View Articles

BHOPAL: There is no end to scams in Madhya Pradesh. After VYAPAM scam yet another scam has been exposed. This scam is known as DMAT. DMAT means Dental Medical Admission Test. This test is held to decide admissions in private Medical Colleges. It is alleged that the tests were manipulated to give admissions to sons and daughters of influential people including present and former ministers, MPs, MLAs and senior officials. Disclosure to this effect was made by Yogesh Uprit, former Director of Professional Examination Board.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Is the UDF Government trying to scuttle the vigilance probe into the bar bribery allegations despite the Kerala High Court’s orders not to do so?

The met office has brought some great news for corporate ground water guzzlers for whom summer is big business. Big summer means even bigger business. Scores of water plants set up across the country by companies such as Coca-Cola, Pepsico and Parle are working in shifts to pump out as much ground water as possible to meet growing demands for their products and brands – from bottled water to fizzy drinks. Beer manufacturers are not far too behind. Some of the manufacturers have found the current drought-like situation a great opportunity to sharply raise the prices of their products. For instance, Coca-Cola, the largest beverage company, has raised the price of 20-litre Kinley water jar for domestic consumption by almost 20 per cent. Millions of gallons of ground water are being ruthlessly pumped out by the beverage industry to convert them into hard cash. Few are concerned if this further dries up land surface. The Tamil Nadu government has already stopped permission to start a giant water plant by a multinational beverage firm.

LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh is in for communal tensions in the coming days with VHP and Hindu fundamentalists in BJP raising the issue of construction of Ram temple. On the other, All India Muslims Personal Law Board is bent on opposing education of yoga in government schools.

India and Bangladesh signed twenty-two bilateral agreements during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two-day trip to Dhaka last week. Strategically the most important of these is the agreement that will permit Indian ships to use the Chittagong and Mongla sea ports. From China’s point of view, the Chittagong port is an important ‘pearl’ in its ‘string of pearls` with which it seeks to encircle India. For precisely the same reason, the Chittagong port is of immense strategic importance to India, apart from its commercial value for the Indian cargo ships.

There’s this to be said for Ms Mamata Banerjee as the ruling chief Minister of West Bengal — she is never short of confidence! It appears she may just go in for the next state Assembly elections about two months before schedule.

The Narendra Modi government’s inability to provide visible signs of the promised development has made it imperative for the BJP to win the Bihar assembly elections this winter. If it stumbles, then the belief will gain ground, especially in the aftermath of the party’s dismal performance in Delhi last February, that the so-called Modi wave is receding fast.

KOLKATA: With more Indian companies expressing their intent to work and invest in power production, gas pipeline laying and mining projects in Bangladesh, prospects for regional economic development in the East have brightened considerably.

I am sipping coffee at the leisure room in Burlington senior centre after my daily workout at the gym there. A white lady, whom I know to be very civic and gentle in nature as we met and talk frequently at the leisure room. She was seated opposite to me. Suddenly she asked me “where do you live?” I answered back but she couldn’t locate it. To refer a land mark, I said that I live next to Baron Park, a very big housing complex and well known. She sneered back, after a pause, “Oh! It’s a horrible place, infected by blacks.”

One wonders what was the tearing hurry for re-promulgation of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Ordinance for the third time. This was done when the Joint Select Committee of Parliament was examining the land bill. One reason may be that the Land Ordinance would have lapsed on June 3. To avoid that the Modi government re-promulgated it. Irrespective of the legality or otherwise of this step, the immediate fall out is that the opposition MPs on the joint committee are proposing to disassociate themselves from it. Sitaram Yechury, CPI-M general secretary and a member of the committee, has described the re-promulgation of the ordinance as “absolutely untenable constitutionally”.