Dec 18 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

MGNREGA Social Audit Irks Rural Min

Yogima Sharma

New Delhi





Underreported figure of misappropriated funds at just Rs 17.67 crore prompts officials to streamline the audit process

The rural development ministry is miffed at the process of social audit of the Centre’s flagship employment scheme that shows misappropriation of just .`17.67 crore since 2012 despite allegations of widespread malaise.
The paltry figure has left officials wondering whether the government should recast the entire process of social audit of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme launched by the Congress-led UPA government in 2006.
The figure has resulted from gross underreporting, a senior government official said.
The official explained, “This is largely because just 17 states — as of November 30, 2014 — are following the rules set by the ministry for social audits and a few of them have seriously done the audit only very recently.” According to the official, who did not wish to be identified, there is a need to make the entire process of social audit more stringent and streamlined so that not a single penny is diverted and the true beneficiaries get their dues.
“We may have to take a fresh look at the process of social audits as there are a lot of loopholes in the system that need to be rectified before we get the true value of the funds that get diverted under the scheme,” the official added.
As per the audit, until November this year, a total of .
`17.67 crore was misappropriated in eight of the total 19 states, with the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh reporting misappropriation of about .
`9.8 crore followed by Karnataka (. `5.5 crore), Sikkim (. `87 lakh), Bihar (. `69 lakh) and Uttar Pradesh (about .
`65 lakh). Of this, only .
`62 lakh has been recovered by the government. Recent reports, however, claimed that 200 crore was siphoned off in just seven districts of Uttar Pradesh, leading to a Central Bureau of Investigation query in the matter. This is just one such example, said rural development ministry officials, who believe that the cumulative embezzled amount under the scheme could run into several thousand crores of rupees.
The social audit of the scheme, entitles millions of workers enrolled under it to .
`100 a day for a minimum of 100 days of work in a year, was taken up three years ago to check allegations of misappropriation of funds.
Since then, over eight lakh social audits of the scheme have been carried out at the grass-roots level, costing the government over .
`1,500 crore.
The government spends .
`34,000 crore a year on the scheme and has spent nearly .
`2 lakh crore in all over the past eight years.

Dec 18 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Indians add 8.6 yrs to their lives since 1990

Mumbai: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





One Of The Best Gains Worldwide, Says The Lancet

Every fifth death in the world is that of an Indian, but Indians are also living at least 8.6 years longer on an average than in 1990, one of the best gains worldwide in life expectancy .In 2013, heart, lung or brain problems caused a third of all mortality in the country . Suicides, road traffic accidents and lifestyle disease diabetes have now muscled into the top 10 killers' list. Tuberculosis and heart diseases are the largest killers of Indians in the most productive age group of 15 to 49 years, says the first country-specific cause-of-death data for 188 countries published in The Lancet on Thursday .
A comparison of the data from 1990 and 2013 showed that heart diseases and stroke have increased their death grip on Indians, but TB and pneumonia are no longer the top killers. “It is good news for India that the death share (26%) of the three major infectious diseases --tuberculosis (9%), pneumonia (9%) and diarrhoea (8%) -has reduced by 50% during the last 23 years,“ said Kaushalendra Kumar, one of the co-authors from the International Institute for Population Sciences in Deonar.
Another co-author Dr Nobhojit Roy , professor at BARC Hospital in Chembur, concurred. “India is going through an epidemiological transition with communicable diseases going down and non-communicable diseases going up. Diseases like malaria and HIV are down and lifestyle-related diseases such as heart diseases and hypertension are going up.'' The biggest indicator of India's relative better health is the rise in life expectancy.“Life expectancy improved for both men (64.2 years) and women (68.5 years) in India, at an average of 8.6 years gained since 1990. This was a larger increase than the global aver age, and one of the top 25 biggest gains in life expectancy worldwide,'' said the report.
The global report, coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said people live longer worldwide than they did two decades ago as death rates from infectious diseases and cardiovascular disease have fallen.
Since 1990, India saw marked declines in mortality from a number of diseases that used to take a large toll on the country . For instance, by 2013, mortality from diarrhoeal diseases reduced by 42%. In 1990, pneumonia and diarrhoeal diseases killed 15,32,459 people.Twenty-three years later, they claimed 7,15,303 fewer lives.
India, however, came in for a bit of criticism for poor health records while neighbouring China won praise for providing detailed reports.“India has to spend on research and surveillance. If you don't know what is killing people, how will you plan a health programme to check it?“ asked Dr Roy .
“All our policies and programmes are based on virtually no data and, therefore, it is difficult to measure effects of policy interventions or initiate effective programmes,“ said Kumar.

MAINSTREAM, VOL LII NO 51, DECEMBER 13, 2014

An Activist Judge with Aristotle’s Mental Range, Fearless Krishna Iyer was a Game-changer

Monday 15 December 2014, by T J S George

IMPRESSIONS
If style maketh the man, opinion maketh the judge. A wise opinion memorably expressed goes directly into the conscience of society and the annals of time. Such was the opinion: “Law without politics is blind. Politics without law is deaf.” It was an aphorism that marked the personality, the commitment and the intellectualism of Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer. Some 700 judgments he pronounced from the Bench of the Supreme Court and all of them were studded with bold ideas boldly expressed. They all had but one aim: Uphold the human rights of ordinary people, even of detainee suspects (he pronounced against handcuffing as a routine) and jailed convicts (he took up a prisoner’s letter about torture as a public interest litigation).
India’s judicial firmament is full of shining stars. (The Emergency years showed that there were also judges who were unworthy of their calling.) Fali Nariman in his autobiography cites some examples of the great, such as Vivian Bose, S.R. Das and P.B. Gajendragadkar. He then says that as “pathfinders” he could name only two: Justice K. Subba Rao and Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer. More than all others “they influenced creative judicial thinking. They lighted new, difficult (and different) paths—paths which others followed.”
The lay public is not all that familiar with the Subba Rao saga, but the legal fraternity remembers with reverence his efforts to ensure the sanctity of citizens’ personal liberties. As Nariman puts it, Subba Rao’s “concern for fundamental rights and his distrust of parliamentary majority led to some of his most controversial decisions. He abhorred absolute power—especially the arrogance of absolute power” whether exercised by the executive or the legislature.
If Subba Rao’s agenda was to make politics subservient to law, Krishna Iyer’s was to make law serve the ends of social justice. He became arguably the most famous of Supreme Court judges. One reason was his activism which increased after his retirement in 1980. There was no people’s cause that he did not champion; at the age of 99 he even sat in dharna demanding a cancer centre for Kochi. He was interested in practically all subjects; one of the 105 books he authored was on life after death. Former Chief Justice of India M.N. Venkatachaliah put it best when he said: “The range of Krishna Iyer’s mind was that of Aristotle.”
But the big reason for his fame was, ironically, his judgment in a political case—the election case appeal by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Krishna Iyer was a junior puisne judge in the Supreme Court at that time. It was just an accident that the appeal came up before him. It was summer recess for the court and Krishna Iyer happened to be filling in as vacation judge. That was when Indira Gandhi approached the court pleading for an absolute stay on the Allahabad High Court’s verdict disqualifying her.
Indira Gandhi was at the height of her power. It was not incumbent on the junior vacation judge to take up the case. He could have just as well granted a stay till the reopening of the court when a proper Bench of three or four judges could have given a decision. But this was Krishna Iyer who had what Nariman called “that abiding quality of a great judge—he was fearless”. Taking the full weight of responsibility upon himself, the vacation judge heard the arguments nonstop for six hours, three each by Nani Palkhivala (for Indira Gandhi) and Shanti Bhushan (for Raj Narain). It was 2 o’clock in the morning when the writing of the judgment was completed. The Court rejected the plea for a complete stay of the High Court verdict and allowed only a partial stay. Indira Gandhi was allowed to function as the Prime Minister, but without the right to vote in Parliament. The order was handed down on June 24. On June 25-26 Emergency was proclaimed.
To understand the extent of Krishna Iyer’s courage in passing that judgment, we must know that Palkhivala had sounded a warning during the argument. His words were: “The nation was solidly behind (Indira) as Prime Minister” and “there were momentous conse-quences, disastrous to the country, if anything less than the total suspension of the order under appeal were made”. Krishna Iyer remained undaunted. Constitutional lawyer M. Seervai, usually a critic of Krishna Iyer, described this as the Supreme Court’s finest hour. Was that the same as saying that V.R. Krishna Iyer was India’s finest judge? His one judgment certainly changed the game for Indian history.

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Will Narendra Modi Speak Out?

Vol - XLIX No. 50, December 13, 2014 

• Editorials

There is a poison spreading against minorities but the prime minister refuses to come down on the bigots.

• Read more
• 0 Comments

No Safe Spaces

Vol - XLIX No. 50, December 13, 2014 

• Editorials

The central issue is patriarchy and power, not private taxi services.

• Read more
• 0 Comments

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Commentary Executive's Environmental Dilemmas Unpacking a Committee’s Report Manju Menon, Kanchi Kohli The High-Level Committee set up by the Narendra Modi government to review the major laws relating to environment protection has, in its recommendations, worked towards two sets of objectives: one, to separate business from the messiness of... Read more	Commentary China's Global Economic Power Yuan as a Future Reserve Currency A V Rajwade The dollar has been the world's reserve currency for decades, but it is not difficult to see it yielding place to the yuan of China, a country that is already the world's largest economy in purchasing power parity terms, and the world... Read more
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Singapore is ‘Asia lite’ for West

The potential for Western universities to forge links with Singapore is growing, but they should not take a “normative approach” on freedom of expression in the city state, according to the president of Nanyang Technological University. Bertil Andersson spoke to Times Higher Education in London when he was part of a delegation led by Singapore’s president, Tony Tan.

NTU, which has recently seen a dramatic rise in its global rankings positions and citation impact scores, has opened a medical school in Singapore in a joint venture with Imperial College London. The partnership “may be one of the most spectacular academic joint ventures in today’s world”, according to Professor Andersson, a Swede who is a member of the board of trustees of the Nobel Foundation.

In terms of academic freedom in Singapore, Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts institution opened in 2011 by the US college and the National University of Singapore, has prompted concerns about freedom of expression from some Yale staff. In 2012, Yale academics in the US voted in support of a motion raising concerns about the “history of lack of respect for civil and political rights in the state of Singapore”, where homosexuality is illegal and there are limitations on rights to free speech and public assembly.

Asked if Singapore’s reputation on academic freedom might concern UK institutions considering links with its sector, Professor Andersson said: “I think people would worry about it. But…I don’t see that academic freedom is limited to any extent.” The former head of Linköping University added that in terms of academic freedom, the comparison between Singapore and Sweden was “certainly not black and white; maybe there are different colours of grey”.

Asked about the Yale-NUS controversies, Professor Andersson continued: “I feel Europe and the United States should not necessarily take too much of a normative approach. I think Singapore has gone through a quite significant democratisation and liberalisation.

“Still to this day when I travel and say I work in Singapore, people [say], ‘Ah, you are not allowed to have chewing gum; ah, you’re not allowed to do this and this.’ If you go to Singapore, today it’s one of the most vibrant cities…Perception always lags after reality. Singapore has changed so much; it has changed as much as its academia has.”

NTU was at the centre of controversy earlier this year when one of its journalism academics, Cherian George, left for a post at Hong Kong Baptist University after being denied tenure. Dr George, a critic of the Singapore government, described his move as a “forced exit”.

- See more at: http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/2014/12/singapore-is-asia-lite-for-west/#sthash.Q3BsTNXK.dpuf 

Dec 17 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

A cycle that warns of obstacles

The Hague: AFP





The Netherlands on Monday launched its first-ever “intelligent bicycle“, fitted with an array of electronic devices to help bring down the high accident rate among elderly cyclists in the bicycle-mad country .Developed for the government by the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), the intelligent bike prototype runs on electricity , and sports a forward-looking radar mounted below the handlebars and a camera in the rear mudguard.
A commercial-available model is expected to be on the market in the next two years and should sell for between 1,700 euros ($1,800) to 3,200 euros per bicycle.
The forward and rearward de tection devices on the test bike are linked through an onboard computer with a vibrating warning system installed in the bicycle's saddle and handlebars to alert cy clists to impending danger.
The saddle vibrates when other cyclists approach from behind, while the handlebars do the same when obstacles appear ahead. It has a cradle in which a computer tablet can be inserted, to wirelessly connect and “talk“ to the bicycle through a dedicated application.
“Accidents often happen when cyclists look behind them or get a fright when they are passed at high speed,“ said Maurice Kwakkernaat, one of TNO's research scientists involved in the project.
“More and more elderly people are using a bicycle, not only for short distances, but also for longer distances,“ Dutch Environment and Infrastructure Minister Melanie Schultz van Haegen said.

Dec 17 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Over 31,000 rape cases pending in high courts

New Delhi TIMES NEWS NETWORK





Crimes against women are on the rise, and so is the pendency of such cases in the subordinate and high courts across the country.In the last three years, number of cases relating to sexual harassment, kidnapping and abduction including rape has gone up from 2.28 lakh to 3.09 lakh. Over 31,000 rape cases are pending in high courts alone.
Concerned at increasing pendency of cases of crime against women and children, the law ministry has written to the state governments and the chief justices of HCs to constitute fast track courts for speedy trial of such cases. The conviction rate in these cases, however, came down from 27% to 22% between 2011 and 2013.
After the December 2012 Delhi rape case, the government had asked the state gov ernments to allocateTOTAL (ALL S additional funds for setting up of fast track courts (FTCs) for trials related to crime against women and children.
This has resulted in at least 318 FTCs being set up by various HCs, designating them exclusively for trials of cases related to crime against women. Madhya Pradesh has set up highest FTCs for women and children (50), followed by West Bengal (48).
There are 310 cases of sexual harassment pending in the Supreme Court while it has L STATES) 318 disposed of 1,455 since 2009. In the HCs, the pendency of rape r cases is as high as 31,386 while e 15,453 have been disposed of in . the last three years.t For the full report, log on to http:www.timesofindia.com