New Delhi, October 30
Admitting that the concept of ‘National Capital Region’ has completely failed, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit today said the satellite cities around Delhi have not been able to reduce pressure of the burgeoning population on the metropolis.

‘’The NCR is a dead concept as nobody is willing to give up anything. We have our regular meetings, make promises that we do not keep,’’ she said, while addressing a conference on ‘Delhi Vision 2021’ at the PHD Chambers here.

She regretted that the satellite cities—Faridabad, Gurgaon and Noida—had not been able to take any pressure off Delhi.

The concept of National Capital Region was first envisioned in the recommendations of the first Master Plan for Delhi (MPD) notified in 1962 comprising Delhi and a few ring towns around it, which was to be developed as a metropolitan region to reduce the population pressure on Delhi’s infrastructure.

The Chief Minister also admitted that though there has been an increase in government’s revenues by way of vat by 28 to 32 per cent in Delhi, implementation of the plans has been tardy as things get mired in age-old laws.

“We are ten years behind schedule in implementation. Unless we change the system and make it more proactive, it will be difficult to turn Delhi into a global metropolis,’’ she said.

She also pointed out that presence of multiplicity of authorities has been a problem and a challege for Delhi. 

‘While the DDA which is in charge of housing in Delhi, owes its existence to the union urban development ministry, Delhi Police comes under the union home ministry. The Lt-Governor has the final say, as he is the chief administrator. But, when there is a Blueline accident or shortage of water, the Delhi government which is an elected body, is percieved to be responsible for all this,’’ she said.

As the 73rd/74th amendments have been kept aside, the municipal authorities are elected bodies but their members have no say, and also, the constitution of a metropolitan authority is yet to materialise, she said. ‘’The Muncipal Corporation of Delhi, which has the Capital’s over 95 per cent area, is also torn between the urban development ministry and the Delhi government.’’

New Delhi, October 30
Blueline buses were at it again on Tuesday with five people, including three school students, critically injured when a speeding bus on route 469 rammed into them in south Delhi’s New Friends Colony.

According to the police, the accident occurred around 4.15 p.m. when the driver of the Blueline bus, plying between Ambedkar Nagar and Anand Vihar, lost control of the vehicle and rammed into the passengers near the Mathura Road flyover in New Friends Colony.

Police said the victims were rushed to the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital in a private vehicle. Some of them were stated to be in critical condition.

The injured were identified as Mansi, 22, a cyclist who has not been identified, and three Class 9 students—Simranjit, 16, Mannu Gupta, 15, Satvir, 15. Mansi is a woman.

The driver of the empty bus, which was going to a gas filling station, fled after the accident. “We have impounded the bus,” a police official said.

Earlier this month, a Blueline bus crushed seven people and left eight battling for their lives in Aali Gaon area in south Delhi, not far from Tuesday’s spot.

The Capital has some 4,000 Blueline buses, which form a crucial part of the city’s poor public transport system. Known as the “killer fleet”, these privately owned buses have killed 100 people so far this year.

Last year, these buses had killed 100 people.—IANS

New Delhi, October 30
The Delhi Police on Tuesday told a city court that it found no evidence against Uma Khurana, a schoolteacher who was shown in a fake television sting as purportedly forcing her students into prostitution and pornography.

The Delhi Police, probing the fake sting operation that led to Khurana’s arrest and dismissal from service two months ago, on Tuesday submitted its final report to a city court.

“We submitted our final investigation report in the court of Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Alok Aggarwal this afternoon,” a senior police official told IANS.

“In our report we mentioned that no substantial evidence has been found against Uma Khurana for her trial under the Immoral Trafficking Prevention (ITP) Act. We have also filed our first chargesheet against the television channel reporter and others,” the official said, adding that the court might quash charges against Khurana on the basis of the investigation.

The official dismissed media reports that Khurana had not been given a clean chit by the Delhi Police crime branch.

“We have already said in court that she was wrongly framed in the doctored sting telecast. We have also written to the state government about it,” the official said.

The ‘expose’ two months ago purportedly showed Khurana, a 41-year-old mathematics teacher at the Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya on Asaf Ali Road in central Delhi, as forcing her girl students into prostitution and pornography.

Following the telecast, an angry mob attacked the school, torched several vehicles parked on the road, and manhandled the teacher.

She was dismissed from service by the Delhi government September 1 and arrested the next day. —IANS

New Delhi, October 30
The past weekend has been very eventful at the Institute of Management Technology. It witnessed a number of marketing stalwarts coming to the Ghaziabad campus. The experts shared their experiences with the students and demonstrated how they had put theory to practice. The event was supported by Pantaloon Retail India Ltd (PRIL), Jindal Steel, National Entrepreneurship Network and Bosch.

The event started with the Director, Dr B.S.Sahay, extending a warm welcome to both the guests and the students. This was followed by Karthik Raina, a well-known marketing practitioner and consultant, expressing his views on the fact that there was no marketing without passion.

His speech was liberally sprinkled with quotes from Napolean, Hill and Peter Drucker. Next on the agenda was a real life case discussion followed by a note by Anoop Kumar Verma on Using Consumer Intelligence to drive your brand.

The Marketing Warfare which followed next saw issues such as The Journey of Marketing in the World of Practice and Reality, Sales in the changing Indian market scenario, and Integrated Marketing Communication in a B2B market being discussed by Anoop Kumar Verma, Animesh Puri, and Jaba Sen Menon.

Next up, Rajiv Mathur, Jaideep Bajaj and Pritesh Chotani enumerated on the Paradigm Shifts in marketing by discussing the new brands and their relevance in a competitive environment such as India with an example of how to create a health care brand in real life.

Arun Kohli, Sumit Gupta, and Paras Goel spoke about the changing dynamics of retail banking in the afternoon session which was devoted to the topic of customer power where the delegates enthused the students with their notes on virtual routes and rural strategies.

Disha ’07 was the highlight of the final session, that saw teams from IMT, MDI, IIFT and LBS present their research on the current retail scenario in India.

Their task was to suggest the next 20 locations at which PRIL could establish its KB Fair Price shops, as well as the products and services that could be offered here. 

Noida, October 30
A woman, who was believed to have been killed by her in-laws in Bihar three years ago and for which a court case was in progress against her in-laws, is happily living in Noida after marrying another man. The woman has been working as a security guard in a shopping mall in Noida for over a year now.

This is the version of Pankaj who claims she is his wife. But the woman refuses to recognise Pankaj, terming it to be a conspiracy against her. A team of Bihar police which had come to investigate the mater has taken the woman back to Bihar.

On May 9, 2004, Pankaj had married Kanchan in Chhapra district of Bihar, but Kanchan disappeared from her husband’s house after a few days in suspicious circumstances. Pankaj filed a missing report in a police station. Kanchan’s father, Gunjeshwer Mishra had on the other hand filed a report alleging dowry harassment by Kanchan’s in-laws. Subsequently, the police arrested her in-laws.

In the absence of any news about Kanchan, her father filed a case in court, accusing her in-laws of having killed his daughter for dowry. On a court order, the police registered a dowry death case against her in-laws.

The matter took a dramatic turn when her husband, accused of having killed her, told Bihar police that Kanchan was not only alive, but was living as wife of another man in Noida. A team of Bihar police reached Noida to verify this information. When Bihar police accosted Kanchan, she said it was a conspiracy against her. She identified herself as Sudha, a resident of Gaya Ghat, Muzzarfarpur in Bihar, who had married Parbhat, her class-fellow of Rampura Darbanga .

Ghaziabad, October 30
An out-of-control truck mowed down a boy in Vijay Nagar bye-pass in Ghaziabad. Infuriated over the incident, the locals torched the errant truck. They also resorted to stone pelting and damaged a number of vehicles. Traffic came to a stand still here for almost 2 hours.

According to eyewitnesses the accident in which 15-year-old young boy was crushed happened at 5 p.m. on Vijay Nagar bye-pass. Nafis, 15, a resident of Biharipura was knocked down by the truck being driven at high speed on Vijay Nagar bye-pass. Nafis had died on the spot. Though the truck driver had absconded from the spot, a crowd of angry people torched the vehicle and damaged half a dozen other vehicles including Noida Depot UP Roadway buses.

The protestords squatted on the road, placing the dead body in the middle of the road which was badly jammed for over two hours with hundreds of vehicle blocked on both from Delhi and Ghaziabad sides.

Cops rushed to the spot and brought the situation under control. The police personnel had to resort to lathi charge to disperse the crowd.As many as 15 persons were taken into custody.

In another road accident an elderly man was crushed under a truck on Hapur road near CBI Academy. Yudhvir Singh, a resident of D-39 Shastri Nagar, was going to Central Government’s ESI hospital in Kamla Nagar when he was knocked down by a truck.

The truck driver tried to flee after the accident, but was caught by some people who beat him up before police reached the spot and took him into custody. 

New Delhi, October 30
“What continues to be a teasing question for Muslim thinkers in India and elsewhere is that of reconciling tradition and modernity in all its ramifications in the social and political life of the community,” said Vice-President Mohd Hamid Ansari at the annual convocation of the varsity.

“In its most obvious sense, the foundation of Jamia was a protest against the political conformity of Aligarh in the context of the period immediately after World War I. This protest was not a flash in the pan, did not happen by accident, and was not confined to a narrow section of opinion. Instead it emanated from a basic premise that perceived the established political order as unjust,” spoke the Vice-President at length.

Hamid Ansari further stressed the importance of communal unity saying that, “we can become united only if we create within ourselves individually and in consonance with our dispositions and our tastes an overriding passion for a unity which can bear the moral burden of the wrongs we have committed. The acceptance of this approach to unity will be a spiritual effort and can succeed only if it receives sustenance and power from the traditions of religiousness which are a part of our history.”

Ansari further stressed that it was a major challenge to succeed in “creating an identity comprehensive enough to encapsulate both Indianness and Muslimness in the plural, democratic and secular ethos of contemporary India.” Will this get converted into action, is the big issue at hand and “underlying any such endeavour is the tension between the twin concepts of tradition and modernity.”

New Delhi, October 30
Yahoo! India announced today that its free mail services were available in Hindi too.

Users can receive and send e-mails in Hindi, without losing out on any of the features available in English.

“Yahoo! is the first Internet company to introduce Hindi language services in the country,” John Kremer, vice-president, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Inc, told IANS.

“We have been focussed on making it easy for people to connect to those, who matter most to them.

Now, with Yahoo! Mail Classic, we are creating a more local e-mail experience, he added.—IANS

New Delhi, October 30
While thousands of tribals, who had marched to the capital demanding basic rights, left for their hometowns by train Tuesday, over 200 of them stayed back at the Ramlila grounds as the government refused to provide extra train coaches.

Of the 25,000-odd landless tribal marchers, about 20,000 have already left for their homes, but nearly 2,000 stranded marchers are waiting at the stations to board trains, organisers said.

“Over 200 marchers have stayed back at the Ramlila Ground, as there are not sufficient trains,” Ramesh Sharma, a coordinator of the organising Ekta Parishad, told IANS.

“We had asked the government to provide us with one extra coach in all the trains going to Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Orissa from Delhi. However, they declined, saying the notice must have been given 24 hours prior to the scheduled departure of the train,” he added.

The participants, who came from villages across India, trekked a distance of 322 km to the national capital from Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, are returning home Tuesday after the government inclined to their demands of right to land, water and livelihood.

The atmosphere at the Ramlila Ground was relaxed and at the same time festive. While children were playing, and women were chatting or washing clothes near water tankers, some were dressed in colourful ethnic clothes, singing and dancing to folk songs - it was time to celebrate as the government had accepted their demands. — IANS

New Delhi, October 30
The Pearl Academy of Fashion organised its first inter-college festival – Pearl Utsav 2007 at Pragati Maidan in the Capital. The theme of the festival was ‘Evolution’. Padamshree danseuse Geeta Chandran was the chief guest and DJ Karan was the guest of honour.

More than 20 colleges of Delhi University like - Gargi, Delhi College of Arts & Commerce, Kirori Mal, Lady Irwin, Lady Shri Ram, and fashion colleges like - Wigan & Leigh and Pearl Academy (Jaipur) participated in the competitions. Fashion presentations and music performances.

New Delhi, October 30
The 703rd urs of the great sufi saint Hazrat Ameer Khusro will be held at Urs Mahal in Hazrat Nizamuddin here from tonight.

Poets, scholars, religious and political leaders and diplomats will attend the urs. On the opening day, vice-president M Hamid Ansari will attend the urs and pay tributes to the sufi saint.

Thousands of devotees, irrespective of faith and religion, are expected to participate in the Urs Mubarak, to be held till November 1.

Various programmes to be held during the urs include dastarbandi (pagri) of the guests, qawwalies by famous qawwal parties and prayers for communal harmony and the welfare of the country. 

In India, the construction sector accounts for almost 10 per cent of the GDP, and commercial and residential buildings in India account for more than 30 per cent of the country’s total electricity consumption. Energy efficient buildings and utility systems can reduce energy demand by as much as 40 per cent.
In such a scenario, says Kornevall, there is the need of new regulations to maximise efficient use of energy.

He was addressing a press conference here on the eve of an international forum on energy efficiency in the bulding sector.

Kornevall said there was a lot of fragmentation in the building sector and there was no leadership, whereas attempts to address the issues of global warming and consequent climate change should immediately turn their focus to this sector.

He also added the project EEB visulises zero net energy for buildings, which means bulidings as a whole, and not individual buildings, would generate as much energy as they use over the course of a year. — UNI

New Delhi, October 30
Raw water pumping station area of Wazirabad in Yamuna Vihar, switching station no 1 near Yamuna Vihar and Gamri village are likely to face power shut-down tomorrow between 11 am and 1 pm as some upgradation and maintenance work is to be carried out, said a BSES release today.