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Punish officers who allow unauthorised constructions in Bengaluru: HC

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The Karnataka state government is under pressure to take action against officers who are found to have failed to prevent unauthorised construction.

The Karnataka High Court has sought the state government’s response to a PIL asking for the government to take action against jurisdictional officers over unauthorised construction in their area. A division bench including Chief Justice Dinesh Maheshwari and Justice S Sujatha asked the counsel appearing on behalf of the state government about its response to the PIL, filed by Umapathi S, an advocate based in Bengaluru.

The petitioner raised the complaint that the state government has not yet laid out punishment for jurisdictional officers in case they failed to prevent unauthorised construction. The officers found guilty are liable for punishment as per Section 321B of the Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act, 1976.

The Act was brought in to keep illegal constructions in check by taking action against erring officials.

The petitioner further added that since 2013 the issue has been pulled up by the High Court on a number of occasions, but punishments have yet to be prescribed. The petitioner also pointed out that it has been more than 11 years since the punishments were mentioned in Section 321 B of the KMC Act in 2007.

The overall-in-charges of local bodies and urban development, BBMP officials are protected by legal lapses due to the lack of penalties imposed on those proven to be guilty of allowing illegal constructions to take place, the petition noted.

The counsel appearing for the government told the High Court that the issue is currently being discussed by the government. The hearing in the case was adjourned to November 28.

Over the years, illegal building constructions in lake bed areas and on storm water drains have become a point of contention in the city. The situation prompted then speaker KB Koliwad to issue a panel report on illegal encroachment in the city in 2017, which named many prominent builders in the city.

PTI

All party meet today over Supreme Court’s decision to review Sabarimala order

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Initial jubilation after Tuesday’s five-judge Supreme Court bench decision, to reconsider its September judgment that allowed women of all ages to enter the Sabarimala temple, was muted when news trickled that the apex court had not stayed its earlier verdict. Now, stakeholders including the Kerala government, protesting devotees and political outfits admit that the Supreme Court’s decision to revisit its earlier verdict has added more confusion.

With just three days left to the annual pilgrimage season to start, fingers are crossed. The stalemate has also affected preparations. Flood-ravaged Pambha, the main base camp of the temple, remain crippled without any facility. The row has taken a toll on preparations, say regulars at the temple adding that instead of restoring basic facilities the government has waded into an unseemly controversy. The state government’s ‘rebuild Kerala’ slogan after the flood of the century has been swept away in the temple tide.

Protestors believe that if women enter the temple during the 61-day window period when the shrine opens, all review petitions will turn invalid so they have decided to step up their vigil. The hill temple will open on Saturday and close only on January 14, with a small break in between. There will be two breaks–Mandalam (November 16-December 27) and Makara vilakku (December 30-Jan 14, 2019).

However, the state government has made it clear that if any woman decides to trek to the temple during this period it is duty-bound to provide security.

Sensing opportunity opposition parties have upped their ante. Congress, which has been keeping a low-profile, has jumped on the bandwagon with party working president K Sudhakaran saying that party workers will stop women in the 10-50 age group entering the temple. RSS leader Valsan Thilankeri went further warning the government that it will have to pay a heavy price if customs were flouted.

“The temple is not a war zone. We need free movement of devotees as well. We hope after the all-party meet on Thursday everything will be settled,” said Travancore Dewasom Board president A Padmakumar. The BJP has said that it will walk out of the meet if it failed to get an assurance from CM?Pinarayi Vijayan.

When Kerala police opened its popular portal, sabariamalaq.com, last week at least 560 women in the 10-50 age group have registered for a ‘darshan’ during the seasonal pilgrimage. To add to its woes, Bhumata Brigade leader Trupti Desai has announced her intention to visit the temple on Saturday. She has sent a letter to the CM seeking protection to her six member group. More women including social activists are expected to arrive unannounced.

The overstretched police force says they expect a tumultuous season this year. “Unlike earlier two occasions, monthly pooja and the one-day chithiray attam, are very sensitive. Even a minor scuffle can lead to major mishap. If political leadership won’t arrive at a consensus there are possibilities of stampede or bloodshed,” said a senior police official on condition of anonymity. He added that the hilltop was a ticking bomb. The TDB commissioner has also submitted a report to the High Court that any tension can trigger mishaps. According to an estimate of the TDB during peak season, more than 8-10 lakh pilgrims visit the temple every day.

CVoter Survey: Assembly polls major test of Narendra Modi’s popularity as Congress eyes 4-0 win ahead of 2019

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Two prominent BJP slogans have been missing from its ongoing campaign for five states — the promise of achche din and the dream of Congress-mukt Bharat. The reason for the BJP’s reluctance to reuse its popular jumlas from previous elections is apparent: Elections for these states do not portend achche din for the party, and the Congress appears set for an impressive comeback instead of getting wiped out of India.

For the first time since the advent of the Narendra Modi-era in politics, the Congress, as several surveys point out, starts as the frontrunner in this round of elections.

According to CVoter, it might sweep Rajasthan, win Telangana and win Madhya Pradesh by a small margin. Even in Chhattisgarh, the Congress is locked in a close contest with a slight lead over the BJP that could be decisive.

Just a few months ago, with the BJP decapitating its rivals ruthlessly in elections and the Modi-Amit Shah duo looking unassailable, who would have thought the Congress might be dreaming of a 4-0 win and the BJP would be fearing a wipeout? But, as Richie Benaud would have said, it’s all happening here.

Representational image. AP

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rajasthan, by electoral behaviour, is a state of extremes. Its impatient and fickle voters swing from one end of the spectrum to the other in almost every election, turning objects of their adulation into subjects of scorn and ridicule. But, the problem with the BJP in Rajasthan is that its government became extremely unpopular very early in its tenure.

The BJP had invested almost two decades in Raje. She is the party’s most popular face in the stae and nobody else in the party has a pan-Rajasthan appeal. Her falling graph and projected loss imply the BJP will have to find new faces to lead the party in 2019 to neutralise the anger against Raje.

If the BJP is still in the race in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, it needs to be more grateful to the Opposition than its own governments in these states. There is palpable anti-incumbency against Chouhan, reflected in the decline in his own popularity. Any other opponent would have harnessed it for electoral gains but the Congress got caught in infighting and failed to get its campaign off the ground for a very long time. This led people to doubt the Congress’ ability to win the election, thus, activating the TINA (there is no alternative) factor in Chouhan’s favour.

In Chhattisgarh, similarly, the BJP is still in the fight because of a division in the anti-government vote. Ajit Jogi and Mayawati are taking away a small but decisive chunk of votes away from the Congress, helping the BJP in a triangular contest. Had the Congress done something to address the Mayawati-Jogi problem, it would have started as a clear frontrunner in the state.

Also, voters in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are clear about their choice for the prime minister’s post — most of them prefer Modi over Rahul Gandhi. This clarity in the voter’s mind may be a blessing for the BJP in 2019. But this year, it could be a curse, since voters are likely to convince themselves that voting the BJP out in the Assembly elections won’t be an act of disloyalty if they support Modi in the Lok Sabha. This dichotomy of faith is summed up by a slogan reverberating in Rajasthan: Modi tujh se bair nahin, Raje teri khair nahin (No animosity with Modi but won’t spare Raje).

 

India-Singapore Hackathon boost to technology, youth power: Modi

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Presenting awards to six winners of the first-ever India-Singapore Hackathon here on Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the platform would boost technology, innovation and youth power.

The top six teams — three each from India and Singapore — were chosen after a final pitching session.

The winning teams from India were from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur), National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (NIT Trichy) and MIT College of Engineering, Pune.

Among the winning teams from Singapore were Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

“Platforms like the Singapore-India Hackathon serve as excellent opportunities for our youngsters to showcase their work. They also serve as forums to learn about pioneering innovations by youngsters from other nations and institutes. A win-win for our students!,” Modi said.

A first prize of SGD 10,000, a second prize of SGD 6,000 and a third prize of SGD 4,000 was announced for each of the three winners from India and Singapore.

After meeting the winners of the hackathon, Modi said he was “impressed by their passion and commitment towards solving problems our world faces”.

The Prime Minister arrived in Singapore on Wednesday on a two-day visit to attend the East Asia Summit, Asean-India informal meet and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Summit.

He also delivered the keynote address at the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF) on Wednesday.

Twenty teams each from both countries comprising university and college students were selected for the Hackathon. Each team had three students and one dedicated mentor.

They participated in the 36-hour long hackathon working on 20 problem statements. The hackathon ended with the “Grande Finale” on Wednesday.

The problem statements for the hackathon were in the areas of mapping, synchronised output of diverse social media, shared digital identity verification, effective number estimate, space management and allotment, effective learning, and personal security.

K’taka cabinet expansion will take place this month : Dinesh Gundu Rao

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The much-awaited expansion of the HD Kumaraswamy-led coalition cabinet in Karnataka will take place within this month, state Congress chief Dinesh Gundu Rao said on Wednesday.

Pointing out that JD(S) patriarch and former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda was out of town, Mr Rao said, once he was back, the issue would be discussed with him.

“It will be done this month itself,” he told reporters in Bengaluru.

Congress general secretary in-charge of Karnataka K C Venugopal has already said it will happen, he pointed out.

The cabinet expansion and appointment of MLAs as heads of boards and corporations that was to take place in October was put on the backburner by the Congress-JD(S) coalition, as the schedule for November 3 bypolls to two assembly and three parliamentary seats in the state was announced.

Several MLAs, especially those from the Congress, who are aspirants for minister’s post have been demanding that the expansion is taken up at the earliest.

Moreover, according to sources close to the legislators, many MLAs feel that this is the right time for cabinet expansion, with theCongress-JD(S)coalition winning two of the three Lok Sabha seats and both the assembly constituencies.

This would be the second expansion of the cabinet since the coalition came to power in May in a post-poll tie-up between Congress and JD(S).

Under the power-sharing arrangement reached by the two parties, Congress will have 22 ministers and the JD(S) 12.

In the earlier exercise on June 6, HD Kumaraswamy had inducted 25 ministers, taking the ministry’s strength to 27.

However, the lone BSP Minister in the coalition cabinet N Mahesh, who was inducted from JD(S) side, had quit his post in October citing personal reasons, but said he would continue to support the ruling coalition.

There are now six vacant ministerial positions left for the Congress, and two for the JD(S).

The decision to expand the cabinet has come amid speculation that some disgruntled Congress MLAs were still being wooed by the BJP, besides reported factionalism within the party.

With growing number of aspirants and limited ministerial berths in hand, Congress was preparing a list of MLAs to be appointed as heads to boards and corporations, in an effort to prevent any kind of resentment, party source said

PTI

Govt will never cancel Tipu Jayanti celebration at any cost: HDK

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Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy informed that Tipu Jayanti celebrations will not be cancelled at any cost.

Addressing media persons after offering floral tribute to the statue of former Prime Minister Late Jawaharlal Nehru he said that he was unable to participate in the Tipu Jayanti celebrations owing to his ill-health. He further added that coalition government will never cancel the Tipu Jayanti celebrations and will continue to celebrate Tipu Jayanti in the coming years.

Responding to a query on the provocative remarks made by Santhosh Thammaiah, Kumaraswamy said “As of now I do not have much information regarding the arrest of Santhosh Thammaiah, I will talk to the concerned officials regarding it and will get back to you”

PTI

Signature Bridge scuffle: Arvind Kejriwal in trouble? Manoj Tiwari names Delhi CM as an accused in FIR

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Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has been named as an accused in a FIR lodged by the Delhi Police on the complaint of BJP state unit chief and MP Manoj Tiwari in connection with the scuffle that took place during the inauguration ceremony of Signature Bridge.

The available footage showed Tiwari who was standing at the edge of an elevated platform when an AAP MLA pushed him, causing him to nearly fall.

On November 4, Tiwari got into a brawl with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers and the Delhi Police at the event after which he wrote to Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) North- East Delhi and filed a complaint against AAP Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) Amanatullah Khan, Kejriwal and unknown persons. Khan was caught on camera shoving Tiwari during the inauguration ceremony of the Signature Bridge.
n a video footage of the incident, Tiwari was seen standing at the edge of an elevated platform when Khan, an AAP MLA from Okhla, pushed the BJP’s Delhi unit chief, nearly causing him to fall. A large number of police personnel and AAP workers were also present on the occasion.

While speaking to ANI after the scuffle, Tiwari had claimed that the entire incident took place in front of Kejriwal. He had alleged that he was stopped by the police and AAP supporters from attending the event.

The bridge was inaugurated on November 4 and was opened for the public the next day. It was inaugurated by the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Announced in 2004, the 575-metre bridge over the river Yamuna aims at reducing travel time and traffic congestion between the north-eastern and northern parts of the national capital, and is the first asymmetrical cable-stayed bridge in India.

 

Agencis

Govt proposed to build ‘Mother Cauvery’ statue in Mandya

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The Karnataka state government has reportedly unveiled a proposal to build a statue in honour of ‘Mother Cauvery,’ the river which provides water to three different southern states. The statue will be of a woman holding a pot which is being tipped over, and water will pour out of this pot continuously. Water will be pumped up in order to attain this.

In its proposal, the government stated that the statue would be 125 feet and would be built around the Krishna Raja Sagar reservoir in Karnataka’s Mandya district, located about 90 kilometres from Bengaluru city, according to reports. The project will reportedly costs around Rs 1,200 crores and will span across and area of 400 acres. According to reports, it will be completed in the next two years.

The proposal to build the statue comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unveiled the statue of Sardar Vallabhai Patel in Vadodara Gujarat last month, dubbed the ‘Statue of Unity.’ The structure stands 182 metres tall and cost around Rs 3,000 crores to build.

Along with the ‘Mother Cauvery’ statue, a smaller statue of Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar has also been planned.

The two proposed statues are key attractions in the recent project taken up together by the Tourism and Water Resources Department, in an effort to improve tourism in the state. Media reports have called it a ‘Disneyland-like’ project.

In addition to the statue, this project will also include two glass houses at 360 feet to give an aerial view of the reservoir, a museum, a band stand, an indoor stadium and several replicas of historical monuments, all intended to help increase tourism in Karnataka.

Karnataka state’s water resources minister, DK Shivakumar, added that while the state is allocating and providing the land for the project, they are looking to rope in private investors for funding of the same.

TNM

#MeToo : India needs policies to empower women in the workplace

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The #MeToo revelations by women against sexual harassment at the workplace hit the global conscience as a compelling case for strengthening women’s economic empowerment. But one crucial question that remains unanswered is what the macroeconomic policy makers of our country think about them. Can they be indifferent to the movement, dismissing it as one to be exclusively dealt with by the legislative fiat of the country?

The conspicuous absence of macro policy makers in the debate may be because social movements on women’s rights and gender justice are hardly ever recognised as an economic issue, when they are indeed a “compelling economic issue”. They encapsulate unhealthy power relations (there are many layers to analyse when a man in power demands sexual favours from his colleagues as his “right”) and associated economic costs. The harassment affects the productivity of a woman in multiple ways. If the fastest and smartest way to a country’s economic growth is by strengthening women’s labour force participation, dismissing the #MeToo revelations as “non-economic” or “private” can have adverse macroeconomic consequences.

Researchers have been pushing for the integration of gender issues in macroeconomic policy debates. However, macro policy makers in general adamantly believe “gender issues” are not their cup of tea. To them, “gender issues” – especially sexual harassment at work – should be confined to decision-making processes in an infinitesimally tiny “intra-household” or largely “private” world within the redressal mechanisms of her office space.

Even researchers, both men and women, are divided on gender in economics. It is a tug of war between the hard-core qualitative world of “compelling story telling” and the rigorous quantitative measurement of gender inequalities. It has been a struggle for feminist economists to push the frontiers of empirical investigation from a marginalised treatment of gender in economics to “gender mainstreaming”.

Budgetary commitments

To put it upfront, even budgets are not gender neutral, for instance. What do the national and subnational budgets of a country consist of to address sexual harassment of women at work and violence against women? This is a crucial “human rights” question. The question of how a country effectively translates gender commitments into budgetary commitments is something we can no longer afford to postpone.

The empirical revelation that budgets are a powerful policy tool to tackle gender inequalities in a country was first made in the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy’s ground-breaking study on “gender diagnosis and budgeting” in 2000. Prior to that, media debates on gender in budget were broadly confined to whether the finance minister had announced “tax cuts in cosmetics” as something done specifically for women. Otherwise, the finance minister focused only on his “core” responsibility of managing deficits, “medium-term fiscal frameworks” and other “macro-fundamentals” that matter for “business as usual”.

Women’s economic empowerment

How much a country spends on the economic empowerment of women is a compelling question, now more than ever before. The genie was out of the bottle when the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy published that targeted public spending for women’s economic empowerment was less than 1% of the Union Budget. Researchers at the institute also flagged that this 1% came from as many as 40 programmes designed in various sectors specifically for women. Though gender budgeting allocations have since improved slightly, the situation of “too many programmes with too little money” demands the immediate attention of public financial management and calls for an urgent convergence of public spending to tackle gender inequalities, with significant budgetary provisions. As women in India’s organised sector are just a small part of the women’s labour force, ensuring macro policies to safeguard women in the informal sector is equally important for holistic women’s economic empowerment.

The United Nations secretary general has formed a high-level panel for women’s economic empowerment and identified gender budgeting as a powerful policy tool to bring about such empowerment. Given the increase in the reporting of sexual harassment of women at work, these policy tools should be used effectively to initiate “ex-ante policies”. What India needs is “ex-ante” policies to address the high rates of sexual harassment faced by women at work in the formal and informal, low-wage and high-wage sectors, and not “ad hoc” and “ex-post” interventions after the incidents have occurred.

 

By : Scroll

Bollywood Buzz  

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Priyadarshan – Aniket – Bhagyashri Celebrated Diwali To Promote ‘Majhya Baikocha Priyakar’
 
Pradeep Sharma of Baba Motion Pictures Pvt Ltd, Deepak Ruia & Rajendra Goenka of Rajkala Movies & Dhaval Jayantilal Gada & Aksshay Jayantilal Gada of Pen India Ltd celebrated Diwali to promote their Marathi film Majhya Baikocha Priyakar at MRP Lounge in Andheri (W) Mumbai where the entire cast of the film was invited.
Everyone came dressed in their ethnic wear. 
 
Zee Music Marathi has released the audio. Priyadarshan Jadhav, Aniket Vishwasrao, Bhagyashri Mote, Priya Gamre, Vivek Kar, Swati Sharma, Suresh Pillai & Choreographer Sanjeev came to be a part of this event. Rajiv Ruia has written & directed this film. Swati Sharma sang her superhit song “Tu Haath Nako Lao from the film. The film is releasing on 23rd Nov, 2018 & is presented & distributed by Pen India Ltd.

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