Gurgaon, February 8
“I was brought to this guesthouse by a driver for the job of a cook,” Rajinder, one of the labourers rescued by the Gurgaon police last night from the Value Apartments flat No. 204 located on the Gurgaon-Faridabad road, disclosed to The Tribune in the hospital today.

Rajinder said the driver took him to the guesthouse at the Palam Vihar hospital in Gurgaon and he was under the impression that this was the guesthouse where he had to work. He said he cooked food for three days and after that he was asked to get his blood tested as he was serving foreign guests at the guesthouse and they wanted to be sure that he had no health problems. He said a number of foreigners kept visiting the place regularly.

Rajinder said after his blood test, one day he was injected and when he regained consciousness, he came to know that his kidney had been donated to somebody. He said after his operation, he was shifted to the house from where the police had rescued him and three other labourers last night.

Another labourer, Daleep, admitted to the hospital after being rescued by the Gurgaon police last night, told The Tribune that a driver picked him from Old Delhi a few days ago with the promise of providing him a good job and took him to the Palam Vihar hospital. He said on his way, two gunmen threatened him to donate one of his kidneys. He said he was operated upon on January 18, 2008, and then sent to flat No. 204 where a Nepalese cook used to take care of them and prepared food for them.

An official said on a tip-off, the police raided the premises of Value Apartments and found four labourers - Rajinder, Daleep, Shaheed and Naresh - lodged there.

He said Rajinder was from Uttaranchal, while the remaining three were from UP. He said all labourers had stated that they had been operated upon to remove their kidneys at the Palam Vihar hospital between January 15 and 20. After their operation, all of them were shifted to the flat where a Nepalese cook looked after them, but he had gone missing for the past two days.

The police has arrested S.P. Singh, owner of flat No. 204 in Value Apartments, Gurgaon, from Chandigarh, but the tenant, Y.P. Sharma, an accountant of Amit, is still missing.

Gurgaon joint commissioner of police Manjit S. Ahlawat denied that a team of the Gurgaon police had been sent to Nepal to interrogate and bring back Dr Amit, the main accused in the kidney racket.

Faridabad, February 8
The police today procured a five-day remand of the manager of Shriram Hospital located in Ballabgarh near here, Jaswant Singh. He was arrested in connection with alleged negligence relating to the deaths of three nationals from Turkistan.

Dr Upender, who is presently in the custody of Uttar Pradesh police in connection with the kidney racket, is the main accused in the case.

District police chief Alok Mittal said the police would try to bring Dr Upender here with regard to investigation in the case. The three Turkish nationals had died in separate cases in 2003, 2004 and 2005. Cardiac arrest was cited as the cause of their deaths by the hospital.

Faridabad, February 8
The police today arrested the wife of a teacher of Government Senior Secondary School in Chandauli village, near here, in connection with his murder that took place on Monday night.

Nardev, brother of the victim’s wife Manju, and his friend Ansool have also been arrested in the case. According to the police, all three will be produced in court a tomorrow.

The victim, Ramvir Singh Shastri, was found murdered on Tuesday morning. According to the police, Manju, a nurse with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, had taken Nardev into confidence about her suspicion of her husband’s illicit relations with someone. She did not know the identity of the alleged paramour of her husband. She had also told Nardev about her husband’s alleged misbehaviour with her.

The sister-brother duo hatched the murder conspiracy. Nardev, doing a hotel management course from the Shriram Insititute in Dehra Dun, was a trainee at Le Meridien in Delhi. He roped his friend at the institute, Ansoo, a resident of Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh), into the conspiracy.

Nardev and his friend came from Delhi to Ballabgarh by train at night and according to the plan, Manju opended the main door of the house. Ramvir Shastri was sleeping alone in one room. The two attacked him with a knife and killed him.

Nardev bolted the room in which Manju and her three children were sleeping from outside to mislead the police. The morning after the incident, Manju had called up a relative to say that her room was bolted from outside. Later, Ramvir Shastri was found dead in his room.

Panchkula, February 8
The state is going to register another leap in the field of information technology leap as the setting up of a Technology park (basically information technology software) has been approved while the work on the proposal of Hardware technology Park was in the advance stage.

The technology park to be set up at Sampla would be developed by Town and Country Planning Board, said Haryana Financial Commissioner and Principal Secretary, Electronics and Information Technology Pardeep Kumar Chaudhary while talking on the sidelines of 2-day National e-Governance Conference which concluded here today. The proposed Hardware Technology Park, however would be developed by Haryana Stated Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation (HSIIDC) at Kundli, he added.

Informing about the progress in the IT Park to be set up at Panchkula Chaudhary said the names of companies to be invited for starting their ventures would also be finalized within this month.

The HSIIDC received around 60 expressions of interest for the first phase of Park spread over 97 acres for allotment of plots measuring between one acre to ten acres.

The exact amount of investment and the volume of employment generated through these ventures would, however, could be assessed only after the companies and the projects proposed by them to be set up in the park were finalised, he said.

Panchkula, February 8
The goal of e-governance would become a reality only after the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) reached 6 lakh villages in the country for the benefit of 850 million rural populace, observed policy planners and technocrats congregated at the 11th National e-governance Conference here today.

Till the farmers graduate to become e-farmers and the villages become smart villages, the vision of e-governance would remain a pipedream, observed the majority of panelists while debating on the theme of “Enhanced developmental impact through ICT- Empowering the farmers”.

“Only a citizen-to-government (C2G) approach instead of G2C approach will help the country to fulfill the goal of reaching out to the last village,” said M. Moni, DDG of the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

The experts rued the fact that the GDP contribution of agriculture sector had come down to 19 per cent from the earlier 61 per cent while it still sustained two-third of country’s population.

N.K. Das, additional secretary in the ministry of agriculture, said the country had for the first time brought out a national policy on farmers and the 11th plan document envisaged top priority to deal with agriculture crisis and bridging the rural-urban gap.

Low availability of power, poor ICT infrastructure in villages, poor ICT literacy and the challenge of localisation of user applications in 22 languages were among the major obstacles, cited by the experts, in the way of the ICTs reaching the farmers.

Srinivas Rao from the ITC, which had pioneered the concept of e-choupal, said the e-choupal initiative was in operation in six states covering 40,000 villages would be extended to 15 states to cover 1 lakh villages by 2012.

An ambitious project has been set into motion to design a comprehensive agriculture portal, AGROPEDIA, which would be a repository of agriculture knowledge and provide every kind of grassroots information to the farmers in the country.

Panchkula, February 8
Haryana has steadily risen up the ranks of e-readiness in the country and now tops among major states on the e-readiness index. According to the latest e-readiness report compiled by the National Council of Applied Economic Research, the state has risen steadily from 15th in 2003 to 11th in 2004 and to 9th in 2005.

In fact, Haryana being a bigger state is counted to be third in the e-readiness index as the others leading in the index were smaller or union territories being governed by the centre. Haryana is next only to Delhi and Chandigarh.

The report released by union communication and information technology minister A. Raja here today at the 11th National Conference on e-Governance is the fourth in the series of such reports compiled since 2003 to rank the states and union territories according to their levels of e-readiness.

The report has measured the e-readiness of the states in terms of their ability to participate in the increasingly networked world. Three main quantitative and qualitative indicators have been used in the exercise - the environment that promotes the spread and usage of information and communication technology (ICT); the readiness of different stake holders of the economy (the government - both the initiatives of the central government and the response of the state governments, businesses, and the individual) to use ICT; and the degree of usage of the ICT by the three stake holders.

Under these indicators, Haryana ranks second in terms of environment among the six states in level 1, second in readiness among the three states in level 1 and seventh among the 14 states in level 2 of the usage index. None of the states has qualified for level 1 in the usage index.

Explaining e-readiness, principal secretary, IT, Haryana, P.K. Chaudhary said it could be considered as the ability to pursue value creation opportunities facilitated by ICT. Therefore, it is not simply a matter of number of computers, websites, Internet service providers, Internet connections, telephones and mobiles in the state, but also the ability of readiness to use technology skillfully at the level of the individual, business and the government, he added.

Panchkula, February 8
Integration with regular healthcare delivery services of state governments and motivation of doctors will be required most to derive the benefits of telemedicine and to make it citizen centric.

Dr K.K. Ghosh, scientist, medicine electronics and telemedicine division, department of information technology, stated this here today.

Telemedicine, the use of information and technology to provide specialised healthcare services when distance separates patient and doctor, would be a success only when the regular healthcare delivery services were ingrained in the system and the doctors available were motivated to use it to treat the patients staying at remote places as the country had no doctors in rural areas, said Dr Ghosh, who was addressing delegates participating at the National e-Governance Conference on the concluding day.

“Seventy per cent of the population resides in villages and not even a single specialist is available for this segment of society,” he said. Moreover, there were merely 260 tertiary medical colleges 
and hospitals for more than 1 billion population.

This was not all. India had just six physicians against 10,000 persons while for the remaining globe, the number of physicians was 22.5 against the same number of people, he revealed.

He said 75 per cent of the doctors were stationed at urban areas while 23 per cent were practicing at semi-urban areas. Only 2 per cent of the doctors were available to the rural population, said the scientist.

The introduction of telemedicine would not only reduce the load on the tertiary hospital but would also improve the access to quality healthcare.

Panipat, February 8
Following two attempts on the life of the controversial head of the Sirsa-based Dera Sacha Sauda, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, the dera management is keen on including a jammer (sophisticated gadget that disables a bomb detonator) in his convoy.

Though the dera chief has already been provided Z-plus security after he reportedly emerged on the hit list of various radical organisations, the management is not satisfied.

Priced at a whopping Rs 1.50 crore, the sources said the dera management might urge the state government to provide a jammer for the dera chief’s security.

At least 25 persons, including an RAF jawan, were injured, four of them seriously, when the convoy of the dera chief was attacked by a mob near Ghukan Wali village in Sirsa on July 16 last.

Fifteen vehicles, which were part of the dera chief’s convoy, were damaged in the attack.

A stepney bomb was blasted on the convoy near Nilokheri, Karnal, on February 2 in which no serious injury to anyone was reported.

The sources said a final discussion would be held later this month after the dera chief returned from his tour of South India.

Rohtak, February 8
Former Haryana finance minister and senior INLD leader Sampat Singh has said the state government is causing heavy losses to the exchequer by favouring the Reliance group. 

“The Congress regime in Haryana is bending all norms to grant undue benefits to the group, thereby compromising the state’s interests and causing losses worth thousands of crores,” Sampat Singh said while addressing a news conference here.

The former minister said Reliance Energy had been granted relaxation in the execution time of the Yamunanagar thermal power unit and other related matters on June 15, 2005. “This, despite the fact that the company had been denied these relaxations hardly two days prior to that,” he pointed out. Sampat Singh elaborated that the centre had announced a subsidy of 10 per cent to the state in case the power project was commissioned within the 10th Five-Year Plan. “To earn the subsidy, the previous INLD regime had asked the company to commission the unit by March 31, 2007, failing which a penalty of 10 per cent would be imposed on it,” he maintained. The INLD leader asserted that as the new commissioning time (November 1, 2007) now fell in the period of 11th Five-Year Plan, the centre’s subsidy amounting to nearly Rs 200 crore was lost.

“Moreover, in an apparent bid to hoodwink the public, the Chief Minister went on to inaugurate the incomplete thermal power unit at Yamunanagar on November 1.

Chandigarh, February 8
Ranjit Kaur, an HCS officer, has claimed that the charge that she was helped during interview by the Haryana Public Service Commission is baseless and without any substance. She said earlier also she had cleared the written examination of the HCS but could not get through the interview.

During inspection of the answer sheets of the HCS candidates as ordered by the Punjab and Haryana High Court, it was found that while she got 493 marks in the written examination, she was given 90 marks out of 100 in the interview. Another Scheduled Caste candidate Shailender Singh Birla, who got 582 marks in the written examination, was given only 17 marks in the interview. He could not make it to the HCS.

Ambala, February 8
The Haryana government is all set to revive posts of district transport officer in the state soon. Revealing this here today, education and transport minister Mange Ram Gupta said the government was committed to providing better transport facilities to the people. He said appointment to the posts of DTO would be made soon.

He said the government would add 500 new buses to the existing fleet and old buses would be replaced accordingly. He said the government had already initiated the process to recruit new conductors and drivers so that the buses which had been rendered useless due to shortage of staff could resume service. The department had decided not to hire private agencies to run the state buses, the minister said.

He said it had also been decided to reduce the seating capacity in buses from 52 to 45.

Chandigarh, February 8
Acting on a petition, accusing Haryana cops of arresting two Yamunanagar district residents despite the production of bail orders, Justice Surya Kant of the Punjab and Haryana High Court has ordered a fact-finding inquiry into the matter.

Pronouncing the orders in an open court, Justice Kant directed that the inquiry be held either by Yamunanagar SP or assistant SP. The Judge has also directed that the petitioners should be associated with the inquiry, the report of which would be submitted to the court before the next date of hearing in the matter.

The case will now come up for further consideration on April 29.

In their petition, Narender Kumar and Kuldeep of Fatehpur village in Jagadhri tehsil had earlier contended that even though the court had passed the bail orders in their favour in a case of hurt registered at Buria police station on March 15, 2006, the respondent police officers illegally arrested them, thereby committing contempt of court.

Going into the background of the matter, the petitioners contended that Jagadhri’s additional sessions judge had on March 22, 2006, dismissed the bail application of three other accused, while directing that the petitioners would be released on bail after furnishing requisite bail bonds in the event of their arrest.

Taking up the petition, seeking the initiation of contempt of court proceedings against the responsible police officers for violation of the bail orders, Justice Kant observed: The plea taken by the respondents is that the petitioners were not arrested in the FIR dated March 15, 2006. Rather, proceedings under Section 107/151 of the CrPC were initiated against them vide dairy report number 18, dated April 2, 2006. It was only to prevent the breach of law and order; they were taken into custody and were produced before the illaqua magistrate the next day.