Bihar Floods

NO BOATS OR RELIEF,
CHOPPERS CARRY ONLY POLITICIANS TO FLOOD HIT BIHAR

By Vikram Kumar

Darbhanga: Every year heavy rainfall in Nepal brings floods, misery and death to districts in North Bihar but despite this the district administrations in Darbhanga, Madhubani and Samastipur and other places do not have a single boat of their own.
And Bihar's chief minister Nitish Kumar finally returns from his Mauritius jaunt only to find most of his state Bihar under water and virtually no relief having been undertaken.
At a press meet in Darbhanga town where flood waters have inundated most on the town, the Commissioner of Darbhanga admits that the district administration does not own a single boat. "But we have pressed 55o boats into service, each boat in the name of politicians from the village head to the Member of Parliament."
But we see no boats ferrying people free of charge in flooded Darbhanga and most likely the 550 boats are only on paper for which money will be given to the people's representatives once the flood is over...Many in Darbhanga thrive on relief and floods!
The government admits to only few deaths with the number not being more than 30 but just at the Jhanjharpur embankment there are 33 breaches this year, every breach kills at least a few so the numbers of flood victims could be very high this year.
Meanwhile, there is petrol rationing in Darbhanga as its highways remain cut-off and there is no petrol supply to the district causing great hardship.
But one difference this year is that there is a 24 hour electric supply at least in Darbhanga town so people can get their flour etc ground and they have a fan to beat the humid heat and can watch their misery live on TV.....

A SECULAR TERRORIST!

"I'M NOT A HIJACKER, I ONLY WANTED WATER"

By Manuwant Choudhary

Frequent flier 39-year-old Krishna Kumar Kahnani prefers not to fly at all these days after his harrowing experience aboard Air Deccan Flight DN 342 from Belgaum to Bombay on January 22 2007...a date he will never forget.
"I went to the toilet and there was no water so I picked up a bottled water just to wash my hands and the Air Hostess tells me `Why have you taken this water? You Idiot'....?"
"I explained that there is no water in the toilet and I don't mind paying...."
But the matter did not end there...An altercation began and I said, "Even Laloo's train has water and your big plane does not have water."
"I ask them to give in writing that this flight didn't have water in the toilet and the Airhostess and the flight attendant do give that in writing."
Mr. Kahnani then goes back to his seat and as the plane lands and Bombay airport...and comes to a halt...a man goes up to him and assaults him. Said Mr. Kahnani, "More people came and hit me amidst announcements that all the passengers must alight as soon as possible as there is trouble."
"They then took me out of the plane and soon I saw CISF personnel who came and said, `Flight hijack kar raha tha...Kahan hai hathiyaar? (You were hijacking the plane..Where is the arms?)..they kept hitting me until I fell on the tarmac and then they kicked me...I managed to call STAR News in Patna and they promised to send their Bombay team."
"I had hid the signed complaint paper in my socks but as I was being beaten up I realised that I would be killed so I handed them the paper and the CISF personnel shouted `Mil Gaya Hathiyaar'...(Found the Arms)....
Mr. Kahnani says he remembers two CISF personnel who assaulted him D.S. Shukla and S.S. Chauhan who took away his Blackberyy Pearl cellphone handset.
He was then taken to the CISF cabin and then Mr. Kahnani being a distributor for Reliance in Patna called up Reliance who came to his help and the Airport police moved in..sent him to Cooper Hospital and Bombay's local newspaper MidDay also arrived on the scene...
Mr. Kahnani returned to Patna on a Sahara flight next day and still cannot believe why he was assaulted so brutally, "Sir, they hit me so hard that there was no blood!"
But why did they think you were a terrorist? "I don't know...Sir...I am not even a Muslim, I am a Marwari but yes on my visiting card that I gave it had my telephone number 9893845786...`786' means Bismillah so they may have thought I was a Muslim..."
"Sir, we are Marwari's and come from a village in Rajasthan but our family god is Sarvar Sultan - a Muslim saint...If you come to my house you will see Hindu and Muslim Gods side by side..."
Mr. Kahnani returned home to Patna only to face more trouble, "So shocked was my wife with what happened to me that on India's Republic Day January 26 she ate poison ...God saved her..."

CONGRESS PARTY'S POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION

RASHTRAPATI PRATIBHA PATIL IS A WOMAN, YES, BUT KIRAN BEDI?

By Manuwant Choudhary

Even as India's first woman President took her oath swearing to protect the Indian constitution and thanking the electors who elected her (Congress and the Communists did so because she was a woman) another story from New Delhi flashed across news channels...that Super Cop Kiran Bedi had been superceded by a man for the post of Delhi's police commissioner.
An upset Kiran Bedi told reporters, "I am going on leave and I am most upset that my seniority and merit have both been ignored. I will also take legal opinion whether I have a legal recourse to this."
When asked further on CNN IBN why the bosses did this to her, she replied, "The message is `Toe the Line', thats all...its not about policing....."
The Congress Party elected Pratibhaji as President because she is a woman but isn't Kiran Bedi also a woman?
The Congress Party discriminated positively for Pratibhaji but not for Kiranji as rightly Supercop Kiran Bedi is a Man, the only man in the Indian police force!
Mrs. Kiran Bedi is an icon....and for most children....girls and boys..she will always be a person to emulate and aspire to be...long after people have forgotten who was the first woman President of India or who is the new Delhi police commissioner?
Kiran Bedi you're a hero....fight on...

INDIA'S PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE - PRATIBHA PATIL - WHO???

"I Know Her Husband" says A.B. Bardhan, CPI boss.....

By Manuwant Choudhary

India's next President could be Pratibha Patil. Pratibha Patil, WHO? Thats how most reacted to the Congress Party's announcement of their nominee.
Most except the Indian Communists. What then happened to the Congress Party's original nominees Dr. Karan Singh and Shivraj Patil? Well, the Communists didn't like the UPA nominees?
But are the Communists in the UPA? No, they are just giving outside support.
Then why should they decide who the UPA nominee should be?
Congress says left support to any candidate is critical. But UPA itself was not consulted on the Presidential nominee and as Congressmen tell the media even they were not consulted. "Madam Soniaji decided the two names and when the Communists rejected them then Dr. Manmohan Singh announced Pratibha Patil's name and the Communists accepted." Why? "Beacuse Pratibha Patil is a woman....."
One Congressman defends the decision, "In 60 years India has not had a woman President."
Sure, but whose fault is that? You have `mis' ruled this great country for most of the past 60 years.
And CPI leader A.B. Bardhan took the defense to its limits, "I know her husband."
Sure, Mr. Bardhan I think you know other famous husbands as well. We think you know Shri Laloo Prasad better. So shouldn't Rabri Devi be India's next President?
Imagine, Laloo living in an outhouse of the Rashtrapati Bhawan and his cows grazing blissfully in the Mughal Gardens!
Forget Rabri, even Brinda Karat could be President...That reminds me when did the Indian Communists start championing women representation issues? In its entire history the CPI (M) did not have a woman as a politburo member. And Brinda Karat is the wife of Prakash Karat, the CPI (M) boss.
Even Outlook Editor Vinod Mehta tries his eloquence, "After all she has been MLA for four terms, minister several times and now she is the Governor of Rajasthan...so give her a chance...she can have a good set of advisors.she is loyal to the Nehru-Gandhi family!"
Mr. Mehta the politicians talk of 33 per cent representation for women in parliament without giving even 20 per cent tickets to women candidates in their own parties.
But why Pratibha Patil...we think Priyanka Vadra Gandhi could be a better choice!
So is there no criteria to select a nominee for India's topmost job? This time events indicate that the parties have lost their way.... only an invisible hand can save this country.

Education vouchers

Free to choose, and learn

New research shows that parental choice raises standards-including for those who stay in public schools. From The Economist.
FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer's expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.
Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable—and often fatal—opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.
But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence. Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.
Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the “pill-placebo” studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines. The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, scored a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.
Voucher programmes in several American states have been run along similar lines. Greg Forster, a statistician at the Friedman Foundation, a charity advocating universal vouchers, says there have been eight similar studies in America: seven showed statistically significant positive results for the lucky voucher winners; the eighth also showed positive results but was not designed well enough to count.
The voucher pupils did better even though the state spent less than it would have done had the children been educated in normal state schools. American voucher schemes typically offer private schools around half of what the state would spend if the pupils stayed in public schools. The Colombian programme did not even set out to offer better schooling than was available in the state sector; the aim was simply to raise enrolment rates as quickly and cheaply as possible.
These results are important because they strip out other influences. Home, neighbourhood and natural ability all affect results more than which school a child attends. If the pupils who received vouchers differ from those who don't—perhaps simply by coming from the sort of go-getting family that elbows its way to the front of every queue—any effect might simply be the result of any number of other factors. But assigning the vouchers randomly guarded against this risk.
Opponents still argue that those who exercise choice will be the most able and committed, and by clustering themselves together in better schools they will abandon the weak and voiceless to languish in rotten ones. Some cite the example of Chile, where a universal voucher scheme that allows schools to charge top-up fees seems to have improved the education of the best-off most.
The strongest evidence against this criticism comes from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children. Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in the state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit. The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admissions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees (most American voucher schemes impose similar conditions).
The result has been burgeoning variety and a breakneck expansion of the private sector. At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now 10% are, and growth in private schooling continues unabated.
Anders Hultin of Kunskapsskolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served rule—the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place. So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).
More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.


Parth J. Shah National Coordinator India.
School Choice Campaign

PM Speaks

WARNING: INDIA PRIME MINISTER DR. MANMOHAN SINGH TURNS RED

By Manuwant Choudhary

To all who saw India's Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh as the great liberaliser his statement calling for India Inc. to cut salaries of its top CEOs has come as a shock.
Dr. Singh says paying such high salaries will increase the gap between the rich and poor and that there would be a backlash.
Haven't we heard similar statements issued by commies and Congressmen for the past 50 years until India went bankrupt!
Let us judge the Prime Minister on merit. The poor Indian does not even know what salaries CEOs get. So the question of a backlash against the rich CEO is farfetched. But yes instead of calling for a cut in salary the PM should have called for more growth, more jobs, more salaries which would mean less unemployment, less poverty and less dependence on social security.
Would Indian CEOs living abroad return to work in India with lower packages? If the best brains are not paid what they deserve (the market decides not the PM), then will the brain drain stop?
Mr. Sunil Mittal, newly elected president of CII, rightly opposes the PMs idea when he says that there are not enough trained CEOs at the top to take the jobs. Why? Because the Indian government has not just a ceiling on land but also on the number of IITs and IIMs in the country. Why can't we have 100 IIMs in the country instead of this stupid debate about which caste gets what seats.
The PM must come out with a white paper on how many students actually leave for foreign universities for their MBA. With just that money the 100 IIMs can be built. But this socialist government believes money spent abroad is alright, in India education must be free.
Just to remind all those who have hopes from this Congress government, the survival of this government depends on the CPI (M) and a lesser known story is that it is not the Congress Party but the Communist sardar Harkishen Singh Surjeet who asked Sonia Gandhi to make Manmohan PM.

LONDONSCAPE

Trafalgar Square green with turf

Trafalgar Square has been transformed into a green space.
More than 2,000 sq m of turf has been laid as part of Visit London's campaign to promote green spaces and villages in the city.
The grass will cover the square for two days during which visitors will be able to soak up the sunshine in specially laid-out deckchairs or enjoy a picnic.
The turf, which has been sourced from the Vale of York, will then be moved to Bishops Park in Hammersmith and Fulham.
Chief executive of Visit London James Bidwell said: "From the rural feel of areas like Bexley Village and Wimbledon, to urban villages like Marylebone and even Canary Wharf, the campaign will help everyone discover Village London."
Courtesy: BBC News