The support of Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) party has become key in the MLC elections scheduled for March 21 from the Assembly quota, as the party has 7 MLAs. Both Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) and YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) are urging Majlis party for its support for their candidates. However, talk is that the Majlis MLAs are likely to extend support to the YSR Congress, though party leaders are stating that they had not yet taken a decision on the matter.
Election fever caught up after the Chief Electoral Officer issued notification for the MLC elections on Monday. Candidates would be elected for 10 seats of the upper house, by members of the lower. AICC secretary Ponguleti Sudhakar Reddy and some other members are retiring by the end of the month. Each candidate would need the support of 29 MLAs to get elected to the Legislative Council. TRS and YSRCP have only 17 members each. As both need outside support, they are looking at the MIM.
Political analysts are of the view that MIM was trying to use the opportunity to the best of its advantage, as the party has been facing a serious political crisis, after snapping ties with the Congress. It has been assessing the advantages it would have by supporting the TRS or the YSRCP. In the meantime, TRS fielded Mehmood Ali, a Muslim candidate to get MIM support. It is learnt that when TRS leader KTR spoke to the MIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi about his party’s support, the latter had not made any promise. He reportedly said they need some more time to take a decision on the matter, as it would have to be discussed.
Another one of Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s pet schemes is under attack.
An audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has found rampant irregularities in the farm loan waiver scheme announced by the United Progressive Alliance government in 2008. The CAG report was tabled in Parliament today.
According to a report on CNN IBN, the report is critical of the implementation of the scheme and alleged that over 13 percent of beneficiaries were eligible but not considered for a loan waiver at all.
The CAG audit, which covered over 90,000 farmers’ accounts between April 2011 and March 2012, found lapses in about 22 percent of the cases.
No acknowledgement was taken from over 34 percent, or a third, of the farmers who had benefited from the scheme, the report said. The acknowledgement is necessary so that farmers don’t take fresh loans from banks.
The CAG has now instructed the government to issue directions to banks to launch a drive to obtain the acknowledgements, the report stated.
The CAG also found that over 8.6 percent accounts audited were ineligible and 13 percent were disqualified by banks. Over Rs 20 crore was doled out for ineligible farmers or for other purposes, the CAG report said.
Moreover, loans worth over Rs 164 crore were waived in violation of guidelines. Over 4,800 cases checked were given incorrect benefits, the report said.
The scheme, announced by then Finance Minister P Chidambaram in his Budget for 2008-09, aimed to write off bank loans worth Rs 52,000 crores taken by small and marginal farmers holding up to 5 acres of agriculture land and taken loans up to Rs 50,000.
The scheme was widely considered to be instrumental in bringing rural voters under the UPA fold, eventually helping the alliance to return to power.
The scheme had also attracted criticism from various quarters. A section of the economists had seen this as fiscal profligacy by the UPA with dangerous consequences.
According to a report by a vernacular television news channel, more than 3.7 crore farmers were to benefit from the scheme.
Considering only 90,000 accounts have been audited, this is likely to be just the tip of an ice berg. In the coming weeks, more skeletons are likely to tumble out of the loan waiver closet.
Also Read: INN IMPACT on the story of CAG recommendations
Size zero came back in vogue in Indian politics thanks to the runaway success of Anna Hazare‘s hunger strike, until his magical malnourishment show grew dull with repetition. Starvation politics lost its sheen, and all of us went back to the business of eating as usual.
Now with Arvind Kejriwal planning a comeback, so is extreme undernourishment Don’t worry, as Kejriwal assures us, this isn’t Grandpa Anna‘s hunger strike: “Those were anshans. We had certain demands from the government. This time, it is an upvaas. We don’t have any demand from the government. We are concerned only with the citizens.” He plans to hop from one supporter’s home to another to protest hikes in the prices of electricity and water. The starving just adds a little oomph to the proceedings.
Anorexia without a cause! When Bollywood starlets needlessly starve themselves, it’s a diet. When our leaders do the same, we call it satyagraha. Sorry, make that ‘upvaas.’ And when Irom Sharmila does it, our government calls it an “attempt to commit suicide.” Unlike Uma Bharti‘s intermittent — now I eat, now I — ”indefinite fast,” Sharmila’s hunger strike has endured 12 years of force-feeding in police custody. She’s also facing charges in a Delhi court for declaring her intention fast unto death in 2006 during a protest in Jantar Mantar. Guess, that didn’t work out quite as well for her as Annaji, who was instead rewarded with a long line of UPA supplicants urging him to just eat something!
Hunger strikes are all about turnout — as Hazare well knows. Human rights violations in distant Manipur aren’t quite as popular as that big-C crowd-pleaser, Corruption. Anna tum sangharsh karo, Hum tumhare saath hain! Irom, not so much.
At the time, left-leaning intellectuals embraced the reverse double-standard. In a widely circulated essay, Shuddhabrata Sengupta thusly described Anna’s bourgeois ann-shan antics:
The current euphoria needs to be seen for what it is – a massive move towards legitimising a strategy of simple emotional blackmail – a (conveniently reversible) method of suicide bombing in slow motion. …The force of violence, whether it is inflicted on others, or on the self, or held out as a performance, can only act coercively. And coercion can never nourish democracy.
Other than rebuking middle class myopia for the absence of “a tele-visually orchestrated campaign against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act,” however, Sengupta remained wilfully silent as to whether Sharmila’s hunger strike qualifies as a “method of suicide bombing in slow motion.” In politics, satyagraha lies in the eyes of the beholder. It’s never about the fast, but the person fasting. And it’s always a person who matters.
Hunger strikes are the weapon of the important. They are less about suicide than wilfulness: I’m not going to eat! That kind of threat works only when it’s pulled by a toddler or a VIP. It assumes the presence of an interested audience – be it of concerned parents, adoring supporters, or harried authorities — who care about when you had your last meal. Or in the case of Irom, a government that cares enough to feed you through a tube against your will. Lots of nameless people go hungry in India; a number of them even die. But no one cares about the death of statistics.
This is why ordinary people in dire circumstances rarely go on a hunger strike. No one can summon up the interest to stand around watching them die, or rather threaten to maybe, possibly die — but only if everything goes terribly wrong, and as a very last resort. To merit any kind of attention, the common man has to go the whole hog and actually kill him or herself. Hence, while Kejriwal, Hazare et al threaten starve until death, a Tariq Ahmad Rather sets himself, his wife, two sons and mother on fire because his family is starving — and then is charged by the police for attempting suicide.
On the other hand, the mighty authorities can choose to ignore plebian suicides when required. Like those 19 farmers in the Cauvery Delta who — in the words of the Tamil Nadu government — met an untimely death “due to a variety of reasons from old age, family problems to accidents.”
The good news for Kejriwal and his admirers is that his latest fast is unlikely to require such unseemly fudging of facts. While the hunger strike is “indefinite,” it is highly unlikely to prove fatal. The upvaas instead marks the birth of a new trend: fasting as political accoutrement, the must-have accessory to make your protest pop!
Narendra Modi gets high on the prospect of power. With the future as adrenalin, he attacks the past. For him the edifice of rottenness, the core of decay is predictably the Congress. Modi sees himself as a seer reading the entrails of the Congress to diagnose the nation’s ills.
There is an ordering of history which is both pernicious and effective. Before this speech, Modi set up his dualisms externally. He posited oppositions between the durbar — the Mughal Sultanate in Delhi — and the dynamism of Gujarat, between Delhi and India, and the Gandhi family and the interests of the nation.
As he massages his career toward Delhi, Modi turns the technique inward, using it to characterize the decay in the Congress. Now he portrays a Congress split between dynasty and the urge toward achievement.
Citing a litany of stalwart Congressmen from Morarji Desai, Chandrasekhar, I.K.Gujral who had to step out of the fold of the Congress to be prime ministers, Modi makes two points. One, Congress is not an incubator for leadership but for dynastic continuity. Two, it only gestates chicks from one family, regardless of the incubation period required.
Modi then reaches a higher crescendo to argue that Congress dynastic narcissism had turned it schizophrenic destroying the best in the party. Paying a left handed tribute to Pranab Mukherjee, he claims the Congress had waived its claims to competence by ignoring Pranab Mukherjee, opting instead for an abstract intellectual called Manmohan. It is here he hits home with the metaphor of the night watchman.
The metaphor of the night watchman is hard in its connotations. A night watchman in cricket is a stand in, a weak player, sent in to play out the final overs of the game. He can be sacrificed. He is temporary. He is not expected to be a force of history, a mere substitute, dispensable by definition. A night watchman state, by definition, is a rudimentary state. It performs minimum functions, providing a minimum sense of stability. As a night watchman Manmohan plays that basic function passively and minimally.
The Congress response is clerical: that night watchmen do not function for nine years. As an exercise in logic and linguistic exactitude, the Congress is correct. Sadly, the logical does not control the sociological; an empirical statement lacks the power of gossip, the eloquence of its vitriol.
There is acid in Modi’s words and bile in Modi’s soul. Modi’s speech is not a critique. It is the taunt of the gladiator beating his BJP chest, calling his forces to battle, convincing them that the only answer to the corruption of the Congress is the courage of the BJP worker, the discipline of the cadres. One can understand such statements in the heat of the battle as semiotic signals.
The performance is crude, hurtful and it shows the style of the man. It demonstrates his ability to go for the jugular, to draw blood. Needless to say neither the matter of fact and minimally compact Lal Bahadur Shastri or the eloquent Vajpayee would have followed such a line of attack. They were political warriors who had a code of political chivalry. They were statesman. Modi is a street fighter with a bully boy attitude to opponents.
I am not saying Modi’s Speech was not effective. It cut to the quick and drove home the message that the Congress had become slow thinking stegosaurus, a dinosaur with two brains, one located in Manmohan and the other in Sonia. The distance between the two created a phlegmatic Congress perpetually waiting for a successor.
For all the populist entertainment, however, Modi’s behavior raises some unsettling questions. And these are not about the Congress and its lazy tactics for the future. What is questionable is Modi’s bullyboy style. There is a touch of the vindictive in celebrating the opponent’s embarrassment. Even in his moment of minor victories, Modi’s style raises unease about his tactics, his sense of civility , his sense of grace, his ability to be at home in the world of difference. If the style is the man, the Modi leaves behind a sense of doubt about his behavior in the future. It makes you wonder whether in shooting others, he might shoot himself in the foot. Only time can answer this.
If you pick up the new story on Naveen Jindal on the cover of a popular mag, looking for some damning new revelation in the Coalgate scam you will be disappointed.
Mehboob Jeelani’s portrait of the 42-year-old Congressman and head of Jindal Steel and Power Limited does all the careful homework of the well-rounded profile. He talks to the man himself, his mother, his college professor in the US, his main environmentalist adversary, an unnamed Coal India senior official. And it comes with colourful anecdotes – of coal towns covered with soot and polo matches of the rich and beautiful with “vintage handbags, tiny, fluffy dogs and big Cuban cigars.” And in a reporter’s dream moment different worlds collide when burly farmers in white dhotis and kurtas rush onto the polo field to meet Jindal, the polo player on his brown pony.
But more than the story of the ups and downs of one politician-industrialist what jumps out in the story is that Jindal is an accidental Congressman. When the young Jindal scion was first thinking of dabbling in politics he wondered which party he should join and he turned to Sunil Kumar, a veteran journalist in Chaattisgarh for advice. Both the BJP and the Congress were offering him tickets. He didn’t know which to choose.
Jeelani takes up the story here in Kumar’s voice: He asked me, ‘Sunilji, which one should I choose?’ I told him that between the two, there was not a great choice. I said that I considered the BJP to be a communal party, so you should not go to BJP and you should go to Congress. He still asked me, ‘But Sunilji, which party is going to win the elections?’ I told him that I didn’t know the answer.” “He had a very open mind,” Kumar continued. “He wasn’t allergic to the BJP, and he had no great liking for the Congress.”
This is telling. It shows that for the very rich and powerful, the parties are not repositories of ideology but means to an end. He is wooed by both and ambivalent about both. And he knows as long as he backs the winning horse, he can make the system work in his favour. Now that Jindal is having to fend off accusations in the Coalgate scam, the BJP is surely thrilled he didn’t choose them. A veteran Congress leader in Haryana complains that Jindal will give the Congress a bad name while at the same time he cozies up to BJP chief ministers like Chhattisgarh’s Raman Singh to the point that they don’t know if he is an MP from Haryana or from Chattisgarh.
Ultimately it’s not about Congress or BJP, it’s about money and the Old Boys Network. So despite that high profile Zee TV sting and reverse sting when Jeelani meets Zee’s Subhash Chandra’s father, Nand Kishore Goenka he dismisses the whole controversy as a “silly fight between brothers.” After all, they are both old families from Hisar who have known each other for many years and part of the same temple trust. After the blow-up Jindal’s mother called Chandra’s father and that was that. “It’s like the way kids usually fight in their childhood,” Goenka said. “It’s the same thing.”
Except this isn’t about your turn at the sandbox or a slide in the playground. It’s about allocation of entire coal blocks. In a way it lends credence to Arvind Kejriwal’s rants about how one party is as compromised as another because each of them wants to woo the likes of Jindal. Jindal is driven to one party, not because he cares about its ideology or opposes the other. He is just concerned about winning. And yes, at some level, even he carefully avoids all committees that deal with coal or iron ore, he cannot help but join the party who will be friendly to his business interests. And when he gets into trouble mommy falls back on the Hisar connection to smooth things over. So the entire Coalgate affair becomes reduced to a Hisar schoolboy hissy fit.
Kejriwal wants to be the alternative to this kind of power play that’s part an parcel of politics in India. The amusing irony is, he is also from Hisar himself. Someone should analyse what’s in the water there. Hisar could well be the Petri dish in which to study what Caravan calls in its headline The Price of Power.
Docs Reschedule Surgeries, Only Emergency Cases Are Being Taken Up.
Andhra Pradesh Healthcare facilities are reeling under massive power cuts ever since the Central Power Distribution Company Limited (CPDCL) started shedding load in the twin cities last week to save energy.
Services were nearly paralysed in several government hospitals and small private facilities on Monday due to erratic power supply throughout the day with many surgeries being postponed and patients suffering in the extreme heat. AP Chest and General Hospital at Erragadda had no power supply for a good five hours at a stretch between 9 am and 1 pm leaving authorities severely handicapped.
The situation was equally bad at MNJ Cancer Hospital and Niloufer Hospital with power cuts reported every half an hour to 45 minutes, leaving the ailing patients feeling helpless. The area and district hospitals located in various corners of the city too, bore the brunt on Monday. “The situation is very difficult. There were power cuts three to four times and we are treating more than 500 patients daily. During surgeries and radiation, we require uninterrupted power supply,” said Dr Nindra Armugam, resident medical officer (in charge), MNJ Cancer Hospital. “We could not give radiation to a lot of patients due to power cuts,” he added.
“The impact was tremendous. Around 200-300 out patients come to our hospital and this is the only major hospital in this area. X-ray and lab facilities were not available. Frequent power disturbance caused a havoc to patients in the intensive care unit,” said Dr P N S Reddy, superintendent, Chest Hospital. He added that doctors could not even tell the patients when to come back for treatment due to the uncertainty.
Doctors at hospitals across the city maintained that patients were the worst sufferers due to prolonged load shedding. “We have a generator, but we often run out of diesel as there are budget constraints. In these circumstances, we are forced to postpone elective surgeries. Only emergency cases are taken up,” said a senior doctor at district hospital, King Koti.
“People come from far-off places and other districts. If surgeries are postponed to next week, living in the city for a week becomes difficult for them. Furthermore, the power cuts are erratic. Officials are saying two hours a day, but we have had threehour power cuts in the first half of the day on Monday,” the doctor added.
While Osmania and Gandhi were not affected much, hospital administrators fear the situation might deteriorate in the coming days.
In the private sector, smaller hospitals have started postponing the elective surgeries during non-load shedding hours to cut down their expenditure on generators and diesel.
An official from the CPDCL told INN that government hospitals were given an exemption but this year, no such directions were issued from the corporate office. “We are awaiting directions,” the official added.
POWERLESS!
- AP Chest and General Hospital at Erragadda did not have power supply for five hours at a stretch
- MNJ Cancer Hospital could not give radiation to several patients due to power cuts
- Government hospitals do not have sufficient budget for back-up
- Some private hospitals are postponing elective surgeries during non-load shedding hours to cut down their expenditure
India perhaps enjoys the unique distinction of having medical facilities that can cater to medical tourism but when it comes to ensuring the health of its own citizens falls far behind when compared to even neighboring countries.
A report titled the ‘The Global Burden of Disease: Generating Evidence Guiding Policy’ by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in the University of Washington puts India at the bottom of the table compared to its neighbouring countries when it comes to death rate and life expectancy.
When it came to age-standardised death rate, per 1 lakh of population, India ranked 155 out of 187 countries in 1990 and while the number of deaths fell by 2010 from 1,447.43 to 1,096.92, it still lagged behind neighbours.
All neighbouring countries did not improve their record but they continued to stay ahead of India. While India ranked 139, Pakistan was at 127, Bangladesh at 113, Nepal at 108, Bhutan at 107 while Sri Lanka and China were at 68 and 63 respectively.
The study noted that while the amount of deaths and people living with communicable diseases hadn’t increased between 1990 and 2010 there had been a drastic increase in the number of people who were suffering and dying from non-communicable diseases.
Comparing the number of life years lost due to various causes, the report notes that the main cause for people losing healthy years of their lives in India over the last twenty years was heart disease.
In 1990 non communicable diseases accounted for 31 percent of years lost among both genders but communicable diseases accounted for 43 percent of the number of healthy years lost. Disturbingly by 2010, the percentage of people affected by communicable diseases had not decreased but the number of people affected by non-communicable diseases spiked sharply.
Non communicable diseases by 2010 accounted for 45 percent of years lost by Indians but the authors of the report noted that the number of cases of heart disease (a 66 percent increase) and diabetes (a 93 percent increase) had seen a drastic rise.
Worryingly the report noted that the reporting of ailments like migraine, depression and low back and neck pain had also increased dramatically among Indians over the twenty year period.
And more Indians are also indulging in ‘self-harm’ and dying in road accidents. The rise in the number of people indulging in self harm had spiked by 136 percent while the number of people who suffered from health problems due to India’s more crowded roads had jumped by 63 percent over the 20-year period.
While the report can be used to argue about the rampant spread of lifestyle ailments like heart disease and diabetes, what is rather disturbing is that the impact of communicable diseases in the county has not reduced as much as expected, barring infant mortality. What it also shows with its staggering rise in statistics of people with depression and indulging in ‘self-hurt’ is that mental health facilities in the nation still have a long way to go in reaching people across the country.
As Firstpost had noted earlier the health policy in the nation presently lies deep in the doldrums with a lot of investment needed in the public healthcare system to make it universally accessible instead of the current system which forces people towards the private sector.
Even this year’s budget while promising a higher spending in the healthcare sector by the central government, will not perhaps help unless the state governments act on improving healthcare facilities within their domain rather than merely implementing a scheme to ensure they receive the funds from the central government.
“Instead of the vertical “national missions” which are essentially one-size-fits-all models, the centre should start using its health budget to incentivise better performances by the states. In an era of decentralised governance, wherein one should look for effective local service delivery, national programmes are an anomaly if it really tries to implement than provide technical advise and provide money, INN noted.
This new report only highlights the continuing problems of providing healthcare to Indians, who suffer irrespective of whether they have access to high-end or no healthcare. Whether it will result in change in the much ignored healthcare sector in India, however, remains in doubt.
Films like Telugu superhit 'Shankar Dada Zindabad' and 'Glamour' movies fame Karishma Kotak bagged chance to act opposite the Bollywood macho man Salman Khan, say sources. The movie would be produced by Sohail Khan, brother of Salman Khan.
Karishma was part of the mega show Bigg Boss - 6, which was hosted by Salman. Though she failed to win the show, the actress luckily grabbed chance to act opposite Salman Khan. The film has been temporarily named 'Radhe'. However, Karishma denied to talk anything about it and in return questioned the media who spread the news. The 30-year-old actress hosted famous shows 'Karishma Show', 'Spa Diaries' and 'It is in'.
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