A Muslim Girl In Bihar Refused to Marry 'Greedy' Groom

By Ashfaq Shaik / Patna

A Muslim girl from Bihar on Sunday refused to marry a local man after the groom’s family sought a hefty dowry in lieu of solemnisation of marriage.

Fatima Firdausi, from Chakhasim village in eastern Bihar’s Munger district, has become a star overnight for her bold initiative to outright reject the marriage.

In support of her courage, the elders at this village have now vowed not to give dowry to grooms in future.

The Trouble With The Polio Vaccine

By M H Ahssan

It's not just the proposed-pentavalent vaccine that is causing problems. India’s Pulse Polio Immunisation programme is apparently not showing the results it was expected to. The worst states for polio in India, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are now reporting more cases of Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP), even from last year, even though the doses have been increased.

The AFP rate is the number of persons paralysed per 100,000 population. Ordinarily, it is expected to be one or two per 100,000. But, the official figures of the National Polio Surveillance Project (NPSP), a joint effort of the union government and the WHO, show that the number of AFP cases by the first week of June 2009 were 4,280 in Bihar. This year, the figure has gone up to 5,190, which is a 21.26 percent increase. In Uttar Pradesh, the AFP cases have gone up from 5,286 in June 2009 to 6,824 in June this year. This represents a 22.54 percent increase.

Almost all cases of AFP are seen as polio. “When we refer to AFP, we take it polio although not all AFP cases are caused by the polio virus. But a majority would be,” says Dr Sanjeev Singh, an advisor to many hospitals in Delhi. Singh says he can barely recall two cases of non-polio AFP over several years of work.

However, the NPSP says only six of the 5,190 AFP cases from Bihar are confirmed polio cases so far this year. It also says it has discarded 4,266 cases as not polio and that 918 cases are pending. Likewise, in Uttar Pradesh the NPSP is confirming only 10 cases of AFP as polio so far adding it has discarded 5,362 cases as not polio and 1,450 cases are pending.

Another reason given for the increase in polio cases even after a massive Pulse Polio Immunisation programme is that there is better surveillance now, people are more aware, and they are therefore reporting more cases now. If that were so, there is all the possibility of far more polio cases being discovered. This, in turn, raises doubts over the efficacy of the polio vaccine.

In 2007, HNN reported that a new polio vaccine was introduced without informing the public and the the AFP rate in Uttar Pradesh rose from 3,789 in 2004 to 10,055 in 2005, when six doses of oral polio vaccine were given, and to 11,538 in 2006 when a further nine doses were administered.

In 2006, the AFP rate in Uttar Pradesh was 16.87 per 100,000. Today, it is 22. In Bihar it is 32. So, is the repeated vaccination in these states, which are receiving more doses, responsible? AFP is no mild disease. About half the cases are permanently paralysed, says an analysis in the journal Indian Pediatrics. It appears that the polio vaccine is another example of the government ceding to international agencies, who are pushing for more doses.

Poverty-Stricken Parents Of Bihar Girl Born With Eight Limbs And Two Torsos Unable To Fund Her Surgery

A lack of funds is preventing a crucial operation for a Bihar girl born with eight limbs and two torsos.

Eleven-year-old Lakshmi Tatma, who was born with a parasitic twin before it was surgically removed in a world-famous procedure in Bangalore 2008, is facing a health scare which has left her parents worried.

The girl, who lives in Rampur Kodarkatti village of Araria district in Bihar, has been experiencing acute pain and is unable to sit for long.

Health Crisis: India's Wealthier States Are Showing An Alarming Decline In Immunisation Process

By NEWSCOP | INNLIVE

The warning signs from the latest National Family Health Survey data have gone unnoticed so far.

A fair amount of media attention has been given to the resurgence of diphtheria in Kerala, which has been attributed to some Muslims rejecting immunisation efforts due to misinformation. However, a much more dangerous and widespread trend of declining immunisation rates as evidenced by the recent National Family Health Survey 4 data, seems to have gone entirely unnoticed.

In India, 3626 Villages Named On Ram, 3309 After Krishna

By Kajol Singh / INN Bureau

What's in a name, or two, or 6,77,459? In the case of India's villages, that list tells us they love gods, goddesses, nation builders and mythologies above all else, and that, when they migrate, they often take the name of their place of origin with them.

INN went through the names of all 6,77,459, inhabited and uninhabited, villages in India, as listed in Census 2011 — data for which was released recently. Lord Ram ranks way up there, with 3,626 villages named after him, in almost all parts of the country except Kerala, while Lord Krishna is a close second at 3,309.

Asad Owaisi: A Hi-Shift From Traditional Muslim Politico

By GHULAM AHMED | INNLIVE

India has traditionally had Muslim politicians who attempt to carve careers within the big political parties like the Congress and the BJP or in the Left and regional parties.

They gain attention through their ability to deliver the Muslim vote for parties but do not usually attain national prominence owing to the competitive field within the community that they operate in.

Maoists Appear Divided Over Tactics During Elections 2014

By Chandan Rai (Guest Writer)

The outlawed CPI (Maoist) appears, which has given a call for boycotting the 16 th Lok Sabha polls, appear to be divided regarding their tactics vis-à-vis the largest democratic exercise worldwide.

If the recent activities of the banned Left Wing Extremist outfit CPI (Maoist) are any indications, they seem to be split over their modus operandi during the 16th Lok Sabha elections. While they have given a poll boycott call in a number of their pocket areas in Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh, the Red rebels have decided to urge the people to opt for the NOTA (none of the above) option in various areas.

Dead Lizard And Now Dead Rat In Mid-Day Meal In Bihar

By Rakesh Yadav | Patna

The Bihar administration seems to have learnt no lesson from the past. First insecticide, then dead lizard, frog and now a dead rat found in the mid-day meal at a government school in Bihar. 

According to media reports, dead rat was found in the mid-day meal served in a plate to a student of a primary school at Saidpur.      

A dead rat was among the things served up as part of the children's mid-day meal at a government school in the Bihar capital, police said on Friday.

Reports state, school authorities prevented children from eating the meal once the rodent was discovered dead in it. 

Alarming Alert: Flesh Bodies For Sale, By Men Too In India

By Tejaswini Pagadala | Hyderabad

Male prostitution, both forced and voluntary, is a reality that is often forgotten in the discourse on gender rights and issues. INNLIVE throws light on the lives of male sex workers in the country. 

As the clock strikes seven every evening, they get down to business. Plain-clothed men, who look just like any other bystander on the road, await their clients. Picked up by women who drive luxury cars, or catering to men looking for cheap sex, they live a clandestine life satisfying the needs of both sexes. Meet Hyderabad’s male sex workers.

Why Kerala Is like Kuwait & Madhya Pradesh Is Like Haiti?

For its level of income, India, as well as many of its states, could do a much better job in taking care of their most vulnerable people.

American poet Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”—“Do I contradict myself/ Very well then I contradict myself/I am large, I contain multitudes”—seems tailor-made for India. Which country can India be compared to, in economic terms? Is India’s level of economic development more or less like Vietnam’s, because their per capita incomes, in international dollars and in purchasing power parity terms, are almost the same?

WANT A 'DOCTORATE DEGREE', PAY 70K TO GET AT HOME

By Sandip Roy / Shillong

The Meghalaya CID is probing a private university for selling degrees. INN finds out how the business operated.

His burning ambition was to become a lecturer at a government college. But 31-year-old Samir Gupta* from Bihar, who teaches at a private school in New Delhi, didn’t want to waste three-five years for a PhD degree.

“I desperately wanted to get a PhD,” says Gupta. “A friend told me about the Shillong- based CMJ University. All I had to do was pay Rs 70,000. I didn’t attend any classes or work on my thesis. Everything was taken care of. I always stayed in touch with the enrolment agent in Bihar. Now, I have a PhD. I’m waiting for my certificate to arrive.”

Bihar’s ‘Osama Laden’ To Contest Against Modi In Varanasi

By Burhan Khan | Varanasi

Meraj Khalid Noor, who is fondly called as Bihar’s own Osama Bin Laden, because of his strange resemblance to the late Al-Qaida leader announced that he would be contesting the Lok Sabha election from Varanasi against BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.

Noor, who is the chief of newly formed political party called ‘Ram India’, said that after much deliberation he has decided to contest polls against PM nominee Narendra Modi from Varanasi.

OpEd: Indian Muslim Voters Do Not Behave Any Differently

By M H Ahssan / INN Live

If, and this is a big If, a Muslim Vote Bank (MVB) existed, it would reveal itself in even a cursory study of the constituencies where Muslims are in a position to determine the outcome of the elections. If it did exist it would be very easy to show how 10-12 per cent of the total electorate was behaving in a manner that was different from the general electoral trends. In fact, the existence of a disconnect between the electoral performance of the so-called non-Muslim seats and the so-called Muslim seats would be the clearest proof of the existence of such a vote bank.

Telangana History: Congress Will Win But TRS May Lose?

By Sanjay Singh / INN Bureau

After initial belligerence, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy has made a complete about turn over the creation of a separate Telengana state. Reddy seem to be doing what Lalu Prasad Yadav did 13 years ago when then NDA government decided to bifurcate Bihar and carve out Jharkhand. “Over my dead body”, a defiant Lalu  then said but soon allowed a resolution for the creation of Jharkhand to be moved in the Bihar assembly and also have it passed.

Reddy is doing the same after threatening to resign over the “destructive decision”, he now wants to abide by the party high command decision and “move on”.

Small States A 'Political Stunt' Without Decentralisation

By Shankkar Aiyar (Guest Writer)

India seems to produce a political paradox almost every week. Indians were told that overall poverty levels fell from 37 per cent in 2004-05 to 21.9 per cent in 2011-12. This did not trigger any review of the idea to give 67 per cent of the population subsidised grains. The chasm between statistics and political arithmetic persists.

Hidden in the reams of data on poverty reduction is an interesting fact. United Andhra Pradesh is among those states which brought down poverty the most. Since 2004, when K Chandrashekar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti was promised Telangana, poverty in united Andhra Pradesh dropped from 29.6 per cent to 9.2 per cent in 2011-12. And the absolute number of those below poverty line has come down from 235 lakh to 78 lakh. World over, poverty reduction is an accepted indicator of growth and governance.

Not Just Bihar: ‘Chalta Hai’ Has Caused Many Disasters

By Salil Vaidya / INN Bureau

On 23 June, 1980, Sanjay Gandhi, the politically-ambitious scion of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty died all of a sudden in a plane crash while piloting the Delhi Flying Club’s newly-acquired Pitts S-2A aircraft. According to his biographer, journalist Vinod Mehta, Sanjay had thrown all caution to the winds. In spite of being a novice pilot, he was indulging in “reckless maneuvers” on that day. On previous occasions he had repeatedly ignored advice from his elder brother Rajiv and others “to wear proper shoes and not chappals while flying.”

The Original Urdu Language Dying A Slow Death In India

By Hamid Ansari (Guest Writer)

Urdu, despite its spread across many States, finds itself to be in a condition of homelessness. It is to be noted that most of the 22 languages now listed in the Eighth Schedule find territorial expression in a ‘home State’. A notable exception to this is Urdu which despite its spread across many States finds itself to be in a condition of homelessness, with all its attendant consequences. Sindhi is in a similar position except for the fact that the total number of Sindhi speakers is 2.57 million. 

Besides being an officially recognised language, Urdu also has an official language status for some specified purposes (whose details vary and condition the impact substantively) in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. According to the Census of India 2001, there were a total of 51.5 million Urdu speakers in the country, amounting to 5.01 per cent of population and constituting the sixth largest language group.

Focus: Can Criminals Really Be Kept Out Of Indian Politics?

By M H Ahssan / INN Bureau

The Supreme Court has struck a blow against criminals in politics. But evildoers will continue to hold sway unless political parties reform themselves. Everyone knows Raja Bhaiyya, the dreaded don from Uttar Pradesh who earned his first criminal case as a teenager and who has a symbiotic relationship with the prisons either as an inmate or as the minister tasked with running them. But ever heard of Bhaiyya Raja?

Satyam Fiasco - Andhra, Bihar Nexus?

By M H Ahssan

The Satyam fraud investigations are meandering into irrelevance. A curious convergence of political, regional and business interests is conspiring to derail the probe.

The prime minister does not want Satyam to sink as it might dent India's global IT image. The UPA's political leadership cannot let a corruption scandal damage Andhra chief minister YS Rajasekhar Reddy (YSR) in an election year. With him goes the Congress party's hope of returning to power as head of the next coalition.

Turfed out of Bihar by the NDA, the political interests of the Lalu Prasad Yadav-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) mesh well with those of the Congress. It partly explains the Andhra-Bihar nexus in the Satyam probe.

The man at the centre of it all, company affairs minister Prem Chand Gupta, is from the RJD. The Andhra Pradesh DGP is a Yadav from Bihar, SSP Yadav. The policeman handling the Andhra CID probe is inspector-general of police VSK Kaumudi. When he was with the CBI some years back, Kaumudi probed Lalu's fodder scam. He obviously knows a thing or two about Lalu's secrets. Lalu and the Andhra CM, thus, have an interest in helping each other out.

There is now strong evidence that the Satyam probe is being effectively sidetracked. Last week, Prem Chand Gupta announced that the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) would be looking into as many as 350 companies linked to Satyam promoter B Ramalinga Raju. This is a disaster. The SFIO is incapable of investigating so many companies in any reasonable time. Any probe that can continue till kingdom come is essentially a plan to scuttle the investigations.

Now let's see how the central and state governments did everything to misdirect the probe. On January 7, Raju -- of his own volition --sent a confessional letter to the stock exchanges admitting to India's biggest corporate fraud. Nobody forced him to make this confession. To obtain a conviction all that the probe agencies needed to do was to reconfirm the confession in legally valid terms so that he could be convicted. But they didn't do that.

For two days, both Centre and state sat on their hands. The Andhra CID jumped into the act only when it seemed like Sebi might get to Raju before anybody else. They arrested him, and shoved him into judicial custody. No less a person than former Sebi chief M Damodaran has said that this was essentially a ploy to protect Raju, not to ferret out the details of the fraud from him.

It took Sebi four weeks, and an application to the Supreme Court, to finally get anywhere near Raju. Meanwhile, politicians must have had enough time to destroy the evidence, threaten Raju into silence, and obtain his concurrence on whatever plot they had in mind to get him and themselves out of the mess.

It is obvious who is really being protected: the Andhra chief minister. The Satyam scandal was essentially about the misuse of corporate funds for private purposes, including the purchase of benami land and wangling lucrative contracts from the Andhra government. It is impossible for land deals to be done in the state without the chief minister's nod.

Mind you, YSR is not your gentleman CM either. He is "widely believed to have risen to power on the basis of murder, loot and terror", a senior columnist wrote in 2004. You can say that murder, loot and terror is often the currency of state-level politics, but you can't get away from the fact that YSR will stop at nothing to get what he wants. His son managed to obtain crores in funding for his newspaper merely by calling on businessmen friends. You have to be stupid to believe that businessmen will cough up crores to invest in losing newspaper ventures. The chief minister's son is not known for his journalistic credentials.

But it's not all the Andhra CM's doing. At the Centre, he got help from Prem Chand Gupta, who has done everything to lead the probe in the wrong direction. On January 11, he announced the names of Deepak Parekh, Kiran Karnik and C Achuthan as Satyam's new board members. The board was supposed to elect a chairman the next day. It didn't happen. Media reports were that Gupta wanted his say on appointments.

The tussle ended only when an insider and Raju crony, AS Murty, was appointed CEO. Quite apart from the impropriety of appointing someone closely linked with Raju to run the company, the chairman's appointment followed that of the CEO. If the board was truly independent, it should have insisted on the opposite: chairman first, CEO next.

The Satyam saga is thus headed towards a stalemate, with truth being the ultimate casualty. The last act in the farce will probably happen after the Lok Sabha elections, when Ramalinga Raju can go back on his January 7 confession. He could say he was pressured into sending the confession, possibly a political or business blackmailer. Even better, he could say the confession was a forgery. It's happened before. After that, the Satyam probe will have reached a dead end.

Analysis: What Exactly Is On L K Advani's Mind?

By Saba Naqvi / New Delhi

Unrewarded labour is indeed a terrible human condition. Lesser men and women lose the yen to keep going. But not L.K. Advani, the self-confessed “political Hindu” with the Protestant work ethic. Still, in moments of existential angst, he may have contemplated the fruits of his many labours. If his goal had been to bring the BJP to the national stage, he had achieved that two decades ago. But if the goalpost had shifted along the way to becoming the prime minister of India or, short of that, remaining in perpetuity the pre-eminent leader of the BJP, he must feel thwarted.

To understand one’s own limits is a sign of great wisdom, they say. Advani showed this in putting aside his own ambitions to project Atal Behari Vaj­payee as the PM-in-waiting in 1996.