Thursday, December 16, 2010

Gautam Adani's Mundra SEZ under Jairam Ramesh's Radar.

The environment ministry today issued a show-cause notice to Mundra Port and Special Economic Zone Limited, a private port and special economic zone being developed on the west coast of the country, for alleged violation of the provisions of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification.

Acting on a complaint of NGO Machimar Adhikar Sangharsh Sangathan, the ministry asked the port to reply in 15 days why the clearance accorded to the West port and North port and the environmental clearance accorded to the township project by Gujarat State Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA) should not be cancelled.

Gautam Adani, the Gujarat based industrialist is considered to be close to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and has flouted envir0nmental rules to develop Mundra .

Issue has been noticed to Mundra SEZ on 15 grounds.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

IPS officers transferred in Gujarat.

A dozen IPS officers have been transferred. Official announcement is likely to be made very soon.
Names are
1. Satish Verma will be new JCP Traffic
2. Mohan Jha will head the Crime Branch.
3. Radhakrishnan will be the Joint Commissioner sector 1, Surat
4. Parghi: DIG Bhuj
5. Gondiya will head Civil Defence
6. Manoj Agarwal will head State Crime Record Bureau
7. K K Ojha has been transferred to armed unit
8. Zameer will be new DCP zone 5, ahmedabad
9 .Brijesh Jha will head VVIP security
10 Rajiv Ranjan Bhagat will be new DCP zone 1, ahmedabad
11. Deepak Swarup will be additional DGP SC and ST
12. Tirthraj will be additional DGP Armed Unit.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Sohrabuddin case: Amit Shah gets furthur respite.

Former MoS home, Gujarat Amit Shah has got a further respite from the apex court. In a crucial hearing today where the CBI was keeping its fingers crossed about Amit Shah's bail being cancelled, the court has adjourned the matter. The matter is now scheduled for hearing on january 27 2011.
This is like a slap on the CBI's face. The sohrabuddin fake encounter case stands weakened.
Today's supreme court development means Amit Shah cannot enter Gujarat but is literally a free bird for a furthur period.
CBI is in for a lot of criticism for the manner in which it is handling the case.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Abhay Chudasama's father dead.

Suspended cop Abhay Chudasama’s father Devsang Chudasama, passed away today early morning (Dec 12,2010)at his native village Ratanpur in Vallabhipur taluka in Bhavnagar district. He was 84 years old.

Popularly known as Devsangdada, Abhay Chudasama’s father had devoted his life to educate underprivileged village children.

Abhay Chudasama’s arrest in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case had shocked him and he had taken ill subsequently.

Abhay Chudasam who underwent a hip replacement surgery on December 9 is in a city hospital and could not travel and attend the last rites of his father. However, just before the surgery, Chudasama through a special permission given by a local court travelled to Bhavnagar on November 24 with police escort and visited his father in the Wockhardt hospital. After visiting his father, Abhay Chudasama who had reported back to Nadiad jail as per the court order was immediately admitted to a city based ortho hospital in Ahmedabad where he underwent a major seven hour surgery.

Abhay ‘s father headed the Bhalsangh Seva Mandal that ran a residential school in Ratanpur.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

New Appointnments made by Union cabinet committe on appointments.

Union cabinet committee on appointments has approved the following appointments:

1. Ms. Naini Jayaseelan, IAS(UT:80) as Adviser, Planning Commission in the rank and pay of Additional Secretary.

2. Shri Arbind Prasad, IAS(BH:80), presently Joint Secretary, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment as Advisor, Planning Commission in the rank and pay of Additional Secretary.

3. Shri Anup K. Pujari, IAS(KN:80) as Director General of Foreign Trade under the Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, in the rank and pay of Additional Secretary.

4. Shri Shyam S.Agarwal, IAS(RJ:80), as Additional Secretary, Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, on in-situ basis, by temporarily upgrading the post.

5. Shri Upendra Tripathy, IAS(KN:80), as Additional Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, on in-situ basis, by temporarily upgrading the post.

6. Ms. Nandita Chatterjee, IAS (WB:80), as DDG, CAPART, under the Department of Rural Development, Ministry of Rural Development, in the rank and pay of Additional Secretary, on in-situ basis, by temporarily upgrading the post.

7. Shri Satish Balram Agnihotri, IAS(OR:80), as Director General of Shipping under the Ministry of Shipping, in the rank and pay of Additional Secretary.

8. Shri Ashok Lavasa, IAS(HY:80), as Additional Secretary, Ministry of Power.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Delusions of Power and Grandeur.

Every journalist worth her salt or sometimes not worth anything also suffers from delusions of grandeur and power.
Who makes journos powerful?
or gives them this illusion of being powerful and being in control.
We meet and interact with a good number of individuals. Yes, we do need to humour our sources but does that "humouring" up mean we sell our souls?
We will tackle this issue in next few days...
Credibility is the biggest asset of those who manage this blog. Nope, accusations dont hurt us because we are clear. We are not ideologically bankrupt and do not make any claims of being "neutral". It is simply that we believe that no development, growth or governance can be justified if it is not seconded by a sound and equitably just social system. We like to believe and rigidly believe that economic growth has a hollow connotation if our moral values show a deficit.
Any economic growth along with a moral deficit as a partner is soul wrenching and we do not subscribe to this module.
In the coming days, we plan to take this debate further.

The rotting of New India.

The rotting of New India

Pankaj Mishra


A scandalous collusion involving politicians and the media has exposed India's ethical deficit

  • pankaj

  • Imagine, if it's possible, that Jeremy Paxman and Matthew Parris are recorded on tape advising a corporate lobbyist how to get her favoured MP into the coalition cabinet. Then imagine that this MP is accused of defrauding the national exchequer of billions of pounds. This is the scandal that unfolded in India last week – more disturbing and revealing for the Indian public than anything from WikiLeaks.

    In addition to this story, in one of the audio recordings intercepted by India's income tax department (and now widely available on the internet), Vir Sanghvi, a leading columnist and TV host, is heard offering his services to Niira Radia, a lobbyist for two of India's biggest corporate houses, the Tatas and Reliance Industries.

    "What kind of story do you want?" Sanghvi asks Radia, and goes on to offer a "scripted" and "rehearsed" television interview to her client, Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man. Another tape has Prabhu Chawla, an editor with India Today – India's biggest-circulation news magazine in English – explaining to Radia how Ambani might win his supreme court battle against his brother. "Everything is fixed nowadays," he hints darkly. Barkha Dutt – who hosts a popular TV show called We, the People – can also be heard offering to relay messages from Radia to politicians whom Radia wants to influence in the process of forming a cabinet.

    Radia's candidate – A Raja – did indeed go on to become the telecommunications minister. He now stands accused of depriving the national exchequer of $39bn by selling mobile phone "2G spectrum" bandwidth cheaply to, among other telecom companies, Tata – represented by Radia. Under pressure from opposition parties and the supreme court, Raja resigned last month. The journalists caught on tape have preferred to brazen it out, insisting that they were only squeezing a likely source for information.

    At first it seemed they might get away with it when such high-circulation mainstream newspapers as the Times of India and the Hindustan Times refused to cover the scandal. But public anger, amplified by the internet, may now be making the censorship unsustainable.

    Yesterday Dutt appeared on her own TV channel, claiming she was guilty of nothing more than an "error of judgment". Her prickly defence – that only a naive journalist would see something newsworthy in the oversized influence of corporate lobbyists on political processes – pointed to a deeper rot in the New India beloved of business and political elites. As Sonia Gandhi, the Congress party leader, put it: the country's economy may "increasingly be dynamic, but our moral universe seems to be shrinking ... The principles on which Independent India was founded, for which a generation of great leaders fought and sacrificed their all, are in danger of being negated."

    Indeed, for influential Indians the model of a "great" leader today is provided by Narendra Modi, the business-friendly Hindu nationalist chief minister of Gujarat who is accused of complicity in the murder of more than 2,000 Muslims in 2002. Ratan Tata, one of the most respectable names in Indian business, hails Modi as a "dynamic leader".

    It is too easy, however, to focus on the moral obtuseness of a few journalists and businessmen. A broader consensus exists within the middle class beneficiaries of India's economy, a wider culture of deference to powerful and wealthy people, and intolerance and meanness towards the poor and defenceless, and their few articulate defenders. Mainstream journalists too have succumbed to this political pathology. What the tapes reveal most vividly is not spectacular corruption – not exactly news – so much as why the supposed watchdogs of democracy have assumed the militant aggressiveness and vanity of the very privileged in a wretchedly poor country.

    Ratan Tata, whose conversations with Radia were also recorded, now complains that India is turning into a "banana republic". But Tata's own praise of Modi signified the ethical deficit among India's rich and powerful. Certainly, Sanghvi sounded like a Latin American oligarchist when, criticising the US decision to deny Modi a visa, he argued: "Modi may be a mass murderer. But he is our mass murderer." Claiming to speak for the "educated Indian middle class", Sanghvi asserted that "we are entirely justified in being angered" by Arundhati Roy's recent remarks on India's military occupation of Kashmir.

    Marvelling about a "concept of Indian unity" that endorses extrajudicial execution and torture, the social psychologist Ashis Nandy recently wondered if there was "a large enough section of India's much-vaunted middle class fully sensitive to the demands of democracy". Or could it be that, far from upholding progressive values, many exalted Indians, including journalists, will do anything to protect "their new-found social status and political clout"?

    Certainly, these revelations and their attempted suppression by mainstream media not only validate Nandy's grim diagnosis. They also confirm his suspicion that, notwithstanding the anarchist culture of WikiLeaks, the future of censorship in India is "very bright".