Hazare’s threat to go on another fast if an effective Lokpal bill was not passed in parliament’s current session, Tewari said there was no need for that.

About the allegations that Home Minister P. Chidambaram favoured a Delhi hotel by withdrawing police cases against it, Tewari said there was no need to react as the ministry had issued a rejoinder.

The special court dealing with Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) cases granted conditional bail to Rajagopal, former vice chairman and managing director of the state-owned Andhra Pradesh Mineral Development Corporation (APMDC).

Rajagopal, the third accused in the case who was arrested by the CBI on Nov 12, was asked to deposit a personal bond of Rs.50,000 and arrange two sureties. He was also directed to surrender his passport to the CBI and make himself available for investigations whenever the investigating agency summons him.

Rajagopal allegedly played a key role in granting mining leases to OMC for iron ore mining in Anantapur district in 2005.

He is the second accused to get bail in the case. Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Y. Srilakshmi was released on bail on Dec 2, four days after the CBI arrested her on charges of approving mining leases in violation of rules.

The court also extended the judicial custody of Janardhana Reddy and OMC managing director B.V. Srinivasa Reddy till Dec 29.

The two were arrested by the CBI on Sep 5 in Bellary in Karnataka. They are currently lodged in the Chanchalguda Central Jail here.

The court has already rejected their three bail petitions. They moved the fourth bail petition Wednesday.

The bench has asked the advocate general to report on Dec 22.

The land deal case in which Kumar is alleged to be involved started when controversial and now jailed ‘godman’ Swami Amritananthachaithanya alias Santosh Madhavan wrote to Chief Minister Oommen Chandy that in 2006 he had paid Rs.70 lakh to Kumar and Rs.10 lakh to a woman advocate so that sanction would be accorded to fill up around 200 acres of land in Kottayam district.

At that time Achuthanandan was chief minister of the state.

Chandy handed the letter to Revenue Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan, who also holds the Vigilance portfolio, and he asked the Vigilance department to probe the incident.

Last month, when the case came up before the Kerala High Court, the vigilance department said they have traced phone calls between Kumar and Madhavan and a woman advocate.

The court was told that they have taken statements from 23 people and eight documents have also been seized by the investigating officers.

A team of vigilance officials had met Madhavan at the central jail in the capital city and he stood by his complaint.

Kumar who earlier was questioned by the vigilance department is reported to have denied having any links with Madhavan.

Madhavan shot into fame a few years back after he claimed to be a self-professed spiritual guru and astrologer to the rich and mighty. He landed in trouble when a court here sentenced him to a 16 year jail sentence after he was found guilty of raping and sexually exploiting minor girls.

The survey, conducted by Peking University, is based on an investigation of recent construction labour markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen cities of China, Shanghai Daily reported.

It found over 75 percent of construction workers, mostly migrants from China’s less-developed rural regions, admitted having not signed any recruitment contact.

Such a situation puts these workers at a disadvantage in getting timely payment for their work, the report said.

Local industry insiders say the trend is for big construction companies, including the state-owned groups, to no longer keep stable teams of construction workers of their own.

The general contractors, usually the big companies on top of the construction projects, outsource segments of the tasks to various legal smaller private companies. The big firms pay the sub-contractors on project basis while smaller constructors hire workers themselves.

‘Legally, the sub-contractors are obliged to sign contracts with the migrant workers they hire,’ said a manager with the Shanghai Construction Group, requesting anonymity. ‘But given the vast number of sub-contractors involved on the market and high mobility of the construction workers, the inspection to make sure these sub-contractors comply by the work-contract rule is difficult.’

Other market insiders also said the absence of labour contracts between sub-contractors and workers was a common practice.

‘In some cases, the small business sub-contractors just flee overnight,’ said the Shanghai Construction Group manager while mentioning an instance in which seven migrant workers were owed up to a total of 440,000 yuan (over $69,000) for their six months’ pending salaries from last year for building a rail project.

The report names commanders and officials from the Syrian military and intelligence agencies that allegedly ordered, authorised or condoned widespread killings, torture and unlawful arrests during anti-government protests.

Human Rights Watch has urged the UN Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and impose sanctions against the officials implicated in abuses.

The 88-page report is based on more than 60 interviews with defectors from the Syrian military and intelligence agencies.

The defectors provided detailed information about their units’ participation in attacks, abuses against Syrian citizens, and the orders they got from commanders and officials at various levels named in the report.

‘Defectors gave us names, ranks and positions of those who gave the orders to shoot and kill, and each and every official named in this report, up to the very highest levels of the Syrian government, should answer for their crimes against the Syrian people,’ said Anna Neistat, associate director at Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report.

‘The Security Council should ensure accountability by referring Syria to the International Criminal Court.’

In some cases, officers themselves participated in the killings.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that more than 4,000 people have been killed since the start of the protests. Human Rights Watch has documented many of these killings.

The trial court had asked the Lok Sabha member to appear before it Nov 3. But allowing Singh’s plea to quash the trial court order, Justice Suresh Kait said: ‘Petition is allowed and the trial court order is set aside.’

Earlier, the high court had issued notice to the Delhi Police and asked them to submit the audio-video CDs of a sting operation in which Singh was allegedly seen talking to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs.

The court said if any person was seen in the video, it did not mean that he was a conspirator.

Senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the SP MP, said the court must quash the order of the trial court which issued summons to his client asking him to appear Nov 3.

‘It is not as if (the) Delhi Police have not yet examined Rewati Raman Singh, nor anything new has come on records. No further material has come on record under which the court issued summons,’ Rohatgi said.

On July 22, 2008, BJP MPs Faggan Singh Kulaste, Mahavir Bhagora and Ashok Argal waved wads of currency notes in the Lok Sabha ahead of a trust vote, alleging they were given the money to vote in favour of the Manmohan Singh government.

After a Supreme Court rap for a shoddy probe, Delhi Police July 17, this year, made their first arrest in the case, taking Amar Singh’s secretary Sanjeev Saxena into custody.

Three days later, middleman Suhail Hindustani was arrested and Sep 6 Kulaste and Bhagora, who are no longer MPs, were taken into custody.

Sudheendra Kulkarni, the media advisor to Atal Bihari Vajpayee when he was the prime minister, was the sixth accused to be arrested in the case when he appeared before the court Sep 27.

A second supplementary chargesheet filed Oct 3 made Argal, a BJP MP from Bhind in Madhya Pradesh, an accused in the case. However, all the accused are already out on bail.

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/cash-for-votes-court-sets-aside-summons-for-sp-mp/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/rti-requests-pile-up/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/rti-requests-pile-up/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:45:44 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/rti-requests-pile-up/ New Delhi, Dec 14 (IANS) The number of pending RTI applications has gone up from 12,242 in April 2010 to 20,232 in September this year, parliament was told Wednesday.

Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office V. Narayanasamy told the Lok Sabha that this was mainly due to the ballooning of RTI applications made to central public authorities.

He said the Central Information Commission had launched a special drive to clear the pendency of appeals and complaints.

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/notice-to-government-on-plea-to-shield-cbi-against-influence/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/hygiene-in-delhi-court-issues-notices-to-civic-agencies/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/hygiene-in-delhi-court-issues-notices-to-civic-agencies/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:21:39 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/hygiene-in-delhi-court-issues-notices-to-civic-agencies/ New Delhi, Dec 14 (IANS) Expressing anguish over the failure of civic agencies to maintain hygiene in the national capital, the Delhi High Court Wednesday issued notices to a number of government departments on a petition that pointed out poor state of public toilets, infrastructure and facilities in health and educational institutions.

NGO Nyaya Bhoomi filed befofre the hight court a public interest litigation that alleged that the government agencies had failed to improve the condition in the city despite the Supreme Court’s observation in 1996 that the ‘historical city of Delhi, the capital of India, is one of the most polluted cities in the world’.

After hearing the arguments of YSR Congress party leader Y.S. Vijayamma, the division bench of Justice G. Rohini and Justice Asutosh Mohunta reserved the order on petitions of Naidu, media baron Ramoji Rao and others.

The court Tuesday passed interim orders, staying the probe against Naidu and 12 others.

The division bench also reserved its order on the petitions of former chief minister N.T. Rama Rao’s widow Lakshmi Parvathi, Jagati Publications Limited vice-chairman Vijay Sai Reddy and others, who opposed Naidu’s petitions.

Vijayamma’s counsel Susheel Kumar submitted arguments against petitions of Naidu and others, and urged the bench to vacate the interim stay.

The bench Tuesday declared that Nov 14 order of another bench would be in abeyance till the petitions by Naidu and Eenadu Group chairman Ramoji Rao were finally disposed of.

The high court Nov 14 directed CBI, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to conduct preliminary inquiry into the assets of Naidu and others. The agencies were asked to submit the reports to the court within three months in sealed covers.

The court also ordered the probe against 13 others, including Naidu’s wife N. Bhuvaneswari, companies owned by her, son N. Lokesh, TDP MP and industrialist Sujana Chowdary, Ramoji Rao, film actor Murali Mohan and the companies owned by them.

The orders came on a writ petition of Vijayamma, widow of late chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, who alleged that Chandrababu Naidu, during his nine-year rule (1995-2004) amassed huge wealth by misusing power and defrauding the state exchequer.

Naidu and others moved the Supreme Court, arguing that the high court passed its order without issuing them notices. However, the apex court directed them to file their vacate petitions before the high court.

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/government-gets-notice-on-information-panel-vacancies/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/bihar-ordered-to-pay-rs.3-lakh-to-undertrials-kin/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/bihar-ordered-to-pay-rs.3-lakh-to-undertrials-kin/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:16:55 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/bihar-ordered-to-pay-rs.3-lakh-to-undertrials-kin/ New Delhi, Dec 14 (IANS) The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) Wednesday directed the Bihar government to pay Rs.3 lakh to the family of an undertrial prisoner who died because of negligence of jail staff.

Gopal Raut, an inmate of the divisional jail in Sitamarhi district of Bihar, died July 17 2009. A magisterial inquiry had concluded that he died due to medical negligence of the prison administration.

The commission said material on record did not reveal any illness or injury in the health screening record of Raut. But on the basis of post-mortem examination report, the magisterial inquiry gave its conclusion.

The rights panel also asked for a compliance report and proof of payment made to the next of kin of the deceased within six weeks.

The two-day workshop was held at Mewat Institute Monday and Tuesday. Hazare took part in the post-lunch session Tuesday.

Team Anna member Sanjay Singh told reporters that in the pre-lunch session the volunteers were acquainted with the fast developing communication system to make the organisation strong.

The social networking sites proved to be the most preferred tool of the volunteers for sharing views among themselves.

During the post-lunch session, Hazare participated in the proceedings but reporters were kept away.

After the workshop, Sanjay Singh said that the session was to make the organisation strong and effective. It was purely a professional workshop, he said.

The court pulled up the Tamil Nadu government for using its oral observations reported in newspapers in an advertisement for political gains.

The constitution bench of Justice D.K. Jain, Justice R.M. Lodha, Justice Deepak Verma, Justice C.K. Prasad and Justice Anil R. Dave sought the government’s response by Thursday, the day when the case would be heard next.

The court’s direction came after Additional Solicitor General Harin Raval said that he had no instructions from the government on this point.

Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been at loggerheads over the dam, built under an 1886 accord between the then Maharaja of Travancore and the erstwhile British Raj. While it is located in Kerala, the dam’s water serves Tamil Nadu, which also manages its affairs.

The court asked the Tamil Nadu government to ensure that the water level in the dam did not exceed 136 feet as directed by it in an earlier order.

‘You are obliged to ensure that water level does not exceed 136 feet. It is our order,’ the court told senior counsel Raju Ramachandran, appearing for Tamil Nadu.

The court reminded him that water level in the dam exceeded 136 feet limit for 10 days in row in November.

The petition of the Kerala government seeking reduction in the water level from 136 feet to 120 feet was dismissed as not pressed.

Senior counsel P.P. Rao, appearing for the Kerala government, sought to draw the attention of the court on the safety of the dam.

The court said that the mere fact that the empowered committee headed by former chief justice of India A.S. Anand set up on the direction of the court in February 2011 was going to the dam site to inspect its safety shows that there was nothing that required any emergency remedial steps.

‘The fact of the matter is that there is nothing grave or serious that requires the modification of court’s order on providing 136 feet water level,’ the court told Rao.

When Ramachandran said that three paragraphs of oral observations of the court reported by newspapers were put in an advertisement by Tamil Nadu, the court said: ‘You want to make even our oral observations part of the court records.’

Asking for display of ‘sanity and sensibility on the both sides’, the court regretted that ‘both sides instead of dousing the fire are inflaming it’.

‘You (Tamil Nadu) are asking for our gag orders so that they (Kerala) don’t make any statement and then use our statement for making political gains,’ the judges said.

The commission’s chairperson Justice (retd) D. Sreedevi said that despite serious shortcomings of not having adequate staff, it has been able to do a good job.

‘In the last fiscal, we received 6,709 cases from various parts of the state. We settled 5,996 complaints. In 2009-10, all but five of the 6,671, and during 2007-08, all but two of the 5,349 cases received have been resolved,’ Sreedevi said.

She rebutted a media report that the Kerala Women’s Commission does not have any teeth and has not been doing what it is supposed to do.

‘At the national level, the performance of the commission was lauded and we have been ranked as the best performing state,’ the chairperson said.

Among the pioneering work done by it, the Kerala Women’s Commission said it conducted DNA tests on the unwed tribal mothers in Wayanad district.

‘We have been doing this since 1997. So far, we have done 31 such tests and cases have been filed,’ Sreedevi said.

Yet another major initiative the commission launched last month was the instant SMS facility for women to get in touch with it at any time for help.

‘Fifty-two women approached us through SMS and we acted instantly,’ the chairperson said.

The commission has asked the state government to ensure that Jaagratha Samithis — vigilance committees that act as quasi-judicial mechanism from the panchayat ward level to protect the rights of women and girl children — are set up in each local body besides forming a district-level monitoring committee.

A constitution bench of the apex court headed by Justice D.K. Jain asked the central government to get back to the court with its response by Thursday when the matter would come up for hearing again.

The court asked the Tamil Nadu government to ensure that water level in the dam should not exceed 136 feet as directed by it in an earlier order.

The petition of the Kerala government seeking reduction in the water level from 136 feet to 120 feet was dismissed as not pressed.

Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been at loggerheads over the dam, built under an 1886 accord between the then Maharaja of Travancore and the erstwhile British Raj.

While it is located in Kerala, its waters also serve Tamil Nadu.

Several arrests were made, while ports reported only minor hindrances Monday in protest against efforts by cities across the country — including New York, Boston and Oakland — to clear the Occupy Wall Street protestors, CNN reported.

The Occupy movement which began Sep 17 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City’s Wall Street financial district, has since spread to over 70 major US cities, including Washington, where protesters have set up encampments in two public squares near the White House.

The protesters’ slogan ‘We are the 99 percent’ refers to the growing wealth disparity in the US between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population and targets corporate greed.

Police in Houston arrested 20 protesters after dozens of police on foot and on horseback confronted a somewhat larger group of Occupy protesters, who blocked an interstate on-ramp, authorities said.

Elsewhere, protesters affiliated with the nationwide ‘Occupy’ movement set out in the pre-dawn hours in Oakland, California; Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, to shut down ports in an effort to ‘disrupt the economic machine that benefits the wealthiest individuals and corporations,’ according to organizers.

About 80 protesters demonstrated outside the gate of San Diego’s port, but caused no disruption, port spokesman Ron Powell said.

Protesters were planning a second occupation of the Oakland port Monday afternoon. Protesters in Seattle also were preparing to protest at the port there, according to organizing websites and posts on Twitter.

In addition to the West Coast port blockades, demonstrators in Salt Lake City and Denver said they were planning to disrupt operations of Walmart distribution facilities. About 40 to 50 people protested at the Denver facility, CNN reported.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/apex-court-seeks-clarification-on-lokpal-lokayukta-powers/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/bangladesh-approves-anti-human-trafficking-law/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/bangladesh-approves-anti-human-trafficking-law/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:57:00 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/bangladesh-approves-anti-human-trafficking-law/ Dhaka, Dec 12 (IANS) The Bangladeshi cabinet Monday approved a new anti-human trafficking law which includes a provision for death penalty for traffickers.

The approval came at the regular cabinet meeting presided over by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Xinhua reported.

The anti-human trafficking law will help in preventing human trafficking, which is also an international concern, said Abul Kalam Azad, the prime minister’s press secretary, after the cabinet meeting.

A trafficker can also be awarded life imprisonment with a fine of 500,000 taka (over $6,300) under the new law, he added.

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/2g-cbi-file-second-supplementary-chargesheet/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/maderna-remanded-in-judicial-custody-till-dec-24/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/maderna-remanded-in-judicial-custody-till-dec-24/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:59:47 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/maderna-remanded-in-judicial-custody-till-dec-24/ Jodhpur, Dec 12 (IANS) Sacked Rajasthan minister Mahipal Maderna was Monday remanded in judicial custody till Dec 24 by a court here in connection with the disappearance of nurse Bhanwari Devi.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) presented him in the court of an additional chief judicial magistrate here after he completed the period of custody with the agency.

‘He has been remanded in judicial custody,’ said a CBI officer who added that the former minister had been quizzed for 10 days by the agency.

‘Many new leads have come up after his interrogation. Now we will verify them,’ said the officer.

The court had Friday extended the CBI custody of Maderna for three days. Maderna had been taken to the CBI headquarters in New Delhi for interrogation and was brought back last week.

Parasram Bishnoi, the other accused and a Congress legislator’s brother, was also presented in court. He was remanded in judicial custody.

Bhanwari Devi, who is allegedly shown in a compromising position with Maderna in a CD, went missing from Jodhpur Sep 1. On Oct 16, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot sacked the minister over allegations that he had a role in her disappearance as she was blackmailing him on the basis of the CD.

CBI arrested Maderna Dec 3 on charges of getting Bhanwari Devi killed. It was alleged that he had hired one Sahi Ram Bishnoi, a small-time politician from Jodhpur, for the job. Sahi Ram then allegedly assigned the task to Shahabuddin, Sohan Lal Bishnoi and Baldev Jaat alias Balia to kidnap the nurse.

In the chargesheet filed before the court earlier, Shahabuddin, Baliya and Sohanlal have been charged under Section 364 (abduction with an intent to kill) and 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code and various sections of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

The reactions of the legal colleagues of Sibal, himself a lawyer, range from ‘let us be fair to him’ to ‘perhaps India too needs a Tahrir Square-like revolution’.

Known for his advocacy of human rights, particularly among those belonging to the minorities and the vulnerable sections of society, senior counsel Colin Gonsalves told IANS: ‘It (Sibal’s attempt of monitoring the social network sites) shows that India also needs a revolution like the Arab countries because Sibal’s comment shows that India like other Arab dictatorships is moving towards spying on its own people and censoring internet content.’

Gonsalves said censoring was not the correct way. ‘If there is any material on the net which breaks Indian laws, the government can prosecute those persons,’ he said.

To be fair to Sibal, he was highlighting the ‘need for a regulator and not advocating any governmental control’, said another senior counsel Raju Ramachandran.

Ramachandran, who assisted the Supreme Court in a 2002 Gujarat riots case, said the issues raised by Sibal were ‘serious and there is no doubt that there is a need for a regulator’ but it had to be ‘independent of the government’s control’.

Instead of censoring by the government, there should be an independent regulatory mechanism to intervene and act in case of any objectionable material on the social network sites, he said.

‘Freedom of media is sacrosanct and it can’t be violated,’ I.H. Syed, another apex court counsel, told IANS.

If there was something that posed a threat to the peace and tranquillity of society or was intimidatory or defamatory, then it could be dealt with by taking recourse to law, he said.

Syed said there were only two ways of dealing with a situation — either it should be prevented or dealt with after it happened.

In the case of the media, prevention could mean censoring which may not be good for democracy. So unlike medicine, where emphasis is on prevention, in the case of media it should be left to the law taking its course effectively in the event of a mischief, he said.

Who is stopping the government from taking steps available under the law, asked Syed, adding ‘any day, enforcing law is better than gagging media’.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon have also cautioned against policing the internet but have not specifically mentioned India.

And most did not mind sacrificing a holiday for the cause.

‘Although it’s a Sunday, we owe this to our country. We are working today to have a better tomorrow,’ said Sanjay Lamba, a 26-year-old trader from Jind, Haryana.

People trooped in to the protest site from bus stands and Metro stations, a sense of purpose evident on their faces.

A huge screen was set up on one side of the road. TV cameras mounted on cranes and camerapersons perched atop temporary platforms captured the scene.

As the crowd swelled by the hour, India Against Corruption (IAC) activists tried to control the deluge by erecting temporary barriers using banners and bamboo sticks but to no avail.

Some local shopkeepers, who have witnessed countless rallies and protests at the site, such they had never seen an individual uniting so many people for a single cause.

‘Organisations and unions do successfully attract large crowds, but not an individual. Not only are his demands genuine but his aura is charismatic,’ said Sunil, who operates a fast food joint nearby.

Around 1,000 police and paramilitary personnel were deployed at the venue.

In August, the 74-year-old Hazare sat on a 12-day fast at Ramlila ground in central Delhi and terminated it only after parliament agreed to frame a powerful anti-graft law.

Before that, in April, he went on a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar which was called off after the government formed a joint committee to draft the Lokpal bill.