Rs 10 Crore bill received for looking after Mr. Kasab

It's been about a year since i found time to add something to my blog. The main reason being the blog sites being blocked in my prevoius office. But not now. And this time also its Mr. Kasab again, who has brought me back to write something on my blog..Such an Inspiration right..:)

Recently Maharashtra government received a bill of about Rs 10 Crore towards reimbursement of looking after Kasab. Instead of thinking about is that worth spending that large amount on the terrorist, the Maharashtra Government is writing a letter to the Central government that it cant bear the entire amount and the Central government should help them by giving some money as saving kasab is a national issue, not maharashtra's alone.

Well, i am out of words to tell about the mentality of the government officials. They are asking the central government to give them money to save kasab, instead can't they think that spending such an amount of money on a terrorist is useless. Can't they hang him soon and use the same money for other development rather than wasting money on a terrorist.

May be they dont want him to get hanged, so that they can eat the money using Kasab's name. Bigger Terrorists i can say.

Read on..



Maharashtra government is stunned after receiving a Rs 10 crore bill from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) towards reimbursing expenses on guarding 26/11 terrorist Ajmal Kasab, lodged in the Arthur Road jail here.

Confirming that the state government did receive the Rs 10 crore tag from ITBP, Medha Gadgil, principal secretary, Home, said that the Maharashtra authorities are writing to the ITBP.

"We are in the process of writing to them. We will explain that 26/11 terror attacks is not only an issue limited to Maharashtra but a national issue," she said.

The state government received a request for reimbursement of Rs 10.87 crore from the Director-General, ITBP, New Delhi, R K Bhatia for expenses incurred between March 28, 2009 and September 30, 2010.

"What Kasab and his associates did is an attack not only on Mumbai but an attack on India and it is unfair to ask the state government to bear the burden (for ITBP guarding Kasab)," another senior Home department official said.

The ITPB was deployed in the jail in the run-up to the 26/11 trial, held in a special sessions court set up in the jail premises.

Last year, the home department sought an extension for the deployment of the ITBP which comprised around 200 commandos, armed with sophisticated weaponry and communication equipment, guarding Kasab 24x7.

The ITBP team was deployed for the trial period, after which the state government wrote to the Centre, seeking an extension, the official said.

Source : Times of India, 24th May 2011

AN IAS officer in India has 220 bank accounts

One more example of corruption and black money existing in India.

An Indian Administrative Officer (IAS) in Chhattisgarh has been found to have a staggering 220 bank accounts and assets worth millions of rupees.

This was revealed after the income tax department raided his residence here, official sources said Saturday.

The IT department raided the houses of some IAS officers and businessmen in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh in the past two days.
Chhattisgarh's Bharatiya Janata Party government is waiting for a final report from the IT department about Agriculture Secretary B.L. Agrawal's assets to initiate action against him.

IT officials searched the residence of Agrawal as well as business establishments of his close relatives Thursday.

On Friday, the officials similarly raided his chartered account Sunil Agrawal's house and came across documents suggesting that the IAS officer had amassed assets disproportionate to his known income.

The officer had at least 220 bank accounts, several of them opened on fake names and addresses, and a few in the names of his domestic helps.
Efforts by IANS to contact B.L. Agrawal failed. A man who answered his mobile telephone said Agrawal was "busy in a meeting".

Income Tax department sources said they were analysing the documents and papers they seized. Some documents suggest he might be involved in hawala transactions, the sources said.

The Madhya Pradesh government had Friday suspended a Bhopal-based IAS couple -- women and child development department principal secretary Tinu Joshi and her husband Arvind Joshi, principal secretary of the jail and parliamentary affairs department. IT department found Rs.3 crore (Rs.30 million) in unaccounted cash in a raid on their residence Thursday.

Brajesh Gupta, Director General of Investigations (I-T) for Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, said bank notes stuffed in a suitcase were recovered from the residence of the couple.

The IT department had also conducted simultaneous raids in Madhya Pradesh at the houses of retired commissioner of the Bhopal Municipal Corporation M.A. Khan, and residences of road and bridge development engineer R.D. Chaudhary, superintending engineer with Power Works Department Deepak Asai, his wife Jyoti Asai, and businessmen Sunil Agrawal and Pawan Agrawal dealing in fertilisers besides ICICI Bank manager Seema Jaiswal and bank agent Bharti Bhasne's.

Source: www.deccanherald.com, Feb 06 2010

Fighting corruption in India - The Zero Rupee Way

People in India are finding new ways to fight corruption. They are so frustrated about this whole thing in government offices that they dont know what to do since your work will not be done until you pay hefty money as corruption. Hence people find innovative ways to frustrate the government officials.

Read On..



A ZERO-SUM game is one in which the gains of one player are exactly balanced by the losses of another. In India a local non-governmental organisation has invented a new sort of zero sum which, it hopes, will leave everyone better off: the zero-rupee note.

What on earth is the point of that? The note is not legal tender. It is simply a piece of paper the colour of a 50-rupee note with a picture of Gandhi on it and a value of nothing. Its aim is to shame corrupt officials into not demanding bribes.

The idea was dreamt up by an expatriate Indian physics professor from the University of Maryland who, travelling back home, found himself harassed by endless extortion demands. He gave the notes to the importuning officials as a polite way of saying no. Vijay Anand, president of an NGO called 5th Pillar, thought it might work on a larger scale. He had 25,000 zero-rupee notes printed and publicised to mobilise opposition to corruption. They caught on: his charity has distributed 1m since 2007.

One official in Tamil Nadu was so stunned to receive the note that he handed back all the bribes he had solicited for providing electricity to a village. Another stood up, offered tea to the old lady from whom he was trying to extort money and approved a loan so her granddaughter could go to college.

Mr Anand thinks the notes work because corrupt officials so rarely encounter resistance that they get scared when they do. And ordinary people are more willing to protest, since the notes have an organisation behind them and they do not feel on their own. Simple ideas like this don’t always work. When India’s government put online the names of officials facing trial for corruption, the list became a convenient guide for whom to bribe. But, says Fumiko Nagano of the World Bank, transforming social norms is the key to fighting petty corruption and the notes help that process. They are valueless, but not worthless.

Source: www.economist.com, 28th Jan 2010

Bhopal gas disaster's legacy lives on 25 years later

Today is December 3rd 2009. Exactly 25 years ago on this day, one of the worst industrial disaster in Indian history happened in Bhopal. Thousands of people died, lakhs of people are still affected by this disaster. At least now the government should take some immediate measures and provide some proper medical attention to all the people affected in that area.

Read On..

The Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) disaster in Bhopal, Bhopal disaster or Bhopal gas tragedy was an industrial disaster that took place at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. At midnight on 3 December 1984, the plant accidentally released methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas, exposing more than 500,000 people to MIC and other chemicals. The first official immediate death toll was 2,259. The government of Madhya Pradesh has confirmed a total of 3,787 deaths related to the gas release.Others estimate 8,000-10,000 died within 72 hours and 25,000 have since died from gas-related diseases.

Some 25 years after the gas leak, 390 tonnes of toxic chemicals abandoned at the Union Carbide plant continue to pollute the ground water in the region and affects thousands residents of Bhopal who depend on it. There are currently civil and criminal cases related to the disaster ongoing in the United States District Court, Manhattan and the District Court of Bhopal, India against Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical Company, with arrest warrants pending against Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster.

Summary of background and causes:

During the night of December 2–3, 1984, large amounts of water entered tank 610, containing 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate. The resulting reaction increased the temperature inside the tank to reach over 200 °C (392 °F), raising the pressure to a level the tank was not designed to withstand. This forced the emergency venting of pressure from the MIC holding tank, releasing a large volume of toxic gases. The reaction sped up because of the presence of iron in corroding non-stainless steel pipelines. A mixture of poisonous gases flooded the city of Bhopal, causing great panic as people woke up with a burning sensation in their lungs. Thousands died immediately from the effects of the gas and many were trampled in the panic.

Hundreds of children are still being born with birth defects as a result of the world's worst industrial disaster 25 years ago. They are demanding that the Indian government provide immediate medical care and research the "hidden" health impacts.

The true legacy of the disaster is only now coming to light. The Indian government stopped all research on the medical effects of the gas cloud 14 years ago, without explanation. Despite the country's supreme court ordering that the children of victims receive insurance, more than 100,000 remain without cover.

Satinath Sarangi of the Sambhavna Trust, which helps to rehabilitate victims, said that the Bhopal victims' penury and low social status meant few are prepared to help. No one, he says, has taken responsibility for cleaning up the site and paying the high cost of medical bills."Because these people are poor or from a minority or lower caste no one seems to care. Their lives and their children are being sacrificed for the cause of industrial progress," Sarangi said.

One of the mothers, Kesar Bhai, held her 12-year-old son Suraj in her arms. She had inhaled the noxious fumes in 1984 and was hospitalised but recovered. Her son, Suraj, was born brain damaged and cannot sit or talk. "My husband is a labourer. We have no money to spend on our son. He cannot even eat on his own. I get free medical care for my breathing difficulties because I am a gas victim. My child does not get any help but he has been affected," she said.

Other children's growth had been stunted, said campaigners, because there has been still no clean-up of the Bhopal plant despite a promise from the prime minister in 2006. So far, less than 20% of the funds set aside to dismantle and make safe the plant have been spent. The disused Union Carbide factory contains about 8,000 tonnes of carcinogenic chemicals which continue to leach out and contaminate water supplies used by 30,000 local people. The clean-up has been stalled by a mixture of bureaucratic indifference, legal actions and rows over corporate responsibility.

Source: Wikipedia.org, www.guardian.co.uk

Woman walks 110 km in 15 days for medical help in Chhattisgarh

As the population of India is keep on increasing, the medical facilities in rural areas are becoming bad to worse. The governments negligence towards rural people's health is also to be blamed. If this keep on increasing, the life expectancy and death ratio will increase exponentially.

Read On..

Such is the state of medical care in Chhattisgarh that a woman had to walk 110 km for 15 days to reach a government-run hospital to get her burnt hands treated.

In September, Phoolwati, 25, and her husband Roop Singh were burnt when the kerosene stove burst in their hut in Bakalo village within the jurisdiction of the Kapu police station in Raigarh district. Sans any medical treatment, Roop Singh battled his burn injuries for a week and then died.

Phoolwati then found insects crawling inside her burnt hands and realised she had no option but to go to the district headquarters here and seek medical treatment. There was no government-run health facility nearby that could tackle her problem.

‘I did not have a single paisa to get treatment from any private doctor or to get into a bus so that I could come here. So I had no option but to walk the 110 km to get admitted to Raigarh hospital. I had found several insects in my burn wounds and the problem was getting worse every day,’ Phoolwati told IANS at the hospital.
Raigarh is 240 km northeast of state capital Raipur.

‘During the entire 15-day journey I begged for food from local people alongside the road. Here a worker in a medicine shop brought me to the district government hospital. The doctor here removed all the insects. Now I feel my injuries have healed a little,’ the childless widow said in between sobs.

A. Tirki, the doctor who operated upon Phoolwati, said: ‘Her wound was filled with dozens of insects when she came to me last week. I have cleaned up her wounds and hopefully within a fortnight she will recover. But she would surely have lost both her hands if she had reached the hospital even a week later.’

Source: trak.in, 20 Nov 2009

This is where the tax money goes in India

We pay hefty tax and our tax money is being robbed by government officers cheating the Indian government by creating fake employees and robbing the tax money on their behalf. Reports say that this has been happening for years. If all our money goes into the government officials account in one or the other way, where will the development happen ?

Read On..

In a startling disclosure, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi on Wednesday said it has found 22,853 'ghost employees' on its payrolls, an administration lapse that has been costing the civic body a whopping Rs 17 crore (Rs 170 million) every month.

An inquiry by Municipal Commissioner K S Mehra, the report of which was submitted to Delhi Mayor Kanwar Sain, has revealed the extent of irregularity that both ruling BJP and opposition Congress in MCD said has been going on 'for years'.

"The probe has found that MCD has 22,853 employees who are missing -- in other words, they can be called as fake employees," Sain said.

"This necessitate further investigation to ascertain the fate of 22,853 employees supposed to be drawing salary from MCD treasury which is estimated to the tune of Rs 17 crore per month," he said.

Sain said the MCD will 'go into the full depth of the matter' by conducting a vigilance inquiry and 'take strict disciplinary action against defaulting officials'.

The probe was ordered after the biometric system of attendance, introduced by the civic body in August 2008 and later extended to all MCD zones, brought out a gap in the data given by drawing and disbursing officers and the number of employees enrolled for biometric attendance.

The report said while the total employees are 127,094, only 1,04,241 have been accounted for, which indicates that there is a gap of 22,853 employees.

The report said as per the information provided by the DDOs and HODs of various Departments, the total number of sanctioned posts of various categories in MCD is 119,706.

Against these, total number of employees and officers working is 98,013. As such, 21,695 vacant posts in the regular category exist in the MCD.

In addition, 29,081 employees of miscellaneous categories which include daily wagers, safai karamcharies, and part time domestic breeding checkers are working in the MCD in various departments. As such, the total number of employees of both the above categories working in the MCD comes to 127,094.

The Mayor said biometric system of attendance has been a grand success in the MCD and could be termed as a key reformist measure in good governance.

Leader of House Subhash Arya said the ruling BJP has to be credited for bringing in the biometric system. "This has helped in bringing out the irregularities. This has been going on for years and was also there during the Congress tenure but they did not do anything."

"We will find out the names of all these employees, who appointed them at whose recommendation and any official found guilty will face criminal cases," he said.

Leader of Opposition J K Sharma demanded a CBI inquiry into the matter, claiming that the corporation suffered a loss of Rs 2,000 to 2,500 crore (Rs 20-25 billion) due to the 'scam'.

"We congratulate the commissioner for bringing out the facts and we want a CBI probe. Those found guilty should be dismissed. This has been going on for 20 to 25 years. We will also raise the issue politically," he said.

Source: Rediff.com, November 25, 2009

A ration card in the name of Mahatma Gandhi

Father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi got his new ration card recently :)
History rewritten. Nathuram Godse was the father of Mahatma Gandhi..

Believe it or not - the authorities in Andhra Pradesh have issued a ration card in the name of Mahatma Gandhi along with his picture!

What is more shocking is that the card named Nathuram Godse, the killer of Mahatma Gandhi, as his father. Godse, however, has been misspelt as Godsay.

Chittoor district collector V Seshadari has ordered a probe after the ration card, carrying a fictitious address, was detected during a verification drive in the district to wee out bogus cards.

The card was issued in Chuttagunta village of Ramachandrapuram mandal in Chittoor district. It carried the picture of Gandhi with the name of MK Gandhi Thatha (Thatha in Telugu means grandfather), age 65, father's name Godsay, address 15-46541, Gandhi Street, Gandhi Road. The address was that of a fair price shop owner.

Seshadari has constituted a three-member committee to probe the matter and take action against the officers responsible.

Action is likely to be taken against those who were entrusted with the task of taking photographs of the person on whose name the card is issued and affix it on the card. The revenue officials also failed to check the name and address.

This is not the first incident of its kind. In the past, bogus cards in the name of politicians, film stars, sportspersons and even Hindu Gods were detected. However, this time the officials have taken a serious note of the incident as it involved the name and picture of the father of nation.

In June, a ration card issued to one Laxmi of Vizianagaram district with a photograph of tennis star Sania Mirza was detected.

The latest incident once again exposed the collusion between the officials and fair price shop dealers. The authorities have intensified verification as several dealers have managed to get dozens of ration cards in fictitious names.

The white ration card issued to below poverty line families make them eligible to get rice at Rs 2 per kg and social security benefits like health insurance and housing.

The authorities had launched door-to-door verification campaign early this year when it was found that the number of ration cards issued in some districts exceeded the population. The number of bogus cards in the state is estimated to be 3.5 million.

Source: Hindustan Times, November 21, 2009

India Can win Nobel prize for dirt and filth - Jairam Ramesh

Even the ministers are as frustrated as common man when it comes to pollution and dirt control in India. Its easy to say that Indian cities are not clean, they are very polluted, etc., but what are we doing for that. Certain strict measures should be taken immediately so that our environment is saved which results in good health for the people in the future. Even every citizen should do his part in saving their cities from dirt and pollution.

Read On..

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh, known for courting controversy and making candid remarks, on Friday said if there was a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would get it.

Our cities are the dirtiest cities of the world. If there is a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India will win it, no doubt,he said at a function to release a report "Green India 2047" by The Energy Research Institute (TERI).

The minister was talking in reference to poor facilities for disposing municipal waste in a majority of Indian cities.

I think our cities have the dubious distinction of being the dirtiest cities in the world. There is no doubt about it. But if there is a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India will win it hands down. There is no competition for that and we have to do something dramatic on municipal solid waste, Ramesh said.

The report he released states that unclean air and water could be responsible for the death of eight lakh people every year in the country.

Our limited analysis suggests that unclean air and water may be taking a toll in terms of over eight lakh deaths in the country each year and morbidity costs amounting to 3.6% of GDP, the report said.

R K Pachauri, head of TERI and chairman of the Nobel-winning UN IPCC said, It is important for every sector and every section of society to understand that protecting the environment is not a luxury. Its an intimate part of promoting the economic welfare of people.

He added that about 45% of the population did not have access to safe drinking water and the air quality was poor in most Indian cities.

Source: Times Of India, 21 November 2009