Fatehabad, October 23
A man allegedly attacked his wife with a knife near the main gate of the mini-secretariat and court complex here today. The woman was seriously injured in the incident.

The accused identified as Prithvi Singh, in his early twenties, would have killed his wife, Amandeep Kaur, had the blade of the knife not twisted due to poor quality.

The accused stabbed Amandeep seven times on her hands, forehead, chest and her back.

Bystanders overpowered the accused and handed him over to the police.

The woman was shifted to the general hospital, where her condition is stated to be serious. The couple hailed from Ratia town and had come here together to seek legal advice for mutual divorce.

Speaking to mediapersons in police custody, Prithvi Singh expressed no regret about attacking his wife and said he would not spare her.

Married to Amandeep for two years, Prithvi Singh suspected that his wife had extramarital relations. The two had an altercation over the issue last night following which Prithvi offered to divorce his wife.

Amandeep readily agreed and the two came to the court to find an advocate for mutual divorce, according to Prithvi Singh.

“However, I had decided to kill her and brought a knife for the purpose. I tried to attack her several times on the way to Fatehabad, but could not do so as the bus was crowded.I attacked her outside the court complex, but the knife deceived me,” said an unrepentant Prithvi Singh.

He alleged that his wife had earlier killed their son, who was born premature, by strangling him while he was sleeping.

Denying all allegations, Amandeep said in the hospital that Prithvi Singh had been harassing her ever since their marriage.

She said she got married to Prithvi Singh under the “barter system” as her brother got married to a cousin of her husband.

She maintained that a marital discord between her brother and Prithvi’s cousin was the root cause of her husband’s anger against her.

She maintained that her brother lost an arm in a thrasher accident and his wife did not want to stay with him. She alleged that Prithvi Singh wanted to desert her therefore he was trying to defame her.

Jind, October 23
A person was killed in the firing during a group clash over land dispute at Hatho village here yesterday. The deceased has been identified as Ramkumar.Demanding immediate arrest of the accused and suspension of police officials concerned, residents of the village and kin of the deceased blocked the highway connecting Hisar with Chandigarh near Narwana town for over two hours here today.

The protesters kept the body on the road and declined to cremate the body till the accused were arrested. The blockade was lifted following an intervention by senior police officials, who assured that action would be taken against the accused.

Though the police has registered a murder case against 16 persons hailing from the village, no arrests have been made so far.

Claiming that had the police acted swiftly on the complaint lodged by the victim’s family, the murder could have been averted as kin of Ramkumar had told the police that they feared threat to their life from their opponents, who had gathered weapons and threatening them.

They alleged that instead of taking action, the police officials concerned, including the SHO, tried to save the culprits.

The police has booked Jaswant, Gurdev, German Singh, Gulshan, Anchal, Malkit Singh and Arjun Singh in this regard.

Meanwhile, tension prevailed at the bus stand here following firing during a clash between two groups of students today. Though no one was injured, the youths involved in the incident fled from the spot before the police reached there.

The firing was opened by a student after he was assaulted by a group carrying crude weapons. The police has registered a case. 

Chandigarh, October 23
Stung by his expulsion from the party by the Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee, former MLA and president of the Vanchit Varg sangharsh samiti Roshan Lal Arya today decried his parent party’s action against him.

He said the organisation would submit a memorandum to Governor Jagannath Pahadia against the “anti-non-Jat” mindset of the present government in the state on October 25. Addressing a press conference here today, Arya said the party had proceeded against him without giving him a chance to explain his position or issuing him a showcause notice.

The action, he said, came after he condemned the Mirchpur incident where Dalits had been at the receiving end and sought action against the guilty. “I had protested against the violence witnessed during the agitation for Jat reservation in Hisar, registration of a case against the then Hisar SP Subhash Yadav, looting of banks and factories and creating a fear in the minds of non-Jats. I sought protection of rights of the 81 percent non-Jats of the state,” he said.

Maintaining that 19 per cent Jats had got 80 per cent jobs in the state, Arya said his expulsion was also an attempt to send out a signal that any voice of dissent from the non-Jats would not be tolerated.

“The Congress committee is virtually being run like a Jat sabha. All job opportunities are for Jats and all cases of corruption are against non Jats. AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi has said Congressmen were free to raise issues democratically if the Chief Minister was not following the policies of the Congress and that’s what I was doing. I was raising the concern of the deprived 35 castes and 81 per cent population in this government,” he claimed. 

Bhiwani, October 23
Zila Upbhokta Kalyan Sangh president and RTI activist Deen Dayal Soni alleged yesterday that an executive engineer of the Public Health Engineering Department misbehaved with him. He also said he feared threat to his life from the engineer.

In a letter written to the Superintendent of Police, Soni demanded registration of an FIR against the engineer.

The incident took place when Soni was called for site inspection by the public information officer of the public health engineering division No. 1. He alleged that when he reached their office on October 20, executive engineer DK Gambhir and two others, misbehaved with him and threatened him of dire consequences for seeking information through the RTI Act.

Later, he was asked to accompany them to the site near the Meham gate. Soni said he urged the executive engineer to wait as local MLA Ghanshyam Saraf was also scheduled to come there. “I was given a threat to life by the executive engineer even in the presence of the MLA and other persons,” Soni alleged. 

Fatehabad, October 23
The Haryana Pradesh Mahila Congress (HPMC) will strive to check dropout of girls from schools in the state.HPMC president Sumita Singh, Congress MLA from Karnal, said this while speaking to mediapersons at the PWD rest house here today. She was here to address the district-level convention of the Mahila Congress.

Sumita Singh said education of the girl child was very important for the overall development of the country and eradicating several social evils prevalent in society.

She said the HPMC would make efforts to involve active women in the organisation, who could visit schools and anganwadis to make sure that girls did not dropout due to any reason. She said the Mahila Congress encouraged elected women members of the Panchayati Raj Organisations to perform their constitutional duties on their own.

Later, addressing the mahila sammelan in Arorwansh Dharamshala, Sumita Singh said the Congress government led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda had initiated several schemes for the welfare of women.

Usha Dahiya, who was recently appointed district president of the Mahila Congress, had organised the convention. Sirsa MP Ashok Tanwar exhorted women to provide technical and vocation education to girls so that they could stand on their own feet.

CPS Prahlad Singh Gillankhera said women were marching ahead of men in almost every field now.

Fatehabad, October 23
With the festival season around the corner, shopkeepers are busy minting money hand over fist.Markets are flooded with adulterated sweets and other food items. Laxity in taking samples of food products by the authorities has provided a long rope to the adulterators, who are operating with impunity.

The health authorities have caught two large consignments of spurious sweets being brought into Ratia in the last two days. The authorities initiated checking operations after DC Vijay Singh Dahiya pulled the strings in his monthly meeting after complaints of sale of adulterated food products.

Sampling activities have virtually come to a standstill in the district for the past several months as there is no Food Inspector in Fatehabad.

“The Food Inspector posted at Kaithal has been given additional charge of Fatehabad. It is not possible to call him from such a long distance every time when a sample is to be taken,” said Hira Lal Gupta, Deputy Civil Surgeon (Health), Fatehabad.

He admitted that virtually no samples had been taken in Fatehabad during the past several months.

Surprisingly, few doctors have been taking samples of food items, despite a clear notification to empower them in this regard.

Faced with a shortage of the food inspector in the state, the government had issued a notification last year empowering senior medical officers, deputy civil surgeons, civil surgeons and the directors to take samples of food products in their respective areas of jurisdiction.

However, the doctors are using the powers scarcely.

Barring the recent two samplings of sweet at Ratia and the samples of a dairy at Bosti earlier this month, no other samples have been taken. The doctors maintain that none in their fraternity was willing to take the trouble of running to courts after taking the samples.

Faridabad,October 23
Though city residents have some respite from organised crime, they continue to be troubled by petty thefts like that of vehicles.Commissioner of Police, Faridabad, PK Aggarwal admits that theft of vehicles is a menace. Off and on, cases of chain-snatching surface too. However, he says the Faridabad police is modernising itself, injecting a handsome dose of technology and gadgets in its system which will go a long way in preventing crime and in the operations to nab offenders.

The police, he says, is in the process of installing an avante garde control room at the mini secretariat. It will have the digital trunk call facility and other technology whereby incoming calls as well as outgoing ones can be entertained simultaneously. All communication will be based on the GPS system so that the calls can be traced.

While the new control room will enhance communication and subsequent response of the police several notches, the digital map facility will help police become pro-active and pinpoint the possible crime site. This will help in prevention of crime. Also, the police, he says, is in the process of launching a mobile unit which will double up as a disaster management kit.

Gurbachan Singh (80), a resident of NIT-5 area, says though the police deserves to be complimented for curtailing heinous crime in the town, incidents of burglary and petty crime like theft of vehicles, purse and chain snatching remain to be tackled.

The police claims that organised crime in Faridabad has been effectively checked with the increase in manpower and introduction of the police commissionerate system.

There are 3,000 police personnel in the city, including 200 constables recruited recently. Considering the demographic profile of this industrialised city as well as its geographical expanse, the police has created quick action teams. The services of a forensic expert has been acquired and a sniffer dog squad included in the police apparatus.

The police has solved all but three major cases-kidnap of a boy, Piyus, in January this year, looting of about Rs 19 lakh from a businessman and murder of woman in the posh Raj Hans Hotel at Suraj Kund.

The woman’s murderer has been identified but has absconded. The main challenge before the police is how to check criminals from Noida (UP) from sneaking into the city. These criminals strike in the city and escape back to UP. The police has formed a communication ring for better coordination with its counterparts in neighbouring districts to tackle these criminals.

Rohtak/Jind, October 23
Of the total pesticides used in the country, a large portion (more than half by one estimate) is used in cotton cultivation in the country. Yet this has failed to address the problems of growers with the Vidarbha region, known for cotton cultivation, becoming notorious for suicide by farmers.

Though a foreign company has come out with a genetically modified (GM/BT) seed claiming that it does not require any pesticide, there are indigenous methods to solve the problems faced by cotton growers.

This was claimed by a team of experts and farmers who visited a village in Jind today. The experts maintained that a bumper cotton crop was possible even without the use of pesticide and the expensive BT seed. Programme coordinator Dr Rajinder Chaudhary, who recently toured a village where cotton has been grown to its potential without the use of pesticide or genetically modified seeds, found that all the local farmer needed was proper guidance and awareness.

“Suicides by a large number of farmers have been the result of the rising indebtedness among farmers who took loans on high interest to grow crops but failed to get the desired results,” he explained.

He said a team of several farmers from five villages of Rohtak, Jind, Sonepat and Jhajjar, who had adopted natural farming methods, visited the fields of one Rajbala in Nidana village of Jind where they found a bumper harvest of cotton without the use of any insecticide what- soever.

“Women farmers there, with the help of a simple magnifying glass, were able to identify insects that were vegetarian and, hence, potentially harmful to the crop, and other carnivorous insects which keep the former insects under control.”

Much like schoolgirls, these women, a notebook, pen and magnifying glass in hand, spread out in the cotton field to examine the cotton plants.

Helped and guided by Dr Surender Dalal and Dr Kamal Saini, officials from the agriculture department noted their observations for varying time periods spread over two weeks.

They gathered at one point and put their observations on the chart paper. They concluded that though there were harmful insects in the field, their population was well below the damage threshold.

“We can say with certainty that for the purpose of pest control, farmers do not need to mess with nature. There are friendly insects in nature that help keep an effective check on the damaging pests, if not eliminate them altogether,” said the officials.

Surender Dalal, who has been asociated with the drive to promote natural farming, said the programme on “insect literacy” had been started three years back. It had been able generate awareness and make the farmers less dependent on chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

Several women in Nidana and nearby villages had been able to identify farmer-friendly insects.

If growth of such insects was promoted, it would help overcome the menace of pests. To promote the idea, a insect literacy programme for women had been launched, he said.

Dr Chaudhary, Department of Economics, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, said a bumper crop of cotton despite the presence of insects came as a surprise. But experience proved that genetically modified (GM / BT) seeds, which were very expensive, were not needed to check harmful insects.

He said one Narain Singh of Lakhanmajra had been practicing natural farming for years and had been extremely successful.

Sirsa, October 23
The health authorities yesterday raided a diagnostic centre at Sangwan Chowk to look for evidence of pre-natal sex determination after a woman was shifted to a local nursing home in a serious condition.

The woman, who had allegedly undergone abortion by a midwife, was bleeding profusely, when brought to Dr Rachna Sangwan of the Sangwan Nursing Home.

The woman, Krishna, according to city magistrate HC Bhatia, who accompanied the raiding party, had three daughters before the present pregnancy.

The health authorities, who had been informed about the case by Dr Rachna’s husband, Dr Yogesh Sangwan, had reasonable doubt that this could be a case of female foeticide. Bhatia said the record of the City Diagnostic Centre, raided by the authorities confirmed that the woman had undergone ultrasound test on October 8, but the test, as per the centre’s records, was not for determination of the sex of her child. He said the record of the centre has been taken into custody.

Dr Sanjeev Kaushal, owner of the City Diagnostic Centre alleged that it was a conspiracy by some member of his medical fraternity to defame him and trap him in a case under the Pre Natal Diagnostic Technique (PNDT) Act.

Kaushal maintained that he performed ultrasound on the woman after the recommendation of a local gynaecologist on October 8 and gave a report of early pregnancy.

“I have filled the Form F, mandatory under the PNDT Act and have handed over to the health authorities,” he added.

Kaushal claimed that it was a well-established fact that the sex of a foetus could not be detected before 15 weeks and Krishna’s pregnancy was only 10 weeks old, when tested in his centre.

The civil surgeon, Dr Narender Chaudhary, informed that the crime under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971, has been prima facie established against Prem Lata, the midwife, who is alleged to have conducted abortion of the woman. He said a complaint against the midwife had been lodged with the local police and the placenta of the woman had been preserved for testing.

However, the civil surgeon said, further investigations were required to find out whether there were any violations of the PNDT Act by the owners of the diagnostic centre.

Dr Chaudhary said the statements of Krishna and her husband Ishwar, were contradictory on this issue, raising doubts in the minds of the authorities.

Ishwar denied that his wife had undergone abortion and claimed that she had consumed some medicine for stomach ache which resulted in miscarriage. 

Karnal, October 23
Kitchen sheds would be constructed in all government primary and upper primary schools of Haryana under the Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Construction on 262 kitchen sheds in Karnal district would commence soon.

A sum of Rs 3.27 crore has been provided to the district for construction of kitchen sheds 15 ft X 17 ft, including a store of 10 ft X 15 ft and an open verandah 7 ft X 15 ft to ease the problem of space shortage for storing foodgrain.

The average cost of a shed is estimated at Rs 1.25 lakh. “The money has been provided by the Centre. The kitchen sheds will be completed by the year-end,” said Suraj Prakash Chawla, district assistant coordinator.

Due to shortage of space for storage and cooking, the government mid-day meal scheme had run into rough weather in several schools and the staff and students were facing a number of problems.

The kitchen shed scheme, though started more than a year ago across the country, was a non-starter in several districts in Haryana. More than 9,300 schools were to be covered under the scheme under which each primary and upper primary school had been provided a one-time grant of Rs 5,000 for purchase of kitchen devices, utensils and cooking gas.

The average cost of meal was fixed at Rs 1.43 per student of which Re 1 was to be provided by the Centre. Later, the amount was increased to Rs 2.07 per student of which Rs 1.50 was borne by the Centre.

The scheme was reviewed and the value of food increased from 300 calories to 450 calories, protein from 8 gm to 12 gm and the conversion cost for upper primary students was raised to Rs 2.50 per student, with Rs 2 provided by the Centre. Besides fuel cost, cooking charges at the rate of 40 paise per student were also allowed. However, State secretary, Haryana Rajkiya Adhiyapak Sangh KK Nirman said only just providing kitchen sheds would not solve the problem as availability of utensils, gas cylinders and other items would still be a problem.

The sangh has demanded operating the scheme on the pattern of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh where a place is allotted for preparation of meal and no teacher is involved.