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CWG rows fail to deter volunteers
CWG cycling test paralyses traffic in CP
DUSU Poll |
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SJ casualty carries aedes mosquitoes
MCD blamed for bird
hit menace at IGI airport
Rajput Sabha decries ‘unruly’ behaviour in Cong rally
Chatterati
Yamuna receding, but still above danger mark
IAS aspirants hold protest
5-yr child found dead
in park
Suicide by cop’s wife over garbage
Woman hit by train, dies
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CWG rows fail to deter volunteers
New Delhi, August 29 The smooth execution of the Games, starting on October 3, will depend on the performance of 22,000 volunteers lined up to present the best of India before athletes, delegates, officials and other spectators who would visit the national Capital during the Games. The volunteer programme is called the Delhi United team. The team comprises homemakers, married couples, students, retired officers, senior citizens. And all these people are united for one common cause-to make the Commonwealth Games a success. Former Delhi State athlete S.P.B. Menon was prompt to sign as volunteer for Delhi United. "Since childhood, I have been an athlete and am very excited for the Commonwealth Games," says the 61-year-old. "Being an athlete and a responsible citizen, I feel that CWG should be the country's top priority and all sportspersons should be a part of it," he added. Age is no bar for volunteers or members of Delhi United. Ved Sultania, who has retired from service and is self employed these days, is equally enthusiastic about being given the opportunity to work as a volunteer. "As an Indian, I am proud to serve the country," says 64-year-old Sultania. "We must come out with our best. As a volunteer, I am motivated and am trying to motivate my friends and others around. I have full faith in the organising committee and am proud that my country is hosting the Games." However, it is not all fun and games for volunteers. There is a lot of intense training involved. The training is divided in three categories-- general, role specific and venue specific. General training provides an overview of Delhi 2010, the significance of CWG for India, the concept of volunteering (role and importance) and respect for diversity and cultural sensitivity. Accessibility training involves training to sensitise the audience about sports that would be part of the mega event. While, role specific training focuses on the knowledge, skills and content that individuals need to perform during the Games. Venue specific training focuses on venues where volunteers would to carry out their roles. This includes competition and non-competition venues. Knowledge about the location of the venue, its layout, venue team, operational aspects, safety and security come under this. The agencies training the volunteers are Amity University, Event Knowledge Services and Knowledge System and Solutions. The prospect of working for long hours and handling a multitude of situations, all of which may not be pleasant does not deter the volunteers' spirit. Minnie Jain, a student says, "For me, the Commonwealth Games will serve as the best platform to develop my foundation and serve my country." |
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CWG cycling test paralyses traffic in CP
New Delhi, August 29
According to information, many were unaware about the traffic diversions as the routes
were finalised at the last minute.
Commuters felt that better public information should be in place for such events, especially in a city which is preparing for a mega event like-- Commonwealth Games (CWG) and is troubled by the perennial problems of traffic jams. Traffic between 6:30 am and 1 pm on Parliament Street, Ashok Road, Janpath and Barkhamba Road were affected due to the event, a senior police official said. "We did not know about this. The authorities should have given prior information about it. We could have planned accordingly. Our Sunday got spoilt," said Anjuman Sinha, who had to take a long route to reach the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital from Ashok Road. Police officials said being a Sunday, there was not much traffic on roads. The event started around 6 am. However, the main International Cycling Event 100 km for men started at 10:30 am and got over by 1 pm. It was followed by the prize distribution ceremony. The event started from Sansad Marg and passed through Patel Chowk, Red Cross Road, Rail Bhawan, Dr Rajendra Prasad Road, Janpath, Vijay Chowk and Barakhamba Road. "No traffic was allowed on the route of cycling event from August 28 night. Cross-traffic on this route was also not allowed from 5 am till the completion of the event," the official added. Traffic was restricted on Parliament Street, Ashok Road from Gole Dak Khana to the round-about near Buta Singh Road, Red Cross Road, Dr Rajendra Prasad Road, Janpath, from Maulana Azad Road crossing to Meridian Hotel and from Janpath Tolstoy to Rajiv Chowk. The other affected routes were Rajpath (from Man Singh crossing to the main gate of Rashtrapati Bhavan), roads connecting Vijay Chowk and Rafi Marg (from Sunehri Masjid to Sansad Marg), Outer Circle of Rajiv Chowk (from Minto circle to Baba Kharak Singh circle) and the Inner Circle of Rajiv Chowk. The event aimed to promote cycling in the city. It had multiple categories comprising amateurs and corporate groups riding 25 km each and a 5 km ride for children aged between eight and 13 years. Around 5,000 cyclists participated in the mega-cycling event organised by the Cycling Federation of India. |
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DUSU Poll
New Delhi, August 29 Hundreds of students who have been chucked out of hostels have reportedly found it difficult to find suitable places of accommodation as they are very expensive. Almost all parties have placed the problems created by the Commonwealth Games firmly on their agenda and are determined that they must be addressed immediately. Robert Rahman of the Students Federation of India (SFI) says, "This year, we have placed CWG on our agenda. The Games have created a whole range of problems for students. Many have been displaced from hostels as they have been allotted to athletes. Students had to find alternative accommodation at a rather short notice at expensive rates, which all cannot afford. Besides, they have been adversely affected by the Games-related construction work and there have been some accidents on the university campus too. We plan to do something about it." The students' wing of the BJP, the ABVP, has also placed the CWG on its agenda. Ashutosh Srivastava, Delhi unit secretary of the ABVP, said, "The Commonwealth Games-related problems are there on our agenda. Many students have suffered due to the ongoing preparations. Outstation students suffered the most as a large number of them were evicted from hostels. The university administration should have made alternative arrangement for the athletes and not made students bear this burden." He added, "Hundreds of students have been affected by the construction work underway on the campus. There have been many accidents and these have been ignored by the authorities. All these issues figure on our party's agenda." Other then Games-related problems, the ABVP is also taking up the semester system issue and infrastructural problems in colleges. An ABVP worker said, "Problems for students over semester system does not seem to end. The teachers and the vice-chancellor have been fighting over the implementation of this system, but it is students who have been the sufferers. We want this problem to be resolved fast." NSUI general secretary Md Shahnawaz Choudhry said, "We are taking up the semester system issue in our agenda. We want the vice-chancellor and teachers to resolve their differences. It is students who have been suffering as teachers fight it out with the VC. We will also take up the infrastructural problems that students face in various colleges." |
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SJ casualty carries aedes mosquitoes
New Delhi, August 29 The stitching room-105 of Safdarjung Hospital's casualty was the place where a junior doctor was bitten by dengue-causing mosquitoes while he was attending to a patient. "I was bitten by a mosquito here in the casualty and in fact two of my colleagues have also contracted the disease. Like many other areas, this part of the hospital remains unclean and one could find mosquitoes thriving in corners," said the doctor in the hospital's casualty. In the last few days, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi
(MCD) has prosecuted nodal officers of several hospitals in the Capital after larvae of the mosquito was found within and around the hospital. "We have sent warnings and prosecuted many agencies, including hospitals and government offices. During inspection, larvae-breeding was noticed in Holy Family,
Leelawati, Pushwati Singhania, Fortis, AIIMS, Safdarjung and Ram Manohar Lohia hospitals," said Dr
V.K. Monga, chairperson of the MCD health committee. Even as the city civic body and the Commonwealth Games
(CWG) committee have stepped up the surveillance against the vector-borne disease by daily visits to the places prone to vector-breeding, including the stadia and training grounds of the Games, it is no looking back for dengue. After registering record positive cases for five consecutive days, the national Capital today saw 59 confirmed cases of dengue, thus taking the cumulative count to 800-a dramatic increase in cases as compared to the last year when just 11 odd cases were recorded and without any fatality till this time. Given the spiral in the disease, a concerned Union health ministry after a stock-taking meeting at AIIMS on Saturday instructed the network of 33 hospitals in Delhi and private hospitals to ensure that all facilities, including kits and blood transfusion
centres, were in place to combat any exigency. "There was a review meeting on dengue and H1N1 in which both the government and private hospitals in Delhi were told to maintain fever-clinics, mosquito-free zones and proper facilities for treating increasing number of viral patients," Dr
A.C. Dhariwal, the director of National Vector Borne Diseases Control
Programme, told The Tribune. Admitting to underreporting of cases by the civic body, he said the numbers have definitely gone up but it is way behind an epidemic-like situation. "Though it has taken the form of outbreak in many parts of the city, with the proportion being high in south (139 cases) zone and central zone (199 cases) followed by
Rohini, Civil Lines and Shahdara North, it cannot be termed an epidemic as the fatality is 0.25 per cent of the population," said Dr
Monga. In coming days, the daily figures of dengue would go up as the MCD has been asked to consider cases testing positive through NS-1 antigen, a method to diagnose dengue at the early stages after the onset of the fever. |
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MCD blamed for bird
hit menace at IGI airport
New Delhi, August 29 "The fear of birds hitting aircrafts has been a problem. But with the sports extravaganza round the corner when lakhs of tourists are expected to fly to the city, we are paying special attention to combat it," a senior Delhi environment official said. The issue was discussed at a meeting of Airfield Environment Management
Committee on August 4. In the meeting, officials had raised concern over bird-prone areas and illegal slaughter houses in Mangla
Puri, animal waste lying on open dumping grounds in Nasirpur, Mangla
Puri, RK Puram and other sites near the airport. IGI Airport is said to be the most prone to bird hits among airports in the country, though regulations clearly state that no sewage or garbage should be allowed to accumulate within its 10-km radius. Delhi environment secretary Dharmendra noted that despite repeated reminders, civic bodies in the city had failed to tackle the menace. "MCD officials say allotment of vending sites to butcher house owners had been cancelled. It, however, accused the police of non-cooperation in taking on illegal meat sellers," he said. |
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Rajput Sabha decries ‘unruly’ behaviour in Cong rally
Faridabad, August 29 The meeting was presided over by Bhagat Mangtu Ram, a well-known Arya Samaj activist. HRPS president and chairman of Haryana State Police Complaint Authority H.S. Rana said the executive committee had decided to constitute a five-member committee to study the facts that appear to have agitated some community members in Mahendergarh and they indulged in unruly behaviour in Congress' rally. Most speakers termed the incident of throwing shoe in the meeting as "abject and despicable" and said such incidents should not happen in any public meet of any political party. The executive committee urged the community members to disassociate themselves from such elements who were allegedly trying to satisfy their ulterior motives. However, the leaders said issues which agitated the community in Mahendergarh were-the alleged police inaction relating to the land grabbing case in village Nawa and a rape in the community. They also claimed that governments in Haryana had been neglecting the community. Some leaders even accused local Congress MLA Rao Daan Singh, alleging that he was pressurising the police to shield the culprits. |
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Chatterati
Politics seems to be the latest flavour of high-powered youth in India. We thus have more sons and daughters of political leaders of all the parties joining politics. We had a whole new youth brigade in the Congress which came in with first Sanjay and then Rajiv Gandhi. Some faded away while the charismatic ones stayed on, worked hard and are today India's top leaders like Chidambaram, Gulam Nabi Azad, Ambika Soni, et al. Now as the next generation of Gandhi's-- Rahul Gandhi has moved in, he has also got new youth power with him. Witness Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasad, Sachin Pilot and others. Though the difference being that Rajiv's youth brigade was not so much from the political class itself, he picked up youth leaders, some from his brother Sanjay Gandhi's time and some that were totally new.
In Rahul's time, the ones seen in Parliament at least are largely sons and daughters of already popular leaders. We now also have Jaivardhan Singh who has joined the Youth Congress. Jaivardhan is a member of a royal family from Guna district in Madhya Pradesh and the youngest child of Digvijay Singh, the former Chief Minister and now UP's Congress general secretary. Jaivardhan is a Doon School product and then went to Mumbai for his college. He is fondly called 'JV' by his father. In Madhya Pradesh, this is not the first time that a Congress leader has joined politics. Arjun Singh's son is an MLA in Madhya Pradesh, Jyotiraditya Scindia, (Madhav Rao's son) and Arun Yadav, the son of PCC Chief Subhash Yadav, are already in play. Checking Mamata's clout As the elections are nearing in Bengal, all the political parties have taken it for granted that Mamata Didi is soon going to be the next Chief Minister. Karat and his party have more or less given up, the local Congress worker is not only demoralized but is also upset by the kind of treatment Mamata has meted out to them. That's one reason why the Congress in Bengal is keen to push in Pranab Mukherjee's son, Abhijit Mukherjee, who is the general manager of the social responsibility department of the Steel Authority of India. He is a low-profile government servant and does not interact often with anyone and also shies away from the media. Abhijit is now being forced by the local Bengal Congress men to come and join politics now so that the Congress workers there will be a little more optimistic and strong in the coming elections. Games is holiday time for many Mani Shankar Aiyer has once again slammed the Commonwealth Games as a work of evil and said that he will be leaving the country during the two weeks of the mega event. Well, Mani is not the only who is heading out of the Capital during the Games. Every Delhiite you meet is planning to leave the town those days. Can't blame them either. With rains wreaking havoc in the Capital and the Commonwealth Games' work, there is an excess of rubble lying all over, so the city traffic has almost come to a standstill. The spread of dengue too has the blame squarely put on the digging going on in the city by none less than the health minister. The lane trial of the Games led to traffic jams on it. As the freeloaders who are all guests of the CWG from the world over, start arriving in the third week of September, Delhiites are going to find it tough even to commute. The Commonwealth Games' chief Suresh Kalmadi, the MCD and the Lt-Governor's office in the meantime are busy blaming each other roundly for the mess created. Last week, Suresh Kalmadi got A.R. Rehman to town for the launch of music CD of the Games' anthem. Unfortunately, there was no song ready, but Kalmadi made sure that Rehman used the platform to portray a positive image of the country. The lyrics he lamely explained would be ready in the next couple of weeks. With no top athletes coming in, no hotel bookings coming in, corruption charges flying high, Delhiites would rather leave the town than be stuck in traffic jams during this time. |
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Yamuna receding, but still above danger mark
New Delhi, August 29 According to officials, the water level was expected to recede further by Sunday evening. The river is flowing above the danger mark of 204.8 metres since August 20. Ten temporary shelter camps have been set up in Usmanpur, Garhimandu, Badarpur Khadar, ISBT bridge, Shakarpur, Akshardham temple, old Yamuna bridge, Geeta Colony and Okhla to provide relief to the affected people living in shanties abutting the river. A control room has been set up to monitor the situation round-the-clock. Besides, 63 boats along with over 50 divers and a team of the disaster management force have been deployed near the banks of the river, officials said.
— IANS |
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Salman woos fans in Delhi
New Delhi, August 29 Sporting a red t-shirt and blue faded
jeans, Salman was looking at his best and the hundreds of fans who gathered at DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj, went berserk on seeing their favourite star. The fans, who had been desperately waiting for him for more than one and a half hours, burst into cheer the moment Salman walked in with his co-star Sonakshi Sinha and brother Arbaaz Khan, who has produced the film. The overcrowded mall reverberated with clapping and cheering when the star stepped on the dais waving and blowing kisses to his fans, but could barely speak due the noise. "Maine ek mall mein itni bheed kabhi nahi dekhi (I have never seen so many people in a mall). Love you all," the surprised Salman told his fans. People were seen pushing and jostling with each other in a bid to get a closer look of their favourite star. When the actor spotted a mother carrying a small child in the maddening crowd, a concerned Salman told the bouncers: "Please take care of the child and the mother." Then he spotted an old lady patiently waiting for him in the crowd and called her to join him on the stage.
— IANS |
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IAS aspirants hold protest
New Delhi, August 29 The protest was organised at Jantar Mantar where the aspirants, especially those who did not clear the prelims for which the results were declared earlier this month, demanded that the UPSC should come out with the cut-off marks for this year's preliminary examinations. They also demanded that the marks secured for preliminary examinations be published. |
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5-yr child found dead
in park
New Delhi, August 29 According to the police, Sujal's body was recovered from a park close to his house by his family members today morning. The victim, a resident of Khanpur's RPS colony, had gone missing two days ago while playing with his friends outside his house. The police came to know about the dead child after a PCR call was made around 5 am. "The postmortem report of the deceased is awaited in AIIMS after which further inquiry will be set up into the case. However, a case under IPC Section 363 has been registered. It is yet to be ascertained whether it was a case of murder or the boy was killed by some animal. As there are a few deep cut marks on his body, we are sure about one thing that it was not a natural death," said a police
officer. Sujal was survived by his parents, two elder brothers and one sister and stayed in
Khanpur. |
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Suicide by cop’s wife over garbage
New Delhi, August 29 According to the police, Floria (34) was found hanging yesterday morning and her husband claimed before the SDM that she was under depression after an argument with the family of Pyare Lal, an Additional SHO in Bindapur police station. "Floria lives on the first floor while Lal's family stays in the second floor. Two days ago, Lal's son allegedly threw some garbage down and it fell in Floria's flat which led to an argument between the two families," a senior police official said quoting Kumar's statement to SDM. Lal's family allegedly threatened her with dire consequences. Lal could not be contacted for comments. |
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Woman hit by train, dies
New Delhi, August 29 "The woman was on her way home from a hospital. While she was crossing the track, she was hit by a train which led to her death," said a police official ruling out any foul play in the incident. The official said this on a statement of eyewitnesses. The victim's body has been sent to the Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital and her family has been informed. "The deceased hailed from Jalaun in Uttar Pradesh," said the police. |
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