Science,Climate Change & World !

Action on climate is justified, not because the science is certain, but precisely because it is not

 CLIMATE-change legislation, dormant for six months, is showing signs of life again in Washington, DC. This week senators and industrial groups have been discussing a compromise bill to introduce mandatory controls on carbon. Yet although green activists around the world have been waiting for 20 years for American action, nobody is cheering. Even if discussion ever turns into legislation, it will be a pale shadow of what was once hoped for.

The mess at Copenhagen is one reason. So much effort went into the event, with so little result. The recession is another. However much bosses may care about the planet, they usually mind more about their bottom line, and when times are hard they are unwilling to incur new costs.

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Private Schools V/s Government Schools

Here is an incontrovertible fact: the majority of children between the ages of eight and 14, rich or poor, attend private schools. Even poor families shun government schools and willingly pay fees to enrol their children in private schools. To cater to this demand, private schools are flourishing, not just in cities and small towns but in villages as well. These schools have been established as commercial ventures. They are of two kinds: recognised and unrecognised by the government. To obtain recognition, private schools have to fulfil impossible criteria including infrastructural demands and have to pay teachers according to the government-appointed Pay Commission’s recommendations. Thus, teachers must be paid upward of Rs 20,000 a month as entrants and the scale rises with experience.

Of course, schoolteachers should be paid well and the new scales are.....

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15th Census Of Hindustan

Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, C Chandramouli announces that census for 2011 is going to kick off from April. 

Highlights:

• Fifteenth 'Census in India' to begin from April 7, 2010.
• There are going to be two phases as first phase of census to be started in April and concluded in September 2010, which would include assimilation of house listing and house census and collection of data on NPR and second and last phase from February 9 to 28 which will include population enumeration.

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Threatening A Core Freedom:India

Free speech is increasingly under attack in the world's most populous democracy.

Indians boast of living in the world's most populous democracy, and rightly so. Regular elections and vigorous public debate are a rebuke to anyone who thinks that liberty can't flourish in a large, largely poor, culturally and linguistically diverse country. But in one area of life officials' concerns for keeping peace between various religious and ethnic groups is threatening a core freedom: speech.

In a little-noticed case on Feb. 26, police in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh arrested Macha Laxmaiah, an author who writes using the pseudonym Krantikar ("revolutionary"), and his distributors, including Innaiah Narisetti, president of the Hyderabad-based nonprofit Center for Inquiry, for "hurting the sentiments of Muslims." Their alleged crime? The distribution of "Crescent Over the World," a book including contributions from Salman Rushdie, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen, and a cartoon from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Mr. Narisetti is out on bail now; Mr. Laxmaiah remains in custody.

The works of Maqbool Fida Husain have been attacked by Hindu nationalists.

Then there are the continuing attacks on Ms. Nasreen and her.......

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Is India's Foundation Secure ?

In his Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment Lecture on December 23, 2009, the home minister gave the outlines of a new security architecture for India. The focal point of his proposals is the setting up of a National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) with the objective of preventing a terrorist attack, containing the attack should one take place, and responding by “inflicting pain upon the perpetrators”.

The NCTC would deal with all kinds of terrorist violence. It would, therefore, perform functions related to intelligence, investigation and operations. The National Investigation Agency and the Multi Agency Centre would become part of the NCTC. Other organisations like the National Technical Research Organisation, the National Crime Records Bureau, the National Intelligence Grid and the National Security Guard would also come under its umbrella.

The home minister also mentioned that his ministry, which had become unwieldy, would be bifurcated. Internal security would receive the home minister’s exclusive attention while another minister or a separate department would handle routine matters like Centre-state relations, disaster management, census, human rights, etc.

These reforms were overdue and P Chidambaram deserves credit for the home ministry’s proposed restructuring. However, we must diagnose correctly the reasons for our ineptness, if not failure, in handling various problems besetting the country. Unless these are addressed, the proposed security architecture would not deliver.

Successive governments have placed political considerations above.........

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Indian Constitution:Landmark Verdict

The judgment of the five-member Constitution bench of the Supreme Court (SC) that high courts can order a CBI probe without state consent, enshrines in law a practice that already exists. This is a landmark verdict and posits the desirability and necessity of making the CBI an autonomous federal investigative body, wholly free of political control and influence. The underlying premise of the judgment, as cited by the bench, is that the higher judiciary needs to ‘zealously and vigilantly’ play its role as the protector of civil liberties and fundamental rights of citizens.

That larger purpose would also be served even better if there was to be a truly independent national investigative body, unencumbered by political pressures or charges of infringing on states’ rights, from which citizens can expect impartial investigation of offences. Indeed, the Centre-state debate, premised on fears that the CBI may be used as a political tool against political parties, figures or state governments by the Centre, would itself lose relevance if the investigative body is seen to be patently autonomous , like, say, the Election Commission.

Of course, there have been previous examples where............

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