HC Admits Plea by Garo Students' on Civic Polls

Shillong, Aug 28 : The Gauhati High Court has admitted a petition by Garo Students Union challenging the proposed municipal polls in Meghalaya's Garo Hills but refused to stay the polls.

Admitting the petition, a bench comprising Justice A Ansari and A Hazarika today issued notice to the government and fixed September 6 as the date of hearing.

The court, however, refused to stay the September 29 elections as sought by the petitioner, saying there was still enough time.

Earlier, the government announced elections to the offices of ward commissioners of four municipal boards in the three districts of Garo hills.

"Following the 1992 amendment in the Constitution, panchayat and municipal provisions do not extend to the tribal areas which are under Sixth Schedule," the GSU said in the petition.

The state government has decided to seek public opinion on a bill that envisages reforms on the municipal act, paving the way for holding of the first ever civic polls in the state, including Garo Hills, since it attained statehood.

The move has been initiated in a bid to avail the benefit under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, official sources said.

Mizoram to Have Geology and Mining Department

Aizawl, Aug 27 : Geology and Mining, a wing of Mizoram's Industries department would be elevated to a full-fledged department from September one and would be named Department of Geology and Mining Resources, an official statement said here today.

The decision to create a Geology and Mining Resources department was taken in state cabinet meeting held on August three to meet the challenges of hydrocarbon exploration in the state.

Reports of the investigation and survey conducted by nine oil majors in the country and abroad predicted that Mizoram has large quantity of hydrocarbon deposits.

Oil exploration giants like ONGC, IOC and OIL and firms from Isarel, the US, France and Russia have been selected through global tenders to explore the gas and oil deposits in an area of 12,430 square kilometres, which comprised of 58.9 per cent of the total geographical area of the state.

Former Congress MP Accused of Rape, Absconding

New Delhi, Aug 27 : Former Assam Congress MP Moni Kumar Subba, who is accused in a rape case, has been absconding after the Guwahati High Court rejected his bail petition twice.

A team of Assam Police officials are in Delhi to trace Subba. A combined team of Assam Police and Delhi Police raided Subba’s farmhouse in Chhattarpur in South Delhi on Wednesday and Thursday to locate him.

Subba was accused of rape three months ago and an FIR has been registered in Guwahati against him. After it was medically established that rape had taken place, Subba managed to get bail from a lower court



CNN-IBN had also raised questions about Subba's citizenship after accessing documents which revealed that he is actually a Nepali national, convicted of murder and not an Indian citizen.

A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) report has claimed that Subba is a Nepalese national originally named Moni Raj Limbo, who escaped from the Illam prison in Nepal while serving sentence for murder.

Subba has always insisted that he is not Limbo though his brother and father use the surname. But Subba himself gave his game away.

In an affidavit filed before the Tezpur magistrate's court on October 3, 1985, the politician admitted that Moni Raj Limbo and Moni Kumar Subba were the same person.

A CNN-IBN investigation in March 2006 exposed Subba for lying about his place of birth and hiding his Nepalese identity. The birth certificate is the only document Subba has to prove his Indian citizenship, but the CNN-IBN investigation established that the certificate was a fake and that he was indeed a foreign national.

The certificate claimed that Subba was born on March 16, 1958 in Dabgram, West Bengal but the document itself was issued 40 years later on October 28, 1998. Salil Sarkar, the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Dabgram, confirmed it to CNN-IBN.

Fear Grips Non-Manipuris

Migrant workers at the Imphal relief camp.

Imphal, Aug 27 : Manoj Shaha, a 26-year-old hawker from Bihar, has been sitting in one corner of a medium-size room at Dharmasala since his arrival at the lodge here this morning.

He has been in the city for the last 14 years, ever since his father came here in search of a job. The killings of the migrants that resumed a few days back, however, has made Manoj change his mind.

“I do not want to stay here any longer. Who will feed my wife and our two children back home in Motihari district of Bihar if I too get killed? We came here to make a living. I will go home once I am allowed to go out of this camp,” he said.

Manoj is one of nine migrant labourers — five from Bihar and four from Cachar district of Assam — taking shelter at the relief camp opened by the Okram Ibobi Singh government from today at Dharmasala, a lodge run by the city’s business community.

The migrant labourers were rounded up by police teams from their workplaces around the city this morning and given shelter in the camp which is guarded by armed security personnel.

The killing of Mohon Shaha, a migrant labourer, by two unidentified gunmen at the city’s Wahengbam Leikai area on Tuesday night prompted the Manipur government to order the police to pick up migrants loitering about or working in the city’s isolated pockets.

Mohon was returning to his rented house at Wahengbam Leikai when he was attacked. He is the fifth migrant to be killed by unidentified gunmen since January 6 this year and no one has been arrested in connection with his killing yet. So far 34 migrant labourers have been killed by unidentified gunmen in Manipur since February 29 last year.

Though no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks on migrants, additional superintendent of police, Imphal West, A.K. Jhaljit, blamed militant groups.

The fresh attack came after the Revolutionary Peoples Front, the political wing of the Peoples Liberation Army served a quit notice to all non-Manipuris (migrants) coming to the state after 1949 — the year Manipur was merged with India — to leave by May 31 this year.

“It is good that the state government brought us here and we feel safe, but how long can we stay like this? We have to work and earn money to feed our families. We will go home after taking our wages from the contractor,” Abul Laskar, a contract labourer from Lakhimpur of Cachar district of Assam, said.

Manmohan Singh Expresses Concern Over Naga-Meitei ‘Divide’ in Northeast

New Delhi, Aug 26 : Prime Minster Dr. Manmohan Singh on Thursday said that the situation in the Northeast is better today than it was in the recent past, but some areas of concern still remain, like the Naga-Meitei divide in Manipur.

Addressing the second-day session of the 45th conference of Director Generals Of Police and other senior security officials here, Dr. Singh said: “In Manipur, for example, the Naga-Meitei divide had accentuated. The unfortunate growth of identity-based assertiveness in the Northeast, particularly in Manipur and the North Cachar Hills, needs well thought-out and sensitive handling.”

He said that, in other areas of the Northeast, there was need to consolidate the gains of the past while at the same time ensuring that new problems did not arise and could be controlled when they did.

“The Darjeeling hill area also needed a careful watch,” he added.

Stressing that the State police and the central paramilitary forces should take firm action against those who take the law into their own hands, Dr. Singh said: “The writ of the State should be firmly established in all these areas.

He also called for continuous vigilance against the rise of communal tensions.

He further said the conference was a valuable opportunity to enhance understanding of matters relating to internal security and to build a consensus on the new strategies that could be devised to meet the challenges facing the nation.

Dr Singh said policing in the country had become increasingly complex over the years.

“But of late the growing presence of non-state actors, fundamentalist groups and left-wing extremists has further complicated matters. The growing inter-linkages of the destabilizing and criminal forces, across states and across our borders, call for far greater vigilance and coordination between the security agencies than ever before,” he observed.

He said the Government had, over the past decade, institutionalized deliberations and structured interactions at various levels.

“This conference has been a time-tested mechanism for enhanced coordination but given the changing circumstances I believe the time has perhaps come for it to reinvent itself. Perhaps this year onwards you could set for yourself some quantifiable goals to be achieved in the coming year,” he said.

He also felt the conference should pursue its agenda of making available the considered professional consensus on important police matters in a more focused manner.

In this context, he repeated an earlier suggestion to set up a Standing Committee of Director Generals of Police to provide policy inputs and hoped that it would begin work in right earnest.

Dr Manmohan Singh also drew the attention of the conference to the disinformation campaigns of the ‘adversaries’ and asked the police to take steps to counter them .

He said modern means of communications had enabled adversarial forces to mount powerful and convincing propaganda.

“Our response to this development needs to be improved. We have to challenge disinformation, often masquerading as objective third party expert opinion, not through suppression or in position of censorship, but by ensuring the availability of better and informed opinion to public at large,” he said.

“Over the past decade, the Central Government had sought to assist states in addressing their manpower requirements through financial support for India Reserve battalions, Special Police Officers, and the setting up of village defence committees,” he added.

He pointed out that, within the police forces, the current system of promotion was based essentially on seniority.

He said this needed to be suitably recalibrated to catalyze better performance and motivation.

Dr Singh also spoke about the need to build up capacities for gathering intelligence in various Indian languages. The intelligence agencies of the Centre and States could draw upon police persons and also incentivize officers to acquire and use relevant local language skills, he said.

Cloudburst in Leh May be Due to Climate Change

New Delhi, Aug 26 : Based on a detailed analysis of weather data from the last five years in Leh, Ladakh, scientists have attributed the recent cloudburst in the region to prolonged winters which may be due to climate change.

"After going through the sequence of events of the weather that led to the cloudburst on August 6, it has been reinforced that the catastrophe was due to prolonged winters being witnessed in the region," sources in Leh-based Defence Institute For High Altitude Research (DIHAR) said.

The analysis by the research institute under the Defence Ministry was done to look into the reasons that triggered the cloudburst in Ladakh which is usually considered unnatural because it is a rain shadow area.

On the condition of anonymity, he said at a recent meeting on "Evaluation of climate change in Ladakh sector and causes of Cloud Burst in Leh," the scientists led by DIHAR director Sashi Bala had analysed the weather data of the last five years in terms of monthly temperature, rainfall, humidity and snowfall.

The study indicated that increased temperature and hot summers in the plains lead to increased evaporation and subsequent cloud formation in the hills. "This in turn, lead to increased duration of snowfall in Ladakh when compared to previous years."

"The winters in Ladakh were found to be prolonged," the experts concluded though they felt the phenomenon could not be directly associated with climate change given the short range of data.

The region was witnessing unusual phenomenon of bright sunshine in the June and July months causing melting of snow and high relative humidity (72%) as compared to previous years (50%), the scientist said.

Tracing the change in weather on the basis of the data available, he pointed out "since snow absorbed the latent heat also, the monthly maximum and minimum temperature remained low and did not shoot up as compared to previous years (2006).

"The low temperature and high relative humidity lead to formation of dense low clouds in the valley. Since the vapour content in the clouds were high and on trying to cross the glaciers, the vapours further condensed.

"The clouds could not retain the water droplets that lead to the cloudburst. Since the rainfall was absent on 3rd, 4th and 5th August and was negligible on 7th, 8th and 9th August the theory of occurrence of a cloudburst in Leh due to prolonged winters may be reinforced," the meeting said on the sequence of event.

The cloudburst, which led to flash floods and mudslides, claimed about 180 lives and injured about 400 people, besides causing widespread damage to public and private property.

The Defence establishment has also initiated research towards preventing soil erosion in case of heavy rains in the area in future in view of climate change.

Source: PTI

Mizoram Sanctioned 8 Air-Monitoring Stations

Aizawl, Aug 26 : Mizoram has received a sanction for air quality monitoring stations under the National Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP), Mizoram Pollution Control Board (MPCB) said today.

One station each at Aizawl and Lengpui and two stations each at Lunglei, Kolasib and Champhai will be set up before the jhum burning season between February and March next year, the MPCB said.

The MPCB meeting, held at the office of chairman Er Dunglena, also discussed bio-medical waste management for hospitals in Mizoram.

Endorsing the health department's step to make use of incinerator at Falkawn Referral Hospital by all private hospitals in Aizawl, the MPCB recommended appointment of bio-medical waste in-charges in all the hospitals and inform the same to the MPCB.

The MPCB also suggested inclusion of hospital waste management subject in nursing schools and agreed to press the health department to follow up the central subsidy for setting up common bio-medical waste treatment and disposal facility under centrally-sponsored scheme.

The MPCB expressed regret over slow progress with regard to solid waste management. It was hoped that the solid waste management programme would yield results by 2015.

Concerned over increasing noise pollution in Aizawl, the MPCB also disapproved the frequent use of public address system during the night.

The meeting agreed to discuss on the enforcement of the Noise Pollution (Regulations and Control) Rules that prohibit among others the use of a loud-speaker or public address system between 2200 hrs and 0600 hrs except in closed premises for communication within, for example, auditoria, conference rooms, community halls and banquet halls.

Mizoram Records 561 Eye Donors

Aizawl, Aug 26 : Mizoram has registered 561 eye donors since the inception of the first eye bank in North East at Aizawl Civil Hospital in September last year.

As many as 17 people have been gifted with vision following successful corneal transplant at the hospital.

Inaugurating the 25th national eye donation fortnight at Chanmari YMA Hall here, health minister Lalrinliana Sailo said the registration of 561 eye donors and 17 successful corneal transplants within a period of less than one year was a great achievement.

He attributed the achievement to the tireless efforts of the State Blindness Control Society and the nobility of the people in Mizoram.

During the function, the minister distributed certificates worth Rs 500 each from his MLA discretion fund to the eye donors. He also gave away prizes for slogan writing competition on the topic of eye donation to high school students.

Dr K Lalremsanga, head of Aizawl Civil Hospital's eye department, gave a power point presentation on eye donation.

As recorded by the health department, there are 7,800 partially-sighted people, 1253 blinds and 200 people with cataracts in Mizoram.