Jind, April 5
Bibipur, a small hamlet in the district, has hit a new milestone with a larger awareness and proper use of solar energy in the village. With the replacement of 1,799 bulbs with CFLs, the village has been provided with 76 solar streetlights in less than two years.

All this has been achieved perhaps due to the efforts of the village panchayat led by its young sarpanch. Winner of a district-level award in energy conservation, the village has been vying to win the state’s top honour in this field in 2012.

“The village has been in the news for the excellent work done in the field of energy conservation in the past two years as it is perhaps the only village in the district where the work of energy conservation was taken up with proper planning and implementation,’’ said an official in the department concerned.

The campaign has attracted schoolchildren in large numbers. At least 31 children up to 17 years of age have been awarded by the gram panchayat for their contribution.

Sunil Jaglan, the village sarpanch, said a total of 1,799 CFLs had replaced the traditional bulbs in the village households in less than two years and this was mainly due to the interest and involvement of young residents.

Claiming that schoolchildren had been working as volunteers, he said residents had agreed to set up seven new gobar gas plants and had bought over 60 solar lanterns for daily use during the past one year.

“The panchayat has installed 76 solar streetlights at a cost of Rs 3.50 lakh in this period besides having a programme to reward those who work in this field,’’ adds Jaglan.

Bibipur was the only village in the district to be rewarded with the Akshay Urja Award of Rs 50,000 last year, he said.

Hisar, April 5
Five members of a Hansi INLD leader’s family were killed in a road accident in Dausa town of Rajasthan last evening.

INLD leader Baljit Singh Malik of Sultanpur village in this district had gone to Shri Shayam Khatuji Temple in Rajasthan for prayers along with his family. On their way back to Hansi, their Tata Sumo vehicle collided with a truck parked on the roadside. Five occupants of the Sumo, including Malik, were killed on the spot. The other victims were identified as Joginder Malik (35), his sister Sheela (32), Sunita (28) and Anjali (10).

Fatehabad: Three members of a family were killed and four were injured when their car hit a tree and overturned near Bhuna on Chandigarh road in Fatehabad this morning.

The incident occurred when a trader Jagdish Chander was returning home with his family after attending a ‘jagran’ in Kaithal.

Jagdish lost control over the vehicle due to drowsiness. The vehicle hit a roadside tree and overturned. Jagdish Chander (55), his sister Banti Devi (52) and grand-daughter Priyanshu (7) died on the spot.

Four others injured in the accident have been shifted to the community health centres (CHCs) of Bhuna and Uklana. A pall of gloom descended on Bhuna town as the news of the accident reached there.

Shopkeepers on Uklana road, grain market and Bhagat Singh chowk closed their shops.

Panipat, April 5
The month-long stay of Pakistani girl, Rahila Vakil, in India came to an abrupt end when the police picked her up from Prabuddh Nagar in Uttar Pradesh late last night and forced her to board a train to Pakistan, without assigning any reasons or allowing her to visit her father’s grave at Mehrana village in Panipat.

Vakil had arrived here on March 9 when she learnt that her visa allowed her to visit only their ancestral Bhasani village in Prabuddh Nagar district of UP. The whole village pleaded her case with the Union Ministry for External Affairs to get her permission to visit her father’s grave in Panipat.

The Indian lawyer for the kin of Samjhauta blasts victims, Momin Malik, said late last night the district police of Prabuddh Nagar picked Vakil up from her maternal uncle’s home in Bhasani village and sent her to Delhi, where she was made to board a train to Pakistan, without being assigned any reason.

Producing her visa documents, Malik said she had the visa to stay in the country till April 7, but was forced to leave the country four days in advance.

Vakil, who spoke to The Tribune over the phone from New Delhi railway station before boarding the train at 11.30 pm, said the purpose of her journey had remained unfulfilled and she was dejected by the developments.

Gurgaon, April 5
Do you know how a number of auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, scooters and cars emitting too much smoke are issued pollution under control(PUC) certificates? Those who man such centres are okay giving these certificates as long as you pay them the money.

According to a reply received in response to an RTI query, the Regional Transport Authority (RTA) Secretary has clearly stated that the charges for issuing a PUC certificate are Rs 15 (for six months) in the case of a petrol vehicle and Rs 25 for a diesel one.

Inquiries made by The Tribune, however, revealed that most pollution checking centres charge up to four times the prescribed charges with impunity. The rules say the checking centres are supposed to put up the prescribed rates on a display board but they do not do so for obvious reasons.

Apart from grossly overcharging vehicle owners, most centre operators issue PUC certificates to them, irrespective of the level of pollutants in vehicles’ emission.

“They either do not check the level of pollutants in vehicular emissions or put any random value (which falls within the prescribed norms) in the column meant for level of pollutant(s),” maintains Ajay Godara, a social activist, who has been pursuing the matter for a long time.

Ajay, who took his vehicle to different pollution-checking centres and secretly videographed the process of issuing PUC certificates, came across many shocking instances.

“While most centres issued certificates without even checking the vehicle, one had a rather queer mechanism… one end of a rubber tube was put in the vehicle’s exhaust pipe, the other end of which had been inserted into a computer CPU, perhaps to give an impression of ‘fully computerised’ testing,” he recounts.

As per Rule 162-A of the Haryana Motor Vehicle Rules, 1993, every motor vehicle should carry a PUC certificate issued by the Transport Department or a pollution-checking centre duly authorised by the Transport Commissioner. 

Rohtak, April 5
Condemning the hike in the power tariff, INLD chief and former Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala has served an ultimatum on the state government to either withdraw the hike by May 7 or face an agitation on the issue.

In a statement issued here on Thursday, Chautala observed that the recent hike in power rates was unwarranted and would lead to more inflation, affecting the daily life of a common man. Describing it as an “anti-people” move, he said the INLD would launch a statewide agitation if the present government failed to withdraw the hike within a month.

Claiming that the state was facing financial bankruptcy, he said the empty coffers of the government had resulted in delay in payment of salary to the staff. Stating that the state had been under a debt running up to Rs 60,000 crore at present, he said the state was not in a position to repay the debt to various agencies at present.

KAITHAL: The Haryana Chamber of Commerce and Industry (HCCI) here has expressed strong resentment against the allegedly unreasonable increase in power tariff. At a meeting presided over by Anand Khurania, district Chairman, here today, HCCI members said the “indiscriminate” increase had come as a bolt from the blue for the industrial units and other category of consumers in Haryana. The units were already reeling under heavy recession and could not afford to pay such an exorbitant hike in power tariff as it would make them unviable.

The HCCI demands that the burden should not be passed on to the industrial consumers and the public at large and the exorbitant hike in power tariff should be rolled back immediately.

Kaithal, April 5
Property dealers, real estate investors and residents of the town are up in arms against the alleged unreasonable increase in the collector rates notifed by the district administration here recently.

A delegation met Kaithal SDM Hawa Singh Pachar here today and demanded immediate rollback of the increase in circle rates effected in the district. The hike, which came into effect April 1, is up to 300 per cent in some locations. The memorandum pointed out that the collector rates of prime agricultural land, which were in the range of Rs 18 -30 lakhs per acre last year, had now been increased to Rs 1 crore per acre . Similarly, the official rates in HUDA sectors had been increased in the range of Rs 15000- Rs18000 per square metre as against Rs8,000 earlier.

The SDM assured the delegation that he would forward its demand to the higher authorities . Copies of the memorandum had also been sent to the Chief Minister. 

Rewari, April 5
Following an undertaking given jointly by the Power Minister, Capt Ajay Singh Yadav, and Congress MP Rao Inderjit Singh, the agitating farmers ended their eight-day long dharna at Poswal Chowk here today.

While farmers of five villages, Kalaka, Jhanjhanwas, Peevra, Mandhiya and Konsiwas, had been staging a dharna at the above chowk for the past eight days, demanding nullification of the ongoing proceedings pertaining to acquisition of their fertile land, they had also convened a mahapanchayat of 51 villages today to chalk out a strategy regarding their future course of action.

Captain Yadav and Rao Inderjit today reached Poswal Chowk and assured the agitating farmers that the proceedings to acquire their land would now become inoperative.

Simultaneously, at their behest, an 11-member committee of the farmers’ representatives was constituted which would meet the Chief Minister in Delhi tomorrow and put forward their problems before him.

Kurukshetra, April 5
“To protect the heritage of ancient classical films, the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDCI) proposes to launch a film heritage mission,” said Nina Laath Gupta, managing director, NFDCI, in her presidential address at the international seminar on “100 Years of Indian Cinema.”

The seminar was organised by the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Technology (IMCMT) at RK Sadan, Kurukshetra University, here today as part of the Media International Film Festival (MIFF).

Gupta maintained that Indian cinema’s importance could not be belittled as it affected the lives of millions of people. She admitted that there was a need to do more for further development of Hindi cinema.

Leslee Udwin, a film producer from Denmark, said classical Indian films were story-based. She called upon the viewers to exercise their right to demand good cinema.

Udayan Prasad, eminent film director from UK, said the hold of commercial cinema on the film industry was waning.

Rohtak, April 5
A 22-year-old woman, who married the boy she loved against the wishes of her parents and others members of her family, seems to be broken and in distress considering that her husband has made a move to divorce her just after three years of their marriage. The victim has now approached the women’s cell of the Police Department here to get justice. The girl, a resident of Ambedkar Colony here, who hails from the Scheduled Caste category, had come into contact with the boy, Pawan, a local resident from an upper caste in 2008. The duo soon fell in love and decided to get married in 2009 against the wishes of their family members.

While the marriage took place at an Arya Samaj temple in New Delhi, the relations of the couple turned sour after about two years, when, according to the complainant, her husband started demanding dowry. In the complaint, lodged with the police, the girl, who is mother of a girl child, has claimed that her mother had fulfilled the demand for dowry initially but her husband left her at her parents’ house a few months ago, stating that he would not accept her till she brought all the amount he had asked for.

She said her father, who had been a driver, had died a few years back and she had no one who she could bank upon as her mother was living alone with a meagre income. The complaint has been taken up with the office of the IG and the SSP office here also.

On the other hand, her husband, Pawan, denied the charges that he had sought dowry from her. He said the reason for his move to seek a divorce had been different and had nothing to do with dowry as stated in the complaint. He said he would not have married if he was so concerned about dowry as he was aware of the financial status of the girl earlier too. The boy has filed a petition in the court for divorce, it is learnt.