Archives for December 2022

RAIPUR: Amid the probe by the Enforcement Directorate in the alleged coal levy scam and the arrest of a few bureaucrats and businessmen, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel on Sunday called the action “vendetta politics” and said he was prepared for more such moves by the Centre.

He also slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government for not releasing funds to Chhattisgarh, adding he would not keep silent over such injustice to his state.

In an interview to PTI, Baghel, who completed four years in office on December 17, said the schemes of his government were aimed at strengthening the rural economy and creating self-employment but admitted there were several poll promises which are yet to be fulfilled.

“We welcome action against corruption. But if the action is politically motivated then it is wrong. Whenever I campaigned in elections in other states, raids were conducted in Chhattisgarh by the central agencies,” Baghel said.

The ED has been probing a money laundering case linked to the alleged levy of money on coal and mining transporters in Chhattisgarh.

It has arrested five persons so far, including IAS officer Sameer Vishnoi and Deputy Secretary in the CM’s office Soumya Chaurasia.

“The BJP does not have acceptability among the people of Chhattisgarh anymore. Anticipating reverses in the Assembly polls (scheduled for late next year) due to the good governance of the Congress government here, the BJP has roped in central agencies to harass and defame my government. Such acts should not be done in politics,” he asserted.

Hinting at the state polls, Baghel said these central probe agencies would become “more active in the coming months” and claimed he was “mentally prepared for it”.

The 61-year-old firebrand Congress leader, who has been vocal against BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leadership, said he shares good relations personally with the Prime Minister, Home Minister, Finance Minister, Defence Minister and all Union ministers.

“But it is my responsibility to fight in the interest of the state. I can speak, write letters and fight for my state’s rights. I don’t consider anything wrong in it. They (Centre) haven’t given Chhattisgarh’s money pending in connection with GST, coal royalty and central excise. If injustice is meted out to us then we will definitely fight,” he asserted.

Baghel said farm loan waiver, procurement of paddy at Rs 2,500 per quintal, rural industrial parks and procurement of minor forest produce and cow dung have been steps taken in the interest of common people.

“We have done a lot in these four years but not everything. There is always room for growth. We have just started and we need to take it further. We took up tasks in adverse circumstances (referring to the COVID-19 pandemic). However, there are many promises that are yet to be fulfilled,” the CM admitted.

He said his government had achieved considerable success against the Maoists but admitted it was tough to predict when the menace would completely end.

“Left Wing Extremism has now been reduced only to some pockets (in the state). The government has pushed Naxalites on the back foot with its three-pronged strategy of trust, development and security. However it is tough to say when the menace will come to an end,” he said.

NIZAMABAD: After a 48-hour marathon exercise, Ch Raju, who got trapped between two boulders in an area between Singarayapalli and Ghanpur villages, was rescued on Thursday.

Raju, who belongs to Reddipet village of Kamareddy, had on Tuesday evening ventured into the hillocks to catch rabbits who generally sleep among the rocks. 

Officials said that Raju’s mobile phone had fallen inside a crevice between two boulders. While trying to retrieve his mobile phone which had fallen to a depth of 15 feet, he got trapped between the two boulders. 

Locals found him on Wednesday. The rescue operations began Wednesday afternoon.

Police, Forest and Revenue department officials used four earth movers to break the rocks followed by a controlled blast to ensure that the broken rocks did not fall on him.

Ashok, a relative of Raju, reportedly provided food to him and also gave him courage.

He was rescued around 2 pm Thursday.

Officials supplied oxygen and liquid food like fruit juice to Raju.

Raju has been admitted to Kamareddy hospital for treatment. His health is reported to be stable.

CHANDIGARH:  Hectic lobbying for cabinet berths are underway in Himachal Pradesh. Meanwhile, Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu on Thursday said that the cabinet will be formed after the upcoming assembly session.

Sukhu, along with all newly-elected MLAs of the Congress, met party chief Mallikarjun Kharge at his residence here. This was his first visit to the national capital after being elected as chief minister.
Interacting with media persons after the meeting, Sukhu said, “The Himachal Cabinet will be formed soon and you will be informed accordingly.”

“The cabinet will be formed after the Vidhan Sabha session.” He added that as he was accompanied by state Congress president Pratibha Singh and all elected MLAs, including deputy chief Minister Mukesh Agnihotri. During his meeting with legislators, Kharge told them to remain united and asked them to share power with all party workers.

He also urged them to remain connected with the grassroots level and serve the people of Himachal Pradesh earnestly. Kharge told the party leadership in the state to fill up all vacancies in the government and make appointments in the boards and corporations soon.

The Congress chief asked the chief minister to share power with party workers so that they also feel the ownership of the government and work more closely with public, sources said. The party will ensure that there is equitable share of power in the hill state between various factions, they added.

Terming the meeting as a courtesy meeting, Sukhu said, “We had come to thank the Congress president as he had campaigned for us in Himachal elections. All 40 MLAs and PCC chief Pratibha Singh has come and thanked Kharge ji on how he extended the party’s support.” “Kharge ji told us to serve the people of Himachal with our hearts and thanked the people of Himachal for electing a Congress government,” 

BENGALURU:  Rishi Atul Rajpopat (27), PhD scholar from St John’s College, Cambridge, just solved a 2,500-year-old grammar problem in the ancient Sanskrit texts written by 5th-century BC scholar and philologist Panini, that had perplexed traditional and modern researchers all these centuries. A major implication of his breakthrough is that now the algorithm that runs Panini’s grammar can potentially teach this grammar to computers.

Mumbai-born Rajpopat’s PhD thesis, published on Wednesday in the journal Apollo — University of Cambridge Repository and titled ‘In Panini We Trust: Discovering the Algorithm for Rule Conflict Resolution in the Ashtadhyadyi’, has decoded a two-and-a-half-millennia-old algorithm which for the first time has made it possible to accurately use Panini’s ‘language machine’ in his famous Ashtadhyayi.

Rajpopat said Panini’s Ashtadhyayi has around 4,000 rules (sutras) that describe the structure of Sanskrit. “He has given one metarule (a rule that governs the application of other rules) — ‘1.4.2 vipratisedhe param karyam’ — to help us decide which rule should be applied in the event of ‘rule conflict’. But the problem in the last 2,500 years has been that scholars misinterpreted this metarule and added more metarules with grammatically incorrect results,” he explained. Often, two or more of Panini’s rules are simultaneously applicable at the same step, leaving scholars to agonise over which one to choose.

 
“Because of the misunderstanding and misinterpretation by traditional scholars, we were getting grammatically incorrect forms. My dissertation is on the understanding that ‘param’ (in ‘1.4.2 vipratisedhe param karyam’) meant, between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word, that the user of the grammar should choose the rule applicable to the right side and not the serial order thereafter. I spent a lot of time with a lot of derivatives before I came to the conclusion, because Panini’s algorithms produce grammatically correct words and sentences without errors. His grammar is self-sufficient. I did not add any metarule to understand the master (Panini),” said the researcher.
Rajpopat said once he decoded Panini and his “language machine”, it became easy to feed in the base and suffix words and watch them turn into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process.

“Computer scientists working on natural language processing gave up on rule-based approaches over 50 years ago… So teaching computers how to combine the speaker’s intention with Panini’s rule-based grammar to produce human speech would be a major milestone in the history of human interaction with machines, as well as in India’s intellectual history,” he said about the potential of teaching Sanskrit grammar to computers.

“Panini had an extraordinary mind and he built a machine unrivalled in human history. He didn’t expect us to add new ideas to his rules. The more we fiddle with Panini’s grammar, the more it eludes us,” he said.

Speaking about his journey as a research scholar, Rajpopat said he was a student of mathematics.
“I was always into patterns, problem solving, coding, numbers etc. I did my graduation in economics but for postgraduation, I wanted to take up a subject I loved. During one of my visits to a Navaratri pandal, I was informed about a retired professor in Mumbai, who taught Panini’s grammar. I approached her and joined her classes,” he narrated. Rajpopat did his Masters at Oxford, and met his supervisor at Cambridge, Professor of Sanskrit, Vincenzo Vergiani, who motivated and mentored him during his research.

Rajpopat’s research may now mean that Panini’s grammar can be taught to computers for the first time.
“I learnt that asking the right questions is a skill. One has to be obsessed about one’s work. The role of a teacher cannot be undervalued,” he said.

“What the Cambridge scholar (Rishi Rajpopat) seems to have done is to discover that a new interpretation of the word ‘Param’ (in Ashtadhyayi) can result in more natural derivations and without having to add many rules for exceptions that arise with the earlier interpretations… His new interpretation is that the word ‘Param’ in the metarule is applicable in the part that is on the “right side” of the word, not the rule that comes later in the Ashtadhyayi.

This seems to reduce the number of exceptions and hence be easier to explain and understand. Note that this observation has to be validated by scholars of Sanskrit after a close reading of the thesis and its applicability to the whole corpus of Sanskrit. Also, note that the structure of Ashtadhyayi is more or less the same except when it comes to selecting the next rule when there is contention in the contexts discussed earlier. However, the contribution is significant as this issue has occupied the great grammarians for the past two-three millennia.”– Prof K Gopinath, Senior Professor, Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Department, Plaksha University, Mohali (formerly with Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru)

NEW DELHI: Union law minister Kiren Rijiju on Thursday kept up his attack on the collegium system, blaming it for high judicial vacancies, saying the issue will keep cropping up until the procedure of appointment of judges is changed.

He also took a critical view of the Supreme Court taking up all bail applications and “frivolous PILs”, claiming it will add to its burden, which drew sharp comments from legal eagles.

On the collegium system, he said in the Rajya Sabha, “The government has no right to find new names for appointment of judges except the names that have been recommended by the collegium…. I have requested Supreme Court and high court judges to ensure that names of quality judges are sent, and that they include names of women and those belonging to various castes.”

The minister recalled that in 2015, Parliament passed the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) Act to reform the system to appoint judges. But the SC struck it down some months later.

Till September 9, the government had appointed 165 HC judges, the highest in a calendar year so far. “Government has recently referred back 20 names to Supreme Court Collegium recommended for appointment as High Court judges….Against 331 vacancies, at present, 147 proposals received from High Courts are at various stages of processing between the Government and the Supreme Court Collegium,” he said.

Reacting to Rijiju’s comment on bail applications, Congress MP Manish Tewari said, “Obviously Law Minister Kiren Rijiju had other pressing preoccupations in Law School other than Law. He perhaps has never read Justice Krishna Iyer’s seminal treatise – bail not jail is the rule.” “Forget NJAC, Govt wants to micromanage judiciary: cut vacations, no priority to bail, et al. What next?” senior advocate Salman Khurshid wondered.