Jharkhand's Panchayat Election

JHARKHAND's first PANCHAYANT ELECTION saw 58% of the 37,000 + seats won by WOMEN Ranging from 19 years to 62 years of age. Truly a historic mandate by the people of Jharkand leading to gender equality.

Most girls in Hindi belt married before 18 yrs of age!

No absurd mining please.

Under the instructions from the prime minister, environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh has from increased the allotted area for mining of coal from 344000hectare to 380000 hectare, which means cutting of 36000 hectares of forest reserves. The current coal production is 53cr tons and coal minister Mr Prakash Jaiswal is willing to increase it to 1000cr tons. Even the prime minister agrees that India needs electricity so there is a need of increasing the production of coal. According to the report of the energy research institute we have coal reserves available for mining for the next 40 yrs. and rest of the coal are present very deep inside the core of earth. So if we double the rate of extraction the reserves will last for next 20 yrs. This won’t be right from the energy conservation view. It is being said that in the next 20 yrs. there will be some new technology coming up for meeting the energy requirements and therefore we should extract more coal and hence increase our speed of development. But it is difficult to forecast the advancements of technology as seen in case of USA, they promoted the consumption assuming there will be new high-tech goods produced by them every time and will therefore keep up the economy and in order to meet the demands they provided easy loans resulting in the economic crisis in which they are stuck at present.

Even if we talk about the electricity being consumed, a major part is being consumed by the things of luxury and not for the basic requirements, many of the villages are not having electricity but many of the city dwellers and shopping malls are wasting electricity for the decoration purpose solely. This type of wastage must not be tolerated in an energy deficit country like ours. The electricity bill for a business person in Mumbai is 70 lakhs; this is really an astonishing figure. To cut forests for such showbiz is not at all right.

After the mining we are presently having a very poor policy of leaving the land barren. Generally an area is dug up and the soil is deposited at a place in the form of a hill and there are no signs of afforestation done there. This is the open cast procedure and is very out-dated. If we see the way mining is done in other countries we will have a lot to learn. In Germany the Roor areas which were once used for extravagation have now converted into beautiful forests. In Congo basin it was found that the forests take 42 years to redevelop so they distributed the areas in pockets, in one pocket mining will be done for 42 years and then will be left for next 42 years when it will be done on the other pocket ,so they will be getting both the woods and the coal in an effective way. While in India we have divided our forests as ‘go’ and “no go” and the area under ‘go‘ will be used for mining.

 

2010 bloodiest year for pakistan

A total of 1,224 people were killed and 2,157 more injured in 52 suicide attacks across Pakistan since January, making 2010 one of the bloodiest years since the turn of the century.

Though the total number of suicide bombings decreased 35 per cent this year as against the past year, 2010 was the bloodiest year since 2001 in terms of the number of the people killed in such attacks, The News daily reported today.

Pakistan witnessed 80 suicide attacks in 2009 that killed 1,217 people and injured 2,305 others.

On an average, suicide bombers killed 102 persons a month this year, compared to last year's average of 101 killings a month.
source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/latest-news/2010-bloodiest-year-for-pakistan-since-2001/articleshow/7157736.cms

Mining Policy

India has newly proposed a mining policy which aims to curtail illegal mining and empower people settled in and around mining areas. The new Bill proposes that companies share 26% of the profits from mining with the locals who lose land. The Bill seeks to expedite the grant of mineral concessions in a transparent manner and attract big investments in the sector.

In March, the Environment Ministry had marked as 'no-go' areas 155 coal blocks in nine coal fields that were intended to cater to 10 major power plants.

This had triggered a conflict between the Ministries of Environment and Coal, with the latter saying it would slow down power generation as the banned coal blocks had potential of producing about 660 million tonnes.

The ministry had contended that mining should be banned only in the cases of "pristine forests or wildlife sanctuaries."

The country has about 40 coal-based power plants, accounting for about 70 per cent of 162,366 MW of electricity production.

The current production of coal is about 530 million tonnes and the government is of the view that it needs to be doubled in the next six to seven years as the demand for power is going to increase manifold.

The protagonists in the government argue that coal reserves are usually located in forest areas and a way has to be found to mine these without affecting the ecology, including trees and wildlife.

This can be done by reclaiming and afforesting the pieces of land where mining is undertaken and completed and the process could be carried out in a phased manner, the sources said.

source: http://www4.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/reworked-policy-on-mining-to-be-unveiled-soon/articleshow/6630595.cms

mobile no portability

India has become the fastest growing mobile industry with around 15 million new connections every month. Nationally, every other Indian has a mobile connection. The metro mobile tele-density is four times higher than the rural mobile tele-density.Customers, initially elated with declining tariff plans, did not realize that the pressure for margins would lead to difficulties like poor voice quality, frequent call drops or no-signal zones even in the densely populated metros. The sudden spurt in the number of mobile subscribers - from 76 million in December 2005 to over 670 million today - too accentuated issues like poor customer care and inappropriate tariff plans. To be fair to the operators, the race for new additions led to lower margins.

In order to shore up their bottom lines in a scarce spectrum environment, customer service levels and the overall customer experience dropped. For the service providers to improve QoS there is an urgent need to grow the current less-than-$4 a month average revenue per user (ARPU) by offering a bouquet of value-added services. The current ARPU levels threaten the long term survival of most new entrants, especially as they look to the hinterland for growth.
According to IT intelligence firm, IDC India, two of every five mobile handsets sold in the country were multi SIM handsets, indicating that a significant number of Indian users are familiar with issues of quality of more than one service provider.While MNP assures customers the freedom to choose service providers, an improvement in the QoS alone will help the mobile customers stay loyal to their service provider.

source: http://www4.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/telecom/mobile-number-portability-will-improve-quality-of-service/articleshow/7004780.cms

newspaper comments

We know that due to our growing emphasis on improving welfare for the poor, we are set to spend a lot of money on various social programmes in the coming years. In the last 10 years, we have significantly raised our social spending. This year, the budget for the Natioanl Rural Employment Guarantee Act9 (NREGA) is Rs. 41,000 crore, for Indira Awas Yojana10 (IAY) Rs. 15,000 crore and for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan11 (SSA) Rs. 15,000 crore. As we have more social programmes, and various rights-right to food, right to education, right to work-get provided for within our welfare schemes we will see spending increase further. This expenditure is ultimately spent on individuals, on beneficiaries. Today, however, because of fundamental problems in confirming the identity of beneficiaries, we have not been successful in reaching benefits to the people who deserve it. The databases are such that there are large numbers of inclusion, as well as exclusion errors. A large number of people are claiming more than their share of public benefits, and there are large numbers of ghosts-people who do not exist but in whose name benefits are being claimed. At the same time, you have millions of deserving people who are not in the system because they do not have any identity. The NCAER (National Council of Applied Economic Research) has estimated for example, that there are over 12 million poor left out from the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS).