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Disposal of hazardous waste
Van Sarovar scheme to conserve water
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Vignettes
Chamba awaits heritage status
Crimes by migrants
Himachal diary
River project for Hamirpur
‘Make yoga part of life for better health’
Janmashtami
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SC directions not complied with
Ambika Sharma
Solan, August 11 Though the court had directed all hazardous waste emitting units to dump their waste scientifically within six months of setting up of such plants in their respective states, despite a lapse of eight months, the plant has drawn little response. Sources in the plant said barely 523 units availed the membership of this facility after depositing the dues and the proportion of the work was as less as 22-25 per cent. It is worth mentioning that nearly 1,400 units had been identified as hazardous waste generating units. Still worse, out of the total members, only 50 per cent units were sending their waste to the plant. This had reduced the plant’s feasibility and it had become difficult to run the plant with below expected waste arrival. Ashok Sharma, CEO of the plant, said efforts were on to draw more industrial units to use the facility, but despite several meetings with various industries at Poanta Sahib, Parwanoo, Baddi-Barotiwala-Nalagarh and other industrial areas, the investors shied away from using the facility. He added that the officials of the State Pollution Control Board had been apprised of the problems being faced in running the plant and the officials had been directed to convince the investors, but the results were poor. Though as per the laid norms, any unit that did not adhere to the directions within 90 days of the setting up of the plant was liable to be punished as per the provisions of the Hazardous Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 1989, the board could do a little to discipline the erring units. This willful non-compliance had rendered the plant non-feasible and the plant officials feared that if the situation did not improve soon, it would become difficult for them to run the plant any longer. The board did try to initiate steps to help the plant and it had taken up the issue of extending an aid of Rs 2 crore from the Ministry of Environments and Forests. The plant had already invested as much as Rs 15 crore on running it till now and if the investors continued to remain lax in sending their waste to the plant, it would force the plant to shut its operations altogether, opined plant officials. Non-utilisation of the plant on the other hand led to the unscientific dumping of toxic hazardous waste at several places in the industrial areas which could create environmental problems if the chemicals percolated to the water bodies. Unmindful of the serious consequences, the investors continued to shy away from their responsibility of dumping waste safely and this spoke volumes about their corporate responsibility in maintaining a clean environment, opined a board official.
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Van Sarovar scheme to conserve water
Shimla, August 11 Indeed the Van Sarovar programme, the forest department plans to launch shortly, will not only help the farmers whose fortunes have been oscillating between drought and deluge but also prove a boon for wildlife. Under the scheme, a series of water harvesting structures will be built in selected watersheds right from the ridge downhill to trap the surface runoff. The cascade of rainwater harvesting trenches and storage bodies will be constructed on the basis of standard drawings approved and circulated to the field staff. Each watershed will have a network of 8 to 10 harvesting structures which will form a unit. The average cost of such units will range between Rs 1.5 lakh and Rs 2.5 lakh depending on the hill terrain. To begin with, five units are proposed to be constructed in each of the 43 territorial and wildlife divisions in the state. Funds will not be a problem as the entire programme would be implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, says Forest Minister JP Nadda. It is entirely a labour-based scheme and virtually no material will be required. Only excavation will be carried out to create the cavities of required size and shape on the slopes to arrest the surface runoff, he points out. The van sarovars will help improve the soil moisture regimes, which in turn extend the green cover by stimulating the natural regeneration of all kind of vegetation. Further, the structures will break the flow of storm water to help prevent soil erosion, a major environmental problem in the hills. More importantly, the network of hundreds of water bodies in deep forests will come in handy in fighting forest fires which cause extensive damage to the green cover every summer, observes additional chief secretary, forests, Avay Shukla. In the long term, the scheme will help recharge the aquifers to revive the natural sources of water which invariably go dry at the very outset of summer. Inadequate and irregular rainfall coupled with declining snow has been a cause of major concern. The snowline is receding with each passing year and the lower hill and even middle hill ranges hardly receive any snow these days. As a result, the discharge in streams and rivers has been declining due to which about 20 to 25 per cent of the 7,900 water supply schemes in the state either go completely dry or are severely affected during summer. The low discharge has also started affecting the hydropower generation. While the Van Sarovar scheme is a welcome move, some major policy initiatives will be required to effectively deal with the problem of water scarcity being caused due to the degradation of the fragile hill environment. Development activity has to be severely restricted and regulated in the middle and high hills for which all areas above the altitude of 4,000 ft should be declared eco-sensitive. Increasing human activity in the high hills, which have little carrying capacity, has been a major factor behind receding of the snowline. Only the local people be allowed need-based constructions and economic development should be based on eco-tourism, agriculture, horticulture and allied activities.
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VP Menon’s journey to Shimla
by Shriniwas Joshi Vappala Pangunni Menon or VP Menon was a civil servant who played vital administrative roles in independent India and before that. The eldest son in a family of 12 of a headmaster of a school in Kerala, he was not much educated. “No degree of Oxford or Cambridge graced his office walls. No family ties had hastened his rise. VP Menon was an incongruous oddity in the rarefied air of Viceroy’s House, a self-made man,” write Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in “Freedom at Midnight”. He had left school when he was only 13. He then worked as a “construction labourer, coal miner, factory hand, stoker on the Southern Indian Railways, unsuccessful cotton broker and schoolteacher”. Menon taught himself to type with two fingers and, in 1929, thought of going to Shimla which then was the seat of the government. He reached Delhi to board a train for Kalka, but found that somebody had picked his pocket. He was desperate when he noticed an elderly Sikh gentleman. Gathering courage, Vappala went to him, narrated his plight and requested for a loan of Rs 15, which was the fare from Delhi to Shimla. The Sikh gentleman could feel the truth in the story and gave him the money. Showing gratefulness to the donor, he asked for his address so that he could return the loan. The Sikh gentleman said, “No. Until the day you die, you will always give that sum to an honest man who asks your help.” Menon kept these words in mind and on reaching Shimla could obtain a job of a clerk. His career then witnessed a meteoric rise. By 1947, VP Menon was the reforms commissioner, the highest post ever held by an Indian on Viceroy’s staff. He was Lord Louis Mountbatten’s confidant and when, in Shimla in May 1947, Nehru was furious on the first draft of India’s independence that had proposed to fragment the country into a dozen pieces, it fell upon VP Menon to redraft the entire plan. He himself says in “The Transfer of Power”: “I had only two or three hours in which to prepare an alternative draft plan and I sat to work on it at once”. The Viceroy wanted to show the draft plan to Nehru before leaving Shimla that evening. Menon’s approach towards the partition of India in the redrafted plan was appreciated by Nehru that made the Viceroy happy. After India’s independence, Menon was appointed the Secretary to the Government of India in the Ministry of States under Sardar Patel. Menon resigned from the service in 1950 on Patel’s death to settle in Bangalore. Most exciting is what his daughter had recalled that six weeks before his death, a beggar came to his house. He asked his daughter to bring his wallet, took out Rs 15, and gave it to the man. He was still paying the debt that he had taken from the Sikh gentleman in Delhi en route Shimla.
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Chamba awaits heritage status
Shimla, August 11 With not much interest being taken by the government in seeking heritage status for
Chamba, which celebrated its millennium year in 2006, the project has been pending with practically no progress. Seeing the rich repository of heritage monuments in the form of ancient temples and palaces, there is an urgent need to save these priceless masterpieces from decaying and being lost forever. While the department of language, art and culture says it is the town and country planning (TCP) authorities which deal with the grant of heritage status to any town, the fact is that it is as good as a dead project, with nobody really bothered to preserve the heritage of the oldest princely state of Himachal
Pradesh. “Seeing the ancient structures like the 10th century temple complex crumble with no conservation and preservation efforts, it is very painful for locals who love the town and want that its rich culture be saved,” says K Asif Ali
Lodhi, a former government employee, who gave up his job to relentlessly plead the cause of the preservation of the rich culture of Chamba and promoting it as an international tourist destination. He has painstakingly prepared an extensive report detailing the history of the town, its uniqueness in having an unbroken chain of rulers from the same family for 1,200 years and the work undertaken by various historians in Chamba over the last one century, highlighting the importance of the town. “Some of the ancient temples, palaces, sculptures and paintings dating back to the ninth century are in dire need of preservation which can only be done through the International Union of Conservation for Nature
(IUCN), once the town makes it to the UNESCO list of world heritage sites,” says
Lodhi. The efforts for getting a world heritage site status for Chamba gained momentum after the millennium celebrations in 2006 when the then Union Minister for Tourism Ambika Soni presided at the function. In fact, officials of the department of language, art and culture did make some efforts to get the project moving with the assistance of TCP officials, but with little success. The TCP officials, on their part, point out that any move to declare a heritage zone is met with resistance from locals. “We have already notified the heritage reports for Shimla,
Chamba, Mandi and Dalhousie but in the absence of any public response to the objections invited, the matter could not gain momentum,” said an officer. The officials point out that rather than declaring the entire town as a heritage site, it would be better to have heritage zones so that people can carry on with their development activities without the fear of restrictions in the case of the grant of heritage status. It was way back in May 1995 that a heritage zone was designated by the government, including the main area around
Chowgan, which covered the temples of Chamunda. There are many others in Chamba along with Lodhi who feel pained at the disinterest shown by the government in vigorously pursuing the matter despite praise being showered and Chamba being a fit case for UNESCO world heritage status.
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Life sentence to 2 highlights problem
Dharam Prakash Gupta Tribune News Service
Hamirpur, August 11 The convicted labourers, both residents of Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh, were working as sharecroppers in Jassai village of Nadaun division when they killed a 15-year-old Class X student, Munish, of Jassai village after kidnapping him last year. The problem is acquiring alarming proportions with each passing day as reports of criminal acts by migrant labourers have increased in areas like Baddi, which has a sizeable population of such people. The convicts, Beeru Ram and Ranjeet, have been held guilty of murdering and kidnapping the boy on April 16, 2008, under Section 302 of the IPC for which they have been imprisoned for life with a fine of Rs 10,000 each and additional imprisonment for two years in case of default in the payment of fine. Both of them have also been imprisoned for another seven years under Section 201 of the IPC for kidnapping with a fine of Rs 5,000 each and six months’ imprisonment in case of default in the payment of fine. Both of them had kidnapped the boy while he was on his way to school. They later killed him and dumped the body in a trench in a nearby forest. The body was recovered by the police on April 20, 2008. The accused had absconded to UP after committing the crime and were later arrested from Shahjahanpur while they were demanding ransom from the family of the boy. The incident had created panic in the district and evoked strong reaction at a few places where local people had targeted migrant labourers. While the criminals in this case have been put behind bars, the state police has a challenging job ahead to tackle such elements.
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Anti-ragging steps: Newcomers relieved
Anti- ragging measures in educational institutions have acquired a new focus with the Supreme Court and the Centre prescribing tough measures to check the menace in the wake of the Aman Kachru ragging murder case.Newcomers in professional colleges are relieved. New students of government medical colleges, which have become notorious for ragging, were really thrilled to find that there was no such thing on the first day there. A student while narrating the experience of his first Sunday in a hostel said the newcomers played cricket on the holiday. This was really a surprise for the juniors as their predecessors could not even imagine of entering the playground during the first few days as the seniors enforced a strict discipline code to restrict the movements of the newcomers as part of the ragging exercise. Doyen of legal
profession
A doyen of the legal profession, Lala Amar Chand Sood, died here early this week.He was 104. He was the seniormost advocate of the Himachal high court and also the oldest reader of The Tribune for which he was honoured during the launching of the Himachal edition of the newspaper two years ago. He passed B.Sc from Punjab University, Lahore, in 1927 and started his career as a legal pleader three year later after obtaining a degree in law. He was enrolled as an advocate in 1941 and designated Senior Advocate in 1974. He remained the vice-chairman of the state bar council and president of the high court bar association. He was given a commendation by the Governor in recognition of his distinguished services to the legal profession. He also had in-depth knowledge of herbal and medicinal plants and ailing people often came to him for seeking advice on the administration of indigenous medicines He was a voracious reader and age had not blunted his urge for reading law journals. He was a philanthropist and financed the education of many needy students. He was associated with a number of social, religious and charitable organisations for which he served selflessly.
Raksha Bandhan
Prisoners at the local Kaithu Jail were overwhelmed when the general secretary of the Delhi Kala Karam, Saroj Vasishth, along with her group of volunteers celebrated Raksha Bandhan with them. The inmates presented a variety programme . A young undertrial recited poems. Vasishth asked her to continue writing poems so that his works could be compiled into a book and published.The Kala Karam has already published two collections of poetry penned by jail inmates. (Contributed by
Rakesh Lohumi and D.P. Gupta)
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River project for Hamirpur
Hamirpur, August 11 The project, known as the River Valley Project (RVP), has been sanctioned by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Central government through which the flood-prone areas lying in the catchment areas would be saved from floods through different measures. The priority of this project would be watershed development projects through which agriculture and forestry activities would be enhanced. Since floods in the low-lying areas along the Beas are perennial in the district, the Rs 3-crore project would focus on the prevention of floods through soil conservation. Prevention of soil erosion would be the main aim of the project and other related activities like water conservation, rainwater harvesting and increasing green cover would also be undertaken. For soil conservation, various check dams and lakes would be raised which would help in the recharging of water sources and raising plantation in the district. Telling about the project, Sanjay Sood, divisional forest officer, Hamirpur, told The Tribune that, “While this project would help in soil conservation in the flood-prone areas of the district, it would lead to increase in green cover, water conservation, and enhancing forestry and agricultural activities which would help in creating large-scale employment in the district during 2009 to 2013”.
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‘Make yoga part of life for better health’
Kangra, August 11 It is an annual feature of the kendra which attracts women of all ages, besides college girls. Raj Kumar Ohri, principal, MCM DAV College, showing keenness regarding health of the girls of the college and to bring them close to theiir cultural roots, directed the girls to attend it regularly. Mehgavani Patil, wife of BH Patil, a former senior scientist of ISRO, conducted yoga classes. Dr Neena Pawa, a prominent physician of the town, who attended the camp, stressed the need for making yoga a part of life for better health. She lauded the role of the kendra in holding such camps in the town. Sangeeta Gurung, a DAV College student, said the meditation techniques taught during the camp had helped her and her classmates. Prominent citizens of the town attended the concluding function.
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ASI’s hefty fee irks residents
Rajiv Mahajan
Nurpur, August 11 According to RK Mahajan, president of the local Municipal Council and the Janamashtami Festival Committee, who used to bear all expenses of the festival every year, this hefty fee was unjust and unwarranted for any religious celebrations and against the religious sentiments of people. He told this festival was being celebrated on August 14 this year and he would raise the demand of scrapping of fee by the ASI through Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal who was scheduled to visit the town on the occasion. He said he would also urge the Chief Minister to declare this festival as a district-level festival. Meanwhile, superintendent ASI, Shimla, Tashkant Lone, clarified that this fee had been fixed by the chief director, ASI, Delhi, for maintaining the protected monument and he was unable to waive it off. “The committee should plead before the higher authorities in this connection,” he added.
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Environmentalists have been for long calling for a change in the forest policy to shift the focus from commercial exploitation of forests for timber and other products to life-sustaining natural resources like water and clean air.
Kangra, August 11
