July 24, 2019 - meraapnabihar

Ranchi Lake beautification likely to be complete this year

Source: dailypioneer.com

The beautification work of Ranchi Lake, popularly known as ‘Bada Talab’, which has been underway for a long time now is being accelerated, said Deputy Mayor of Ranchi, Sanjeev Vijaywargiya.

The proposal to complete the work was scheduled pre-monsoon, by March end of this year, yet no substantial on site development can be witnessed. “We have come up with a budget of Rs 3.5 crores for the project and aim to develop the lake with advance technology, Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) for all the sewage and drain water that is discharged in the lack causing water contamination,” said the Deputy Mayor.

A request for proposal will be floated within this week said Vijaywargiya. The work for the STP will start from September and would take about six to eight months for its completion. Water purification and development of a horticulture park around it also included in the project. The park along with the bronze statue of Vivekananda that was established earlier this year will be handled by the Tourism Department of the State.

The plan to undertake the beautification project for the lake has been on the RMC’s checklist from 2016. With intervention from the CM’s side this year the initial plan was to complete the work before monsoon so as to ensure recharging of ground water and rain water harvesting. “We have already decided to cut 10 per cent of the contractor’s payment due to the delay and are committed to ensure the project proves to be good quality work in due time,” told Vijaywargiya.

“We are looking forward to the renewal and beautification of the lake, we wish to see the iconic lake of Ranchi develop as a tourist spot. It is also important from the perspective of water conservation as we are going through major water crisis in the leading cities of our country,” said Manoj Kumar, a resident near the lake.

The other projects in process for the Ranchi Municipal Corporation includes road expansion of about 10-15 feet from Rotary Park to Laxmi Narayan Mandir in Upper Bazaar, pathway – eatery joint and park development around the Yoga centre present there, collaboration with Maheshwari Samiti in the Annapurna Yojna to provide food Rs.10 per plate with parking and seating space.

Bihar assembly sees uproar as 5 lynched in 4 days

Source: dnaindia.com

Five people were killed in a spate of mob lynchings in four days in Bihar. Recently, there has been a rise in cases of mob violence in the state, raising questions about law and order. The latest incidents were reported from Chhapra and Vaishali districts.

The first incident took place on Thursday, July 18 in Chhapra when enraged villagers beat three thieves to death. Apparently, all three were known for stealing cattle from the villagers. The father of one of the victims has demanded rigorous punishment for the accused. The police have taken cognisance of the matter and taken eight people in custody.

Subsequently, three incidents took place on Friday, July 19, in Vaishali and Bhojpur. In two separate incidents in Vaishali, villagers brutally thrashed a robber while he was trying to flee after looting a bank.

Another incident happened on Sunday, July 21, when a mob of angry villagers attacked and killed a youth. According to the villagers, the young man was punished for murdering a girl. The situation in all these villages remained tense as on Monday.

Meanwhile, the opposition attacked the Nitish Kumar-led JD(U) government over the “deteriorating” law and order in the state. Leaders belonging to RJD demanded an answer from the government, while BJP legislator Jeevesh Mishra said, “The people of Bihar are taking law in their hands out of frustration. However, this is not right. They should hand over the accused to the police.” He also said that the state will have to take necessary steps.

Bihar Woman Allegedly Beaten to Death by Villagers on Suspicion of Witchcraft

Source: news18.com

Nawada/Bihar: A 50-year-old woman was allegedly beaten to death here on Tuesday by villagers, who accused her of practising witchcraft, police said.

The incident took place at Koyaligarh village under the Govindpur police station area, where the woman was attacked with bamboo and wooden sticks around 8 am, Station House Officer (SHO) Jyoti Punj said.

“The woman was brought to police station by her husband and other family members. Noticing her critical condition, we rushed her to a primary health centre, where doctors declared her brought dead,” he said.

An FIR has been lodged by the woman’s husband, who has named 12 residents of the village in the complaint, the SHO said, adding, that the body has been sent for post-mortem.

The woman, who had gone to fetch water in the morning, was later found lying on the ground in a pool of blood, and villagers were standing nearby and accusing her of practising witchcraft, her husband alleged in the FIR.

Four persons, named in the complaint, have been arrested and search is underway for the remaining accused, the SHO said.

The incident comes less than a week after three persons were beaten to death in Saran district on suspicion of stealing a buffalo.

Earlier in the day, opposition legislators led by former chief minister and RJD national vice president Rabri Devi staged a demonstration outside the legislative council, accusing the state

government of “failure to check violence against Dalits and Muslims”.

Left parties — the CPI and the CPI(M) — also issued statements, charging the Nitish Kumar government with failure to check mob violence.

Patna: Tej Pratap Yadav dresses up as Lord Shiva; offers prayers at temple

Source: dnaindia.com

Amid the ongoing ‘Shravan month’, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s elder son Tej Pratap Yadav on Tuesday dressed up as Lord Shiva and offered prayers at a Shiva temple in Patna.Embracing Lord Shiva’s look, Tej Pratap wrapped up himself in a white dhoti, painted tiger skin-like fabric on waist and applied ash on his body including hands, forehead and chest. In the image, he was seen wearing a traditional Hindu rosary around his neck.

The RJD leader, who reached here with his bodyguards, was seen flaunting his long hair to look identical to Lord Shiva. He offered milk and Gangajal (holy water) to Lord Shiva.This is not for the time as even last year Tej Pratap had worn the similar attire during the ‘Shravan month’. He had said the prayers were being offered for the welfare of Bihar and its natives and also for his father’s health.

“Will pray for the welfare of the people of Bihar and the entire nation so that everybody lives in peace, in harmony, without any divide or barrier. I will also pray for the health of my father, will pray for his long life,” he had said.

In May 2018, the poster was seen outside the residence of Lalu, depicting his son Tej Pratap and ex-wife Aishwarya as Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati, respectively.

In 2017, he had dressed up as Lord Krishna to celebrate the beginning of the New Year. Donning Lord Krishna’s avatar, he was spotted playing the flute with a red turban on his head

25-year-old man arrested for killing a person in Delhi six years ago

Source: mid-day.com

On Tuesday, a 25-year-old man was arrested from Bihar for allegedly killing a person in the national capital nearly six years ago. The accused, identified as Rahees Manjhi is a resident of Gaya in Bihar. The police had announced a reward of Rs 25,000 on information leading to his arrest.

According to a senior police officer, Rajesh was killed in the Mundka area on October 14, 2013. During the investigation, accused Upender and his relative Sajan Manjhi were arrested. Upender said that he, along with his nephew Rahees Manjhi and relative Sajan Manjhi, had killed Rajesh with a sharp-edged weapon after an altercation over liquor.

Police got a tip-off that Rahees had been hiding in Bihar. “Thereafter, a police team was sent to Gaya where they arrested Rahees from a jungle of Piyar village after a brief chase,” said Ram Gopal Naik, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime).

In another incident, three teenagers were arrested by Delhi Police for allegedly killing a 15-year-old boy for a smartphone. A missing report of a 15-year-old boy was registered on July 13, at Moti Nagar police station. The investigation to find the missing teenager was initiated.

In the meantime, the police received information about a boy’s body in an abandoned house in Delhi’s Basai Darapur area. After the police reached the spot along with the victim’s cousin, it was found to be the missing boy’s body.

Delhi Commissioner of Police (DCP) West, Monika Bhardawaj said in a statement, “The police team gathered the vital clues with the help of technical surveillance and CCTV footages installed in the locality. On the basis of discreet enquiries, three Children in Conflict with Law (CCLs) were apprehended.” She also added that during the interrogation all three of them confessed the crime.

In the Saga of Bihar, Where to Start and Where to Conclude?

Source: patnadaily.com

During the considerable time gap since then much water has flown down the rivers and many events, both pleasant and unpleasant — from abuse of girls in shelter-homes to Pulwama bombing to the Lok Sabha elections to the outbreak of encephalitis — have all filled the pages of newspapers, I spent a good hundred days in India, mostly at my ancestral home in the city of Darbhanga (24 Feb to 19 May, 2019). Away from India, I always had the urge to reach out to fellow Biharis through the PD columns; closer home, as if I was on an unexplained leave of absence!

Before arriving at Darbhanga, my wife, Reeta, and I had the opportunity to visit my alma mater JNU, present a talk arranged by Dr Mansi Mandal, a JNU alumni, at Amity University (Gurgaon), meet with a number of friends and relations in Delhi, and take a holy dip at the Prayag Kumbh while camping with my Lucknow-based cousin sister Madhu Di (originally from Patna).

At every stage of my travel, I thought I could have sent a short dispatch to PatnaDaily capturing my impressions or experience (as many competent writers do), but the procrastinator in me always came in my way. During my prolonged stay at Darbhanga, I always toyed with the idea of writing something and thought of a potential topic every day but, again, failed to get myself to doing that on one pretext or the other. The idea seemed to drown with the setting sun every night.

The thought of uselessness of writing, frankly, also crossed my mind. It possibly discouraged me from typing out my impressions. I was most likely overwhelmed by many things going on around me. I decided perhaps voluntarily to internalize the experiences and then set about expressing them. But then the question was where to start, which question to take up and where to go? Who will I be writing for? Who are the targeted readers? Is there anything new I’m going to say? Should I be recording things for myself and then share with interested friends and relations later? How is this going to be beneficial to the society? And so on.

As a Bihari settled in Canada, I thoroughly enjoyed being at my ancestral home place living in its own life-style; however, that didn’t prevent me from critically looking at my own surroundings in Darbhanga, most of the time through a foreigner’s pair of glasses. The contrasts between our two livings — and the mindset — were so stark that I feared if I said anything critical, I would be seen as attempting to force people into adopting certain attitudes and behavior that they considered “foreign.” But my anguish continued. I wished to engage everyone around me in a serious conversation: Please think long and hard about the future of Bihar.

If I were to frame one question, I would ask: “Are we trying to make Biharis, particularly the generation that is under ten, into the future aware Citizens?” What will happen when this huge chunk of the population grows up into adulthood not properly educated or trained; not seeing a clean or efficient administration or the rule of law in action; not realizing the dangers of lawless behavior on the road or in the over-populated neighborhoods; not understanding the consequences of environmental (including noise) pollution or not comprehending the superstitious-exploitative, ritualistic, self-destructive or political aspects of organized/ institutionalized religions?

It’s very easy to hold the government-that-be responsible for everything and it is to a large extent; but, what about the role of the people with whom lies the Sovereignty, who were part of the Civil Society? What when the government had all good intentions and a section of the people were hell bent on frustrating them? What when the people took laws into their own hands? So where to start and where to conclude?

UPSC Civil Services: Modi Government May Bundle Indian Bureaucracy Into Just 3-4 Divisions, Says Report

Source: swarajyamag.com

In a bid to rationalise the civil services in the country, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government is likely to reduce the more than 60 civil services in the country to about three or four, reports The Print.

According to the report, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has prepared a five year vision document in which it has been emphasised that the government will try to drastically reduce the number of services to ensure harmonious functioning of the state machinery.

“Rationalising the services essentially means reducing the number down from the existing 60-plus civil services to about three-four,” an official from DoPT was quoted in the report as saying.

“The idea was proposed last year by NITI Aayog and the government will now seek to implement it,” the official added.

The civil services in India comprises of more tha 60 specialised services classified into Group A and Group B. The Group A include the IAS, IPS, IFS and IRS among 25 other services.

As per the report, no decision regarding how to undertake the rationalsation has been done by the government. However, a possible solution could be to classify the civil services into three groups.

“One way of doing it is dividing the services into Indian Administrative Service, which would include all non-technical services; the Indian Police Service that would include all security-related services and the Indian Technical Services, which would include all technical services,” the official said.

“This is just one idea doing the rounds…the services could be rationalised in other ways too,” the official added.

23-year-old is Chandrayaan-2’s Jharkhand connection

Source: telegraphindia.com

he Rs 978-crore Chandrayaan-2 mission to the Moon, which was successfully launched onboard the GSLV-MkIII-M1 rocket from the spaceport in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, on Monday, has a Jharkhand connection.

Ranchi boy Gaurav Vaibhav, 23, who passed his 12th from Jawahar Vindya Mandir Shyamali in 2011, is a flight dynamics scientist for the mission, which is intended to help India become the fourth country to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon after the former Soviet Union and the US in 1966 and China in 2014.

Gaurav has been working with the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (Isro’s) satellite centre in Bangalore since 2015 after completing his BTech in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in Kerala.

“Chandrayaan-2 is very important to me as it is my first interplanetary mission experience,” Gaurav told The Telegraph on Monday. “I learnt a lot, and felt the heat of being part of this historic mission. Being a flight dynamics scientist, I am involved in designing and planning of events to make the lander achieve the required landing site on the Moon. This kind of work requires a lot of numerical computations and analysis.”

Chandrayaan-2, made up of an orbiter and a lander with a rover, is expected to throw more light on the Moon. The Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, Isro had earlier said, had “conclusively discovered traces of water” on the Moon. The first mission had also discovered water ice in the Moon’s north polar region.

Gaurav has been part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission for the last one-and-half years.

“Within this timeframe, I had carried out the lander trajectory analysis and successfully completed the allotted activities,” he said.

Asked if anyone else from Jharkhand is part of the mission, Gaurav said: “Since many centres of Isro are involved, there could be (other) people from Jharkhand or Ranchi also but I would not know.”

He said there were lows, of at times stumbling on a problem, and highs — of achieving the solution.

“It has been really a fabulous learning experience for me. There were many challenges. Being the maiden lunar landing mission of India, soft landing on the required site is critical. All the subsystems are expected to perform; even one small system failure may lead to crash-landing. Since this landing phase will be of roughly just 20 minutes, recovery of any failure within that time isn’t possible,” he said. “Working together with so many subsystems in an integrated manner strengthened me technically from every aspect.”

Asked why the mission’s July 15 launch was cancelled, Gaurav said: “Cryogenic filling in the launch vehicle is done just four hours before the launch because it is highly inflammable.

On July 14, the required pressure could not develop during cryogenic filling because of an unexpected gap in a valve. Hence the mission was postponed till the problem was rectified. Fortunately it was observed at the right time and a major catastrophe was averted.”

Gaurav’s father Sudhir Upadhyay, under secretary in the state home department, who lives in Harmu Housing Colony, said he was proud of his son for being a part of the historic mission.

A school charges waste instead of fees in Bodh Gaya

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

For students of Padampani School, it is praiseworthy to be a part of a great initiative to keep the environment clean. Total credit goes to the school authorities, who encourage students to pick up wastes on the way to school and dump it at the dustbin kept at the entrance gate of the school. The school considers those wastes as school fees.

The school was jointly started by a Korean activist and a group of people from Bodh Gaya. Soon after it gained popularity, many social organisations started lending their support to the school. Manoj Samdarshi, the founder of Padampani School, said, “The school was started with a motive to educate poor kids of the nearby villages and to keep the areas around Mahabodhi Temple clean. A Korean social activist, Shin Geong Hawa, helped us a lot. Besides, we also get funds from other social organisations. The school is running well, and we have provided suitable infrastructure to the students.”

Currently, the classes starts from standard 1 to standard 8. However, constructions works are going on and soon it will get affiliated to the Bihar Board. Deepak Kumar, vice-principal of the school, said, “By now, over 250 students have got enrolled at our school and the number will only increase with the time. We provide all the basic facilities, including mid-day meals. Students also get to learn various co-curricular activities, including yoga and meditation from experts. We also encourage students to plant more trees. With the help of our students, we have planted more than 200 trees in and around the school premises. Students also learn more about environment preservation through workshops, which we organise frequently.”

Nalanda weavers want ‘acche din’ back for their handloom

Source: dnaindia.com

The Rashtrapati Bhavan windows were once adorned by the beautiful handmade curtains, brought in from Nalanda. The tide, however, has turned since the famed curtains no longer hold the prestigious order and the weavers blame this on the government’s apathy.

The curtains produced by the artisans of Bihar’s Baswan Bigha town were even being exported to Japan and Germany till five years ago, but that has now ceased.

According to Kapildev Prasad, a local weaver, former President Dr Rajendra Prasad had the Nalanda-made curtains hanging in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. But after him, the officials ignored the curtains and stopped procuring them. Not only this, the interest of ordinary people in handloom clothes faded and the craftsmen began running out of business which forced them to look for other jobs. Prasad claims that yet, he has somehow managed to eke out a livelihood for over 50 years. Even today, the demand for Bawan Buti sari and curtain isn’t much among Indians, but tourists from other Buddhist countries, including China and Japan, are fond of it.

Secretary of the Primary Weaver Cooperation Society, Sunil Kumar, said that the situation of weavers has become pathetic due to the government’s indifference. “Till 10 years ago, the industry thrived here. All the government buildings had our curtains. Now, orders are given elsewhere and no initiative is being taken by the government for us.” Earlier, fifty to sixty artisans used to work on the looms, the number now lingers at just 20 weavers.

However, in what might turn to be a fresh lease of life, fresh curtains have been sent by the association, through the weavers service center in Bhagalpur, to the Union Textile Ministry in New Delhi for the President’s Award. If selected — the design depicts Buddhist symbolism — it could breathe new life into the industry.

Kumar claimed, “Currently, we only weave the fabric as and when demand comes from customers. Our hopes of revival now rests on bagging the President’s Award.”