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Villagers in Yamunanagar district being evacuated to safer places.
Swollen Ghaggar alarms farmers in Fatehabad
Karnal villages also deluged
Mustafabad residents try to plug a breach in Indri, Karnal. Tribune photo: Ravi Kumar |
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Red alert in Sonepat areas
Rebate withdrawal leaves khadi industry in lurch
PDS Rot
Floods man-made, says report
Rs 4,200 crore plan to augment power supply
Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda inaugurates a railway overbridge at Mahendragarh on Sunday.
A Tribune photograph
Farmers’ panel to meet on Sept 10
Land Acquisition
Power corpn to buy 2.50 lakh meters
Strike by govt staff on Sept 7
Flood relief: Sirsa discriminated against, allege INLD leaders
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Water enters homes in 22 villages
Yamunanagar, August 22 Water has entered residential areas of at least 22 villages located in low-lying areas while agricultural land in over 48 villages has been submerged after the embankments of the Yamuna were washed away at several places causing breaches in the Yamuna in Jagadhri and Radaur subdivisions. The water released from the Hathnikund barrage will take 72 hours to reach Delhi
after passing through different districts of the state. The situation is much serious in Pauwari, Belawali, Kalesar, Belgarh, Nawazpur, Mandola, Bibipur, Jodhpur, Lal Chhapar, Sanghala, Sanghali, Gumthala, Nakub, Dayarampur, Tapimajra, Jatlana, Gumthala, and Unheri villages where water has entered homes. The villagers have taken shelter on the roof of their houses. Many villagers are vacating their homes and shifting to safety. The situation has been aggravated by rainfall in the district. Link roads have been damaged at several places and agricultural land in hundreds of acres has been washed away. The breaches are attributed to unscientific mining of sand and stone in the Yamuna. The water level in the Yamuna began rising late last evening and was recorded at 2.21 lakh cusecs at 2 am. The villagers say there are no proper arrangements to shift them to safer places or drain out water from residential areas. But Deputy Commissioner Ashok Sangwan denied this. He said residents of 27 villages affected by the Yamuna had been told to leave. “We are making arrangements for the villagers as per their requirement,” he claimed. |
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Swollen Ghaggar alarms farmers in Fatehabad
Fatehabad, August 22 He said there was no threat of floods, provided it did not rain heavily in the catchments areas again. However, the apprehensions of farmers are not totally unfounded. Crops in over 68,000 acres were submerged in the district during the July floods. “Our fields were flooded with water from the Ghaggar last month, damaging the crops we had grown. “Now, we have transplanted paddy again with great effort and incurred heavy costs in removing water from our fields and bringing costly saplings from Punjab. “Another flood will completely ruin us,” said Jarnail Singh. “I have 40 acres on contract basis for
Rs 38,000 per acre and have transplanted basmati on the land. “We visited the Khanauri and Gulha Cheeka head works this morning and hope that the waters gushing again in the Ghaggar river will not devastate our crops the second time,” added Avtar Singh, a former sarpanch of Kasimpur, looking worried. |
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Karnal villages also deluged
Karnal, August 22 Chandro, Hansumajara, Nagli, Nabibabad, Sayeed Pur, Japti Chapra, Bano Kheri, Chagaon and Shekhpura villages in the district have been even as flood threat looms large over a dozen adjacent villages. Rajinder Singh, Chief Engineer, Yamuna Water Supply said the low lying areas were always proneto floods and with heavy rains in catchment areas of the Yamuna and its tributaries, the situation had worsened. The people of flooded villages were very angry with the government for not taking preventive measures even as they suffered year after year. During the monsoons last year, these villages were flooded when about 4.20 lakh cusecs of water was released from the Hathnikund barrage, which flowed downwards at a speed of 20 ft per second.
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Red alert in Sonepat areas
Sonepat, August 22 At present, the flow was around two lakh cusecs and the Yamuna embankment had been strengthened to withstand a water flow up to 5,00,000 cusecs.The situation was being monitored round the clock. The district had been divided into 20 sectors to keep a watch on waterlogging, damage to crops, and outbreak of contagious diseases.
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Another buffalo clone at NDRI
Karnal, August 22 Dr AK Srivastava, Director of the institute, said the second cloned buffalo calf - Garima-II - was born at the NDRI at 4.15 pm, through the advanced hand-guided cloning technique and was different from the earlier cloned calf - Garima, born on June 6, 2009 - because in this case the used donor cell was the embryonic stem cell while in the earlier cloning, the donor cell was from somatic cells. The donor embryonic stem cells, isolated from the eight-day-old blastocyst, were cultured up to 29 passages (117 days) till these expressed the pluripotent marker, he explained. In this technique, immature oocytes were isolated from ovaries, matured in-vitro, denuded and treated with an enzyme to digest the outer layer of oocytes called zona pellucida. The oocytes were then treated with chemicals to push their genetic material to one side of the oocytes and the protruded side was then cut off with the help of “hand-held fine blade” for removing the original genetic material of the oocytes. The enucleated oocyte was then electrofused with a single cell taken from a colony of embryonic stem cells and the resulting embryos were cultured and grown in the laboratory for seven days to develop them to the stage of blastocyst which were transferred to recipient buffaloes. The cloned calf, weighing 32 kg, born through the caesarian operation, carried out by a team of doctors comprising Dr RS Bisla from the CCSHAU, Hisar, Dr KPS Tomar, Dr Subhash Chand, Dr Parveen Kumar and Dr MK Srivastava from the NDRI, was in a fine state with normal blood pressure, ECG, blood count and pulse rate and was free from problem of the umbilical chord faced by the first cloned calf. Dr Srivastava said this technology could go a long way in faster multiplication of superior milch buffaloes in India, which had the world’s largest population of buffaloes. Scientists say that the embryonic stem cells have a better cloning ability as compared to the somatic cells, as the epigenetic reprogramming of these cells is much more efficient with differentiated and committed lineage. Earlier, the NDRI had successfully produced the world’s first cloned buffalo calf on February 6, 2009, by the conventional hand-guided cloning technique developed at the
NDRI. |
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Rebate withdrawal leaves khadi industry in lurch
Panipat, August 22 The Union Government had abruptly put an end to the rebate given to the khadi industry from April 1 onwards. The local industry, which was highly dependent on the rebate, has been hit the hardest by the decision. Mahesh Dutt Sharma, state convener of the Haryana Khadi Mission, said many khadi and village industries in the state had provided employment to a considerable number of artisans. The latest move might render this workforce jobless in the near future, he added. The rebate was the lifeline for the industry, as khadi clothes were being sold in the market at a discount of 30 per cent. Sharma said the decision would push the industry further towards extinction as it had been already facing a resource crunch. Sharma said it was quite unbecoming on the part of the Union Government to stop the rebate as this had been introduced to promote the khadi industry, which was endorsed by Mahatma Gandhi himself. At present, the government owes over Rs 450 crore to the khadi industry of the state as rebate, which has not been released despite repeated pleas. Even bank loans, which were earlier granted at an interest rate of 4 per cent, are now given at an interest rate of 12 per cent, which has made it altogether more difficult for the khadi units to survive. In the present scenario, where highly sophisticated industry units had taken over the major market shares, khadi could only be saved with immediate intervention of the government, he said. “Even the Congressmen have stopped wearing khadi now. Perhaps the latest move of the government will completely ruin the khadi industry, which at one point of time had played an important role in the country’s struggle for freedom,” Sharma said. He said a strong appeal had already been put up before the Union Government and they could only hope for a positive response that would go a long way in safeguarding the interests of the khadi industry.
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Villagers make team beat a hasty retreat
Sushil Manav Tribune News Service
Fatehabad, August 22 Villagers, who suspected that the officials had come to the village to tamper with the records, snatched ration cards from them when they were allegedly making some entries in the cards of the villagers. The Tribune had published a report, “Rotten wheat finds way through PDS”, in these columns yesterday and highlighted the fact as to how fungus-infested wheat was sold to poor families in the village. The department had, however, played down the issue and claimed that wheat, slightly discoloured due to moisture, had found its way to the ration depot. Baljit Singh Kuleria, Joint Director of the Food and Supplies Department, visited the village last evening in this connection. However, after his visit four officials of the Food and Supplies Department from Fatehabad reached the village in a jeep today and said they had come here for a door-to-door inquiry. “A number of villagers had gathered in a gurdwara to partake of the bhog of akhand path and they told the team members that they were free to conduct any inquiry, but they would not allow them to make any fresh entry in the ration cards,” said Gurmel Singh, sarpanch of the village. “However, when they started their door-to-door survey, they made some entries in the ration card of the first family they visited,” the sarpanch added. Gurjeet Singh, a former member of the village panchayat, entries in whose ration card was allegedly tampered with by the officials, called villagers, who asked the team to leave their village. An exchange of hot words was witnessed between the villagers and the team members, who later left the village without any further inquiry. Dilbagh Singh Doon, District Food and Supplies Controller, did not respond to several calls made on his mobile phone for knowing his version on the episode.
Kuleria said he would submit his report to his
Director in Chandigarh.
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Floods man-made, says report
Sirsa, August 22 A report of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People
(SANDRP) - “An analysis of flood disaster in the Ghaggar basin in July 2010” - suggests that the floods could be a wake up call for the affected states and the authorities concerned, but is does not appear so. The report by Swarup Bhattacharya and Vineet Kumar of the SANDRP says that while the ill-maintained SYL was instrumental in bringing floods to new areas, another yet-to-be-commissioned Hansi Butana Canal also caused flood disasters in areas otherwise not prone to floods. The report maintains that at many places various builders, allegedly in partnership with bureaucrats, politicians and engineers, have encroached upon “flood plains and even flow paths”. Local water harvesting structures, too, have been poorly maintained. The indifference of successive governments towards this issue can be gauged from the fact that a committee was constituted 20 years ago to mitigate the problems of floods in the Ghaggar basin. Named the Ghaggar Standing Committee, the working group is chaired by a member of the Central Water Commission and includes officials of Punjab, Haryana and
Rajasthan. Quoting an official of the Irrigation Department, the report says that 20 meetings of the committee have been held in these 20 years, without reaching any results. “No matter how much the unprecedented rain in the catchment areas of the Ghaggar basin, human interference in its flow has caused the devastation. In the name of canalisation or embankment, policy-makers virtually want to turn a river into a canal,” the report maintains. The SANDRP report also holds lack of coordination between the riparian states and even within a state on the upstream and downstream of the Ghaggar responsible for the destruction caused by floods. |
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Rs 4,200 crore plan to augment power supply
Mahendragarh, August 22 Hooda laid the foundation stone of substations at Dhanonda, Pali and Nangal Mohanpur, a women’s college, a water supply and sewage disposal system and Chaudhary Ranbir Singh Hooda Memorial Park. He inaugurated a 958-meter-long railway overbridge, constructed at a cost of Rs 16 crore on the Charkhi Dadri-Narnaul road. The Chief Minister also inaugurated an administrative block of the subdivision complex. A sports stadium constructed over an area of 8.25 acres at a cost of Rs 99 lakh was also inaugurated by thge CM. The Chief Minister said the government was committed to the overall development of the state. Education Minister Geeta Bukkal, Revenue Minister Shiv Charan Sharma, MP Shruti Chaudhary, Chief Parliamentary Secretaries Rao Dan Singh, Anita Yadav, Jaleb Khan and Prahlad Singh Gillankhera, MLAs Satpal Sangwan and Narender Singhand HPCC spokesperson Ved Prakash Vidrohi accompanied the CM.
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Farmers’ panel to meet on Sept 10
Hisar, August 22 Paroda said in view of its geographical proximity to big cities, farmers should diversify in agriculture-related activities to supplement their income. The commission, he said, would first collect data about various zones of Haryana and the peculiar weather conditions in different areas. This would help it make proper area-specific recommendations. This was for the second time that Paroda was in the commission’s office on the Haryana Agricultural University campus. During
his first visit, he had assumed charge. |
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Villagers to intensify agitation
Tribune News Service
Fatehabad, August 22 The farmers, who met at Government Girls School in the village, also decided that they would keep their agitation peaceful and non-violent. Besides farmers whose land is proposed to be acquired, Krishan Swaroop, district president of the Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Sabha, Suman Lata Siwach, district president of the INLD’s women wing, and Nihal Singh Matana, district president of the Haryana Janhit Congress, were present. Farmers from some neighbouring villages also attended the meeting. Speakers rued that the authorities had not cared to contact them though they had been sitting in dharna for the past four days. They decided to organise a procession on August 26 and also decided to intensify their agitation. The villagers demanded that the government should shift this plant to states like MP or Gujarat, where large areas of unproductive land were lying unutilised.
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Power corpn to buy 2.50 lakh meters
Faridabad, August 22 According to him, all old distribution transformers having more than 100 per cent load will be replaced within a month. More than 40 overloaded transformers in Faridabad have already been replaced. Besides, overloading of the distribution and the transmission systems will also be eliminated. For this a survey was carried out to find the requirement of extra transformation capacity and prepare an action plan to be completed in the next six months under a crash programme. Under the plan, the capacity of all overloaded transformers will be augmented by adding new power transformers or by replacing the existing transformers with the new transformers of higher capacity. Conductor of lines having load more than the capacity will also be replaced or the feeder will be divided into two parts. The work of adding capacity at substations of 66 kV and above levels will be done by the Haryana Vidyut Prasaran Nigam, he added. |
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Strike by govt staff on Sept 7
Rohtak, August 22 At a well-attended “Save department, save job” rally at the local Chhotu Ram Stadium today, the sangh leaders claimed the government was serving vested interests of a few who wanted to gain control of all services provided by the governments. Claiming participation of thousands of employees at the rally today, the leaders claimed the large turnout was proof of widespread resentment among the employees against the policy of privatisation. “Privatisation has failed utterly to improve services or to provide relief to the common man, but it had come as a tool to loot government coffers by vested interests. The politicians are hand in glove with these vested interests and have been trying to justify the policy,” claimed Dharambir Phogat, president of the sangh. Announcing participation in the nationwide strike of trade unions on September 7, the leaders said their stir would continue till the demands were accepted. Gate meetings , demonstrations, leave en masse would be resorted to. General secretary Subhash Lamba said several meetings had been held with the state government, including the Chief Minister, but in vain. The demand charter submitted by the sangh sought regularisation of jobs of thousands of employees, end to outsourcing, filling vacancies in all departments, proper promotion policy, removal of anomalies in pay scales, cashless medical services and job to the kin of those killed on duty.
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Flood relief: Sirsa discriminated against, allege INLD leaders
Sirsa, August 22 INLD secretary-general and Dabwali MLA Ajay Singh Chautala and his younger brother and Ellenabad MLA Abhey Singh Chautala stated this while addressing a Yuva INLD sammelan in the grain market in Sirsa town. “Crops on over 55,000 acres have been damaged by the floods in Sirsa while government reports claim that crops on only 350 acres have been destroyed,” alleged Ajay Singh. Ajay alleged that the government had been discriminating against Sirsa district on all issues, including that of providing flood relief. He alleged that several areas in the district were still submerged under water, but the authorities were doing nothing to save people’s property. Terming the Hooda government as anti-youth, he alleged that a scandal was going on in the state under the patronage of the government, where the youth were being charged for clearing the state teachers’ eligibility test (STET) and the national eligibility test (NET). Umed Singh Lohan, state president of the youth wing of the INLD and Dharamvir Nain, district president, were among those present. Pardeep Kamboj, vice-chairman of the Chopta Block Samiti, and Raj Kumar Sihag, Zila Parishad member from Fatehabad, announced their decision to join the INLD after quitting the Congress and the BJP, respectively.
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Sportspersons asked to apply for pension
Chandigarh: Youth Affairs Department has invited applications from eligible sportspersons for old-age pension. The last date to submit application is August 25.An official spokesman said old-age pension would be provided to sportspersons having the age of over 60 and annual income less than Rs 25,000. Pension of Rs 700 per month would be given to those sportspersons who had participated in Olympic Games, Rs 500 per month to those who had participated in sports meets at the Asia and international levels and Rs 300 per month would be provided to those who got positions in national-level competitions. He said ex-servicemen would also be eligible to avail of this pension.
— TNS |
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Holiday on October 14
Chandigarh, August 22 |
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Karnal, August 22
Mahendragarh, August 22
