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IAS in crisis Cheers for hockey
girls |
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Textbook failure
Operation Telangana
When a General came
calling
Canada
Calling Gerrard India
Bazaar mela a big draw THE TRIBUNE VISA
WINDOW
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Cheers for hockey girls The
bronze medal that the Indian girls won at the junior hockey World Cup deserves to be celebrated -- after all, India had not won any medal at any hockey World Cup since the men's team won the gold medal in 1975. The girls deserve every bit of attention and rewards that are coming their way following their win over England in the playoff match for the bronze. Five of the girls, including Rani Rampal, the best player of the tournament, are from Shahbad, Haryana. Baldev Singh, their coach at the hockey academy in Shahbad, deserves to be congratulated, too. The key to India's performance lay in the fact that the 13 of the 18 members of the team have been part of the core for the senior national team. Playing in the senior team, training with it, had given these girls the skills, experience and confidence to do well in the junior World Cup. Therein lies too the need to temper our joy with caution, for this is just the beginning. The road ahead is much more difficult. The senior women's team is currently ranked 12th in the world. The Indian women had won the gold medal at the 1982 Asian Games, but the team is now ranked fourth in Asia. If the team is to rise and challenge China, Japan and South Korea, this bunch of juniors who have excelled in Germany must raise their games. They have shown that they have the ability; they could do with unstinted support, too. It has been observed that players from other major hockey-playing nations make a very smooth transition from junior to the senior level. They do that because of the excellent base they have as junior players; that is complemented by the support system that's available to them once they have decided to get into professional hockey. Things have improved in India, but not enough to match the developed world. Thus we support these girls through thick and thin, and do not let our expectations become unreasonable.
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Textbook failure The
Annual Status of Education Report, released earlier this year, had revealed that nationally 46.3 per cent of Class 5 children could not read a Class 2-level text. The figure increased to 53.2 per cent by 2012. Among the states that brought down the national average was Haryana. This year the distribution of textbooks in the state - free up to Class 8 and paid from Class 9 to 12 - has been delayed for all classes, with most not having received till now. Nearly half the intensive teaching period is over for this academic session, with most of the days in winter taken up by festivals and vacation. What the learning outcomes would be after this session is anybody's guess. The books could not be distributed because the firm contracted for the supply of textbooks - already blacklisted in another state - did not deliver. Books for Class 1 and 2 were contracted to another firm, which too delivered after a delay. Now the state government is retendering in a hurry, which might just prove to be an excuse to circumvent laid down procurement procedures. The officials responsible had obviously made a wrong assessment of the publisher's abilities the first time round, a fact that needs to be investigated to rule out any criminal intent. Haryana has had a history of delays in delivering textbooks. Repeat failure is not pardonable, and cannot be put down to a few officials. The minister has to take blame too.
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I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up. — Groucho Marx
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Operation Telangana
The
formation of Telangana has been announced at last after repeated failed promises, but in a most clumsy manner. Many would-be states are expectedly up in arms in the heartland and the Northeast. Telangana has not been clearly defined. Will it be limited to the 10 districts of Telangana proper or will possibly two other districts of Rayalseema, Kurnool and Anatapur, be added on to create Rayala-Telangana in order to balance the number of Assembly seats in the two new States? Why? The idea of carving out Hyderabad as a Union Territory has fortunately been abandoned but it is to be the joint capital for ten years until Seemandhra (a new nomenclature for the residual stare) has time to build a new capital. A make-shift capital could be readied in six months. Ten years gives time for vested interests to dig in. Recall Chandigarh. Equally absurd is the Home Minister's unwise statement that the (district) boundaries of Telangana will have to be settled. This is inviting trouble. Further, Telangana will move forward, he said, whether the united Andhra Assembly resolves accordingly or otherwise. Seemandhra is already up in arms, with many Congress MPs and MLAs handing in their resignations in protest. Nothing daunted, the Home Minister has said the legislative and administrative processes to bring Telangana into being will take six to eight months to complete. This is to hand out an IOU on a shaky bank. The ham-handedness of Operation Telangana is a supreme example of how not to do it. The TRS President, Chandrashekhara Rao has added fuel to the fire by his incendiary statement that once Telangana is formed all Seemandhra-born government employees will have to leave Hyderabad. Numerous fallacies are being cheerfully touted. One is that Coastal Andhras have invested heavily in the growth and prosperity of Hyderabad city. So what? They can continue to enjoy property and corporate control in and dividends from the city. Another red-herring is the cost of building a new capital and finding the land for it - an estimated Rs 3 lakh crore and at least 15,000 acres just for the Raj Bhavan, Assembly, Secretariat and associated housing alone, according to some estimates, plus compensation for land acquisition. These are bogeys. India is steadily urbanising and is building cities to accommodate the numbers that would otherwise crowd noisome shanty towns. Rohini or Vasant Kunj in Delhi is bigger than the projected Andhra, or some-day Haryana capital. The land and the money were found. Just 10 days ago, Delhi was host to an All-Bodo Student's Union-sponsored National Convention on New States presided over by P.A. Sangma in which delegates from Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao, the Gorkhaland Task Force, Kamatapur, the Tripura Hills, Bundelkhand, Harit Pradesh, Vidarbha and Telangana participated. The demand was for new states as these people felt marginalised and felt interim solutions had failed. The Bodo and Gorkha representatives in particular said that if Telangana was granted, Bodoland and Gorkaland must be simultaneously conceded else there would be trouble. The Bodoland Territorial Council was dubbed unsatisfactory as real powers had not been devolved and even after a decade the Territorial Council had been unable to get the Assam Governor's assent to a single Bill passed by it or to approve rules and regulations for 14 other enactments. This sorry record demands an explanation and offers a legitimate cause for frustration. The temper of the convention was unmistakable - there had been too much dithering and patchwork approaches. Vidarbha has been hanging fire for long while the UP Assembly under Mayawati approved a resolution to divide that giant state of 200 million into four further units. Other demands for Coorg, Saurashtra-Kutch, Mithila, etcetera, are incipient. The controversy over Telangana has revived the debate on the merits of smaller (not small) versus larger states. Indian states and districts are by and large huge in terms of population and even area by world standards. So with a growing population, 1.25 bn today and 1.7-1.8 bn by 2060 (a fifth of mankind), India could rationally do with maybe 50-60 states, 1200 districts (or double the present number) and a corresponding increase in the number of (national extension service) blocks and nagarpalika wards for better and more participative and accountable governance. Governance is becoming ever more complex and technical and there are limits to size for efficient management and administration. Small, however, is not necessary beautiful or efficient by itself, but size does constitute a very relevant factor in good governance, viability and coherence. The Northeast has seven tiny states and further division could be problematic on grounds of economy, scale, coordination, strategic considerations and so forth. Identity formation could be rationally encouraged in the immediate aftermath of Independence when former "wholly and partially excluded areas" were plunged into the vast, turbulent ocean of Indian humanity and needed time to find a place in this new commonwealth in the making. Identity was an obvious organising principle for state formation, regional and local autonomy. The situation is different today and identity, culture, language and development in confined areas and for small, scattered communities may no longer be workable answers. Real decentralisation (panchayati raj, PESA, active gram sabhas, non-territorial councils) may offer superior solutions and greater "autonomy", with simultaneous aggregation or consolidation at other levels to achieve scale, coordination, and a critical mass of human and natural resources. It would need a second states reorganisation commission to define the new parameters, critical issues and pitfalls in any such exercise and to chart the way forward in a phased process of nation building. Education, development and employment are the real engines of progress and hope rather than futile lamentation over loss of land and forests that can no longer support rising aspirations. One sees nothing of this larger framework, vision and imagination in the current official discourse on Telangana or new state formation. The political parties mouth partisan inanities and much media discourse is riveted on trivia. Meanwhile, one can only lament the cosy corruption and chicanery being practised by the BCCI in which so many leading politicians are involved. That saga has not ended with a bogus report produced, astonishingly, by two retired High Court judges who served on an illegally constituted committee. Matching this is Gopinath Munde, the BJP leader's assertion that his defiant boast of having spent Rs 8 crore on his last election was only a "figure of speech" and not a criminal violation of the election code! And then we have the scandalous conduct of the UP Samajwadi Party leadership under the Mulayam and Akhilesh Yadav father and son duo, in concert with the sand-mining mafia and known party thugs, to penalise and silence a young IAS officer, Durga Shakti Nagpal, for doing her duty. They have flouted every rule in the book, sought to terrorise officials through penal transfers and suspensions and played the communal and caste card to cover their nefarious designs and loot the state. Their only defence, as usual, is that others do likewise. The country is up in arms. None can be silent. When moral authority is lost, everything is lost.n www.bgverghese.com
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When a General came calling As
I watched him step down from a helicopter, my thoughts went back to a Fancy Dress show put up by the fresh entrants to the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun, in 1955. One of them had dressed as a young mother to perfection and "she" came pushing a pram with the placard "Walking My Baby Back Home". And indeed there was a cute babe inside, swaddled in a shawl but as the mother stumbled on purpose, tipping the pram on its side, out stepped Gentleman Cadet Jameel Mahmood! Not only was Jameel terribly short-statured but also had a child's face and innocence, which he retained all his life. Years later, Jameel became GOC-in-C, Eastern Army Command, and came visiting one of his Infantry Divisions that was out on field manoeuvres, not far from Latehar, which is often in the news these days for Maoist-related excesses. It so happened that my wife and I had purchased and lived in a cottage, in a patch of pristine forest, in the same general area. Our nearest co-habitants were Adivasis, in a cluster of a dozen mud-and-thatch huts which went by the name "Konka", but figured on no map! Naturally, we were rather surprised at first when a helicopter made several circuits over our cottage and then puzzled when rotors stopped churning, all of a sudden. The Adivasis had never seen a chopper in flesh-and-bones as it were and the two pilots were having difficulty in keeping the crowd at a safe distance, till my intervention calmed them sufficiently. The pilots carried a note from Jameel, enquiring whether it would be convenient if he came calling on us the following afternoon en route to Ranchi? I scribbled in the affirmative and then drove one of the pilots in my jeep to a better touch-down patch. No one can imagine the wonderment of the Adivasis on watching the chopper take off! To avoid bedlam I met the village elders in the evening and told them about our friend, the "Burra Sahib", and they at once responded to receive him in a proper Adivasi welcome and also ensure safety of the chopper. Jameel was at his ebullient best, describing our post-retirement pad as "Jangal mey mangal"; his staff officer was hard put to remind him about the approaching dusk but being one of our best Army aviators he knew where he could cut corners with flying safety. The next day, my wife received a thank-you note tagged to a bottle of Champaign. The CAG of the times was obviously a discreet gentleman! But who could have imagined that three weeks later, Jameel, his wife and that very staff officer would be reduced to cinders in a MI 17 on their way to pay a courtesy call on the Maharaja of
Bhutan?
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Canada Calling Gurmukh Singh Large-scale preparations are on to commemorate the centenary of the (in)famous Komagata Maru episode, which remains etched in the memory of Indo-Canadians
With
the 100th anniversary of the (in)famous Komagata Maru episode in the history of the Indo-Canadian community coming up next year, organisers are planning large-scale commemoration events to highlight the racist policies of the then Canadian Governments towards citizens of a fellow British dominion nation. Komagata Maru was a Japanese ship, which was hired by a wealthy Malaysian Sikh Gurdit Singh to bring 376 Indians from Hong Kong (where they reached by steamship from India) to Canada in 1914 in violation of a law which carried the so-called ‘continuous journey clause’. The clause stipulated that only those who reached Canada directly without breaking their journey anywhere could land in here. Since there were no direct ships from India to Canada, no Indian could reach Canada directly. Indians would first sail from Kolkata to Hong Kong and from Hong Kong, they would catch ships to Vancouver. So when the Komagata Maru ship reached Vancouver in May 1914, it was not allowed to anchor for two months and then forcibly sent back to India where the British Indian police killed many passengers when they reached Kolkata. For this historical injustice, the Indo-Canadian community has been demanding an apology from the Canadian Government in the nation’s parliament for years now even though the current prime minister Stephen Harper said ‘sorry’ for the episode at a Punjabi mela in the Punjabi-dominated city of Surrey in 2008. However, as the centenary of the incident approaches, the Komagata Maru episode is assuming more and more political significance as opposition parties, particularly their Indo-Canadian MPs, are pressurising the government to formally apologise in the House of Commons. A petition signed by thousands of Canadians was introduced in the House of Commons in 2010 by the Opposition New Democratic Party “demanding this government apologise for the mistreatment and denial of basic necessities and legal rights on May 23, 1914, to Indians who were on board the Komagata Maru.” As preparations for the Komagata Maru centenary begin, Canada Post last month announced to issue a stamp next year to mark the occasion. “We are very happy that Canada Post has approved a commemorative stamp to mark the centenary of the Komagata Maru. They announced this at our function on July 23 to mark the 99th anniversary of the incident,” says Vancouver-based Harbhajan Singh Gill, president of the Komagata Maru Foundation. “Our foundation is working with all universities in British Columbia and major Indo-Canadian organisations for this event. We will be announcing the line-up of various commemorative events in about a month as they are still being finalised,” he says. But seminars, lectures and stage plays have already been planned at the two major universities — the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. An exhibition will be held the Surrey Art Gallery. A big symposium on ‘Art and Migration’ is also being planned for May 2-4. “We have planned two dinner nights — May 30 in Vancouver and July 31 in Surrey — to commemorate the centenary,” says Gill. “But an apology from the Canadian Government is a must, and I am hopeful it will be done before the centenary date in May next year,” he adds.
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Gerrard India Bazaar mela a big draw
Toronto boasts of North America’s biggest and oldest Indian bazaar, which is famously known as Gerrard India Bazaar — named after the famous Gerrard Street that passes through it. Almost all shops in this bazaar are owned by Indians, Pakistanis and some Bangladeshis. Though other smaller Indian bazaars have come up in the Toronto suburbs of Brampton and Mississauga, Gerrard India Bazaar remains the mother of all Indian bazaars here and across Canada. Because of the summer months now, it is a very busy place these days. In fact, it just had a two-day mela, which attracted more than 1,50,000 people. The whole place was chockablock. The South Asian mela in this bazaar is the second biggest crowd-puller in Toronto after Caribana (the Caribbean festival). “Yes, more get people here than any other festival in Canada, except Caribana, but it costs us upwards of $150,000 to stage this two-day mela,” says Inder Singh Jandoo of Sonu Saree Palace in Gerrard India Bazaar. Jandoo’s Sonu Saree Palace is one of the first shops to come up in the bazaar in the 1970s. He used to export silk sarees to India from Canada in those days. “India didn’t have the machinery or the fabric at that time, so we used to import the fabric from Japan and export it to India as silk sarees,” says Jandoo, who came to Toronto from Delhi in the early 1970s. He recalls how Indians from all over North America used to come to shop in Gerrard India Bazaar at the weekends in the 1970s and 1980s. “People used to come from New York, New Jersey, Chicago and so many places to shop here at the weekends because there were few Indian shops anywhere in the US and Canada,” says Gurjit Chadha of Moti Mahal restaurant, who landed as an immigrant in Toronto in the 1970s and set up his shop this bazaar. “There used to be a craze for Indian food in those days because there were hardly any India food outlets. More than Indians, I used to get tons of white people in those days and continue to this day,” says Chadha. It was the dearth of entertainment for early immigrants that led to the birth of this bazaar. “One gentleman Gian Chand Naz, an engineer who had worked on Bhakra Dam and then came to Canada, started the Naz Cinema here in the late 1960s to let immigrants see Indian films because there were no videos or CD back then. From there, the bazaar started taking shape and slowly became Gerrard India Bazaar as Indian immigrants bought shops from white people,” says Jandoo. Though the Naz Cinema Hall is gone, the bazaar has grown bigger and important over the decades. And it still retains the crown of the biggest Indian bazaar in North America.
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THE TRIBUNE VISA WINDOW
My wife and I applied for US tourist visas to visit my son and his family. However, I was surprised to see that I was granted a visa for 10 years while my wife’s visa was valid for only one year. After staying with our son in the USA for three months, we came back to India. I would like to know why was my wife given a one-year visa? We feel discouraged to visit the USA as we have to face a lot of problems to get visa again. The vast majority of visas we issue are 10-year, multiple-entry visas like the one you received. We don’t typically issue short-term visas but some cases require shorter validity. Visa matters are private, but if you have specific questions, write us at support-india@ustraveldocs.com/in and we will try to give you a more detailed answer. But also note our Interview Waiver Program (IWP) for those qualified travellers who have had visas before. Once you’ve had a visa and used it properly, you may be able to get it renewed without an interview. Under this programme, good travellers may never have to come to the Embassy or Consulate again! Details are at: http://www.ustraveldocs.com/in/in-niv-visarenew.asp My daughter is eight years old. I want to renew her multiple entry US tourist visa which expires next year. What is the procedure to renew her visa and also for the renewal of adult visas? Your daughter may qualify for our Interview Waiver Program. You can read the details here http://www.ustraveldocs.com/in/in-niv-visarenew.asp but if you apply for her renewal and provide copies of her parents’ visas in the same category, we may be able to renew her visa without any of you having to visit the Embassy or Consulate. Is there a category called Visa for Religious purposes? If so, on what grounds is it given and what are the documents required and conditions for applying for that visa? Also, for what duration it is given and what are the conditions attached, if any (fee, etc.) Yes, there is a religious worker visa, also called an “R” visa. It is for individuals seeking to enter the United States to work in a religious capacity on a temporary basis. This visa requires a petition from an organisation based in the US. For more detailed information on the Religious Worker Visa application process, forms and fees structure, please see this link http://www.ustraveldocs.com/ in/in-niv-typer.asp. There is also an immigrant visa for religious purposes. You can read more about it here: http://travel.state.gov/ visa/immigrants/types/types_1324.html I have three-and-half years of experience in the field of hospitality and a diploma in hospitality management. I would like to know what kind of work visa would be required for a visit to the USA? To qualify for any type of work visa, you first need a U.S. company to offer you a job. The company will decide if your education level meets the needs of the job. Once you are hired by a U.S. company, they will sponsor you for a temporary work visa and will file a petition for you. The petition will allow you to apply for a visa. The specific type will depend on the job being offered. For more information about the types of work visas, please visit our website: http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1271.html The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has approved a
petition from my spouse and sent it to the national visa centre. How much time will the NVC take to process the case? Every immigrant visa case is different. It is difficult to estimate how long the process will take for a specific individual. If you are an American citizen, the application is not subject to numerical limits and will, therefore, be available for your wife if she qualifies. Once a petition is approved, it is largely up to you how long it takes to get an interview appointment. The more quickly you follow the instructions provided by the National Visa Center (NVC) and submit all requested documents, the sooner an appointment can be scheduled. Appointments are usually scheduled for the month after all documents are submitted. Visas for those qualified are normally available within a few days of the interview. If you are a Legal Permanent Resident (LPR), the petition is subject to numerical limits and you can check the visa bulletin to get a better idea of the wait time. http://www.ustraveldocs.com/in/in-iv-waittimeinfo.asp. Once your wife’s “priority date” (the date you filed the petition for your wife) is current, an interview appointment will be scheduled. Note:
Please send your questions to usvisa@tribunemail.com. The US Embassy or The Tribune will only give general answers based on various queries. We will be unable to respond to individual correspondence. For more information, you can consult www.ustraveldocs.com/in or on Facebook for the Visa Fridays feature
(www.facebook.com/India.usembassy).
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