Gurdaspur Diary: Administration steps up drive against stubble burning
Gurdaspur is a district which has the least of stubble burning fires among all districts of Punjab. Officers in the know put this down to the fact that Deputy Commissioner Uma Shankar Gupta, Suhail Qasim Mir and Harish Dayama, SSPs of Batala and Gurdaspur police district, respectively, and senior agriculture department officers have gone in an overdrive to ensure the menace is pegged to the minimum. Nobody can say that farmers stayed away from putting a matchstick to the stubble. Gurdaspur did burn but when it did, the DC and his two SSPs were quick to reach the site. Impromptu camps were held by them to educate the farmers. Officers know that it is impossible for them to completely nip the evil in the bud. The officers tried and failed but they never failed to try. Farmers are told that among other things, the effects of burning are air pollution, greenhouse gas emission, soil health impact, biodiversity disruption besides water quality concerns. One thing is for sure! Gurdaspur’s civil and police officers know that you miss 100 per cent of the shot you do not take. Hence, keep on trying till you find a permanent solution. Persistence guarantees that results are inevitable.
Political one-upmanship in run-up to bypoll
There is a famous quote that a politician thinks of the next election while a statesman thinks of the next generation. In this season of heightened political activity, with a bypoll being held in Dera Baba Nanak, you cannot find many statesmen. If this breed is indeed rare to sight, you can find the other one — politicians —- a dime a dozen. One common thing about all the candidates is that during speeches, they exhort their audiences to vote. They also informed the gathering that one of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, and consequently elections, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. That is hundred per cent true. Here, we must remember Martin Luther King, Jr, who had said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Apart from these appeals to vote, there was nothing else except lies, deceit and deception. The other day, AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal said if his candidate was voted to Vidhan Sabha, he would provide funds to set up an ITI, a biogas plant and sugar mill. Now, this was not quite true because the Punjab government has no finances for these projects. Already, these ventures have been discussed and their blueprints thrown in the dustbins of the Civil Secretariat. If that was Kejri’s deception, the truth was blurted out by Member of Parliament Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa. He claimed that during his stint as cabinet minister, two of the three ventures —- a biogas plant and a sugar mill — had already been established in Batala and Gurdaspur. He added that an ITI had been functioning in Kalanaur since the 1980s. So, what was the need for another one? He had clean-bowled Kejriwal with a stinging yorker. This, in other words, meant that Kejriwal was trying to pull wool over the eyes of a gullible electorate. Suddenly, in the rallies that followed, AAP politicians were guarded in their speeches, as if Randhawa had told his opponents: You stop telling lies about me, I will stop telling the truth about you! Kejri and company have been told by local leaders that he has many aces, and some blistering truths, up his sleeve. You never know when he takes the mike and starts lambasting and lampooning his rivals — left, right and centre. So, for AAP leaders, it is politically prudent to leave him alone. The game will go on till November 20. Till then, sit back and keep on counting the lies.
(Contributed by Ravi Dhaliwal)
