Jessica Jane Clement hit the jungle with "I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here" she's just EVERYWHERE. I especially love the impromptu beach photoshoot that is just a little to set up to be realistic.
Jessica Jane Clement hit the jungle with "I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here" she's just EVERYWHERE. I especially love the impromptu beach photoshoot that is just a little to set up to be realistic.
By Sujit Chakraborty
Agartala, Nov 22 : The electricity crisis in northeastern India is set to ease when the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation's (ONGC) first mega power project -- the largest in the region -- starts generating power by April next year.
"State-owned ONGC's 726-MW generating capacity first major power project in India will start producing electricity from April next year," a Tripura power department official told IANS.
The gas-based thermal power project will resolve the power crisis of Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram and Tripura states. It is being commissioned at southern Tripura's Palatana, 60 km from here.
"State-run National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) has been working to extend the power transmission line from Palatana to the national power grid at Bongaigaon in western Assam," the official said.
"From the national power grid at Bongaigaon, the electricity will be disseminated in Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram," he said.
"Subsequently, the project will be able to generate 1,000 MW of power if additional machineries are integrated with the operational turbines," he added.
Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar Saturday reviewed the progress of the works for commissioning of the Rs.9,000-crore power plant, for which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had laid the foundation stone in 2005.
The meeting also assessed the progress of works for commissioning of another 104 MW capacity combined cycle power project, being installed by the public sector company North Eastern Electric Power Corp (NEEPCO).
NEEPCO's power plant is being set up in West Tripura's Monarchak, 65 km from Agartala. The Rs.625-crore project will start power generation from January 2013. The ONGC had agreed to provide natural gas for the project.
The oversized heavy turbines and other heavy machines for ONGC's Palatana project, carried on massive 132-wheeled trucks, had reached the site from Haldia port in West Bengal after being trans-shipped through Bangladesh.
An ONGC official said transporting the heavy equipment to Tripura over a few thousand kilometres of surface routes within India - through the mountainous northeastern states - was extremely difficult, and the Indian authorities were forced to carry the power plant's equipment through Bangladesh.
"Work on commissioning the power project is in full swing despite the transportation difficulties," the official said.
A consortium comprising US-based General Electric and India's state-run Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) has been contracted to supply the all-important gas turbines for the thermal power project, the official added.
ONGC owns significant quantities of natural gas reserves in Tripura. However, these reserves are not yet sufficiently commercially exploited due to the low industrial demand in the northeastern region.
The complexities of logistics and costs limit the economic viability of transporting gas to other deficit parts of the country.
It is to optimally utilise the gas available in Tripura that ONGC proposed developing the 726-MW Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) thermal power plant close to its gas fields in the state to supply power to deficit areas of northeastern India.
Agartala, Nov 22 : Tension has gripped the colleges in Tripura after 15 students were injured in clashes between various groups following the announcement of students’ council polls slated to be held on Dec. 2.
“At least 15 students were injured in clashes between factions of students in several colleges during the past three days,” a state higher education department official told reporters here on Monday.
“Following the incidents of clashes, huge security forces have been deployed in and around all the colleges in different parts of Tripura,” the official said.
The state’s ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) backed Students Federation of India (SFI) and opposition Congress’ student wing National Students Union of India (NSUI) have filed complaints with police against each other.
The state higher education department Saturday announced elections to students’ councils in 15 colleges across Tripura.
“Polling would be held for altogether 527 seats in 15 students’ councils on Dec. 2 in Tripura. Necessary notification was issued on Nov 19 for the elections,” the official said.
Of the total of 527 seats in the 15 councils, the SFI had won 525 seats in 2010.
Kohima, Nov 22 : Preparations for the National Hornbill Festival of Nagaland at the Kisama Heritage village are on in full swing with various Naga tribes making whole-hearted efforts to get their respective Morung (dormitories) sites ready on time. 
Lord Linlithgow, in a 1935 file photo.
For several weeks now, Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, has been campaigning vigorously to have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (or AFSPA) withdrawn from his state.
The act, which confers upon soldiers in “disturbed areas” extraordinary powers and legal immunity, has operated in the Kashmir valley since 1990 and in Jammu since 2001. Mr. Abdullah has been soothing and diplomatic in his efforts; at one point, rather paradoxically, he assured the media that he wasn’t intending to “undermine the role of the army.”
He hasn’t called the act unconstitutional or unjust, as many civil society activists have done; the most prominent of these, a Manipuri woman named Irom Sharmila, has been on a hunger strike since November 2000, demanding that the AFSPA be repealed in India’s northeastern states.
The AFSPA arrived into this world swaddled in acrimony and bitterness, and it has failed to divest itself of those qualities ever since. Ironically, the spirit of its provisions derives from an ordinance that was designed to quell the Quit India movement, and that was issued by the Indian viceroy Lord Linlithgow on Aug. 15, 1942. The Raj did not view Quit India’s theoreticians kindly. That July, the Secretary of State for India, a conservative politician named Leo Amery, had written to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, urging the sort of swift action that was later enshrined in the ordinance:
To my mind the only course is to act promptly now: ‘Twice armed he that has his quarrel just; But thrice armed he who gets his blow in fust.’ I hope the Cabinet will this afternoon authorize Linlithgow to arrest Gandhi and the Congress Working Committee at once… We are dealing with men who are now definitely our enemies… To appease them or delay in striking at them can only discourage the army and all the loyal elements
In 1958, though, it was Jawaharlal Nehru – one of the Quit India agitators himself – who hoped to get his blow in fust. As prime minister, Nehru was fighting India’s first separatist insurgency: the Naga National Council’s attempt to create a sovereign state in the northeast. The Naga leader, Angami Phizo, had proclaimed the Federal Government of Nagaland in 1954, but the Indian army’s efforts in combating this insurgency had not been going very well; the historian Sarvepalli Gopal compared the army’s challenge to “eating soup with a knife.” The Times of London reported: “[T]he Indian army does not know who is a loyal Naga and who is a rebel; they look the same… Unable to identify the enemy, Indian soldiers have killed several innocent people on the slightest suspicion.”
A regulation had already granted the army some degree of special powers because, according to Nehru, it was “fantastic to imagine that the Government of India is going to be terrorized…by Phizo and company.” In August 1958, the government sought to install these powers within an act, allowing officers to make arrests and conduct searches without warrants, and to open fire, “even to the causing of death,” upon anybody suspected of breaking the law.
For a divisive bill, the historian Srinath Raghavan informs me, the debates in Parliament were surprisingly short: two hours in the Lok Sabha on Aug. 18, and a few hours per day in the Rajya Saha on Aug. 25, 27 and 28. But even in these brief periods, parliamentarians staked out their positions and defended them with vehemence. The home minister, G. B. Pant, referring icily to “misguided Nagas … indulging in mischievous activities,” called the proposed act “a very simple measure.” It was not possible, he said, “over such a vast area to depute civil magistrates to accompany the armed forces wherever there may be trouble, because [trouble] happens unexpectedly.”
Pant met fierce opposition. Some MPs accused the government of obfuscation on the precise nature of the Naga troubles. One Manipuri parliamentarian argued that his state’s residents were already being harassed enough by the army. Naushir Bharucha, of the Praja Socialist Party, quoted the bill’s focus on armed land forces and, laying the sarcasm thick, said: “That probably means that the government very mercifully has not permitted the air forces to shoot or strafe the area.”
Perhaps the most vocal opponent of the bill was Surendra Mahanty, of a party called the Gantantra Parishad. In a speech of high heat, Mahanty said:
“This is a unique legislation, the kind of which has never been contemplated by since this Indian Parliament came into existence… What I am trying to submit is that this is a martial law…. It is being sought to be introduced in this House as a most innocuous measure. If anybody analyses this bill, one will find that it seeks to indemnify any person for any act done for quelling disturbance in an area declared so by either the Governor of Assam or the Chief Commissioner of Manipur within their jurisdiction… [W]e want a free India. But, we do not want a free India with barbed wires and concentration camps, where havaldars (sergeants) can shoot at sight any man. If that is the concept of free India, I think I may as well be a traitor.”
Mahanty notwithstanding, the bill was passed without amendment in the Lok Sabha; in the Rajya Sabha, it was passed 10 days later. Its stoutest defender there was none other than Nehru, who pleaded that his government had treated the Nagas with friendliness. “No infirm government can function anywhere. Where there is violence it has to be dealt with by government, whatever the reason for it may be; because otherwise you drift; the country drifts into, if I may use the word, Fascist methods, all groups, private groups and others, indulging in violence and trying to coerce the governmental authority by organized violence.”
To journalists and observers in the northeast, the effects of the AFSPA upon the civilian population unfolded almost immediately. Gavin Young, a journalist from The Observer in London, traveled illegally through Nagaland in 1961, and one of his dispatches included an interview with P. Vikura, a lieutenant in the Naga home guard:
“His face was impassive as he told me his story. His father had been bayoneted to death by Assamese riflemen of the Indian Army in 1956, and his mother gaoled. Vikura, who was eighteen at the time, was at school in central Nagaland. He and two hundred other students ran off into the jungle when the Indians began to organize Naga students into labor squads. He has been with the Home Guard ever since.”
That the AFSPA would further polarize the very societies it was supposed to help knit back into India started to become clear very soon; it remains one of the keenest criticisms of the act. Even Nehru realized as much. In a letter dated May 1956, he wrote to B. R. Medhi, the chief minister of Assam, promising to use the army “to the fullest extent possible.” But, he added, “we have always to remember that the real solution will require a political approach and an attempt to make the Nagas feel that we are friendly to them and that they can be at home in India.”
Source: nytimes.com
Adidas, the German sportswear and equipment maker, is to launch a shoe costing one dollar a pair in India, boss Herbert Hainer said, despite the failure of a similar venture in Bangladesh.
He told the Sunday newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag that unlike in Bangladesh mass production would be possible to supply the growing Indian market.
“The shoe will be sold in villages through a distribution network,” Hainer said, adding, “We want the product to be self-funding.”
Will Adidas' USD one shoe work in India?
He gave no indication of when or where it would be launched.
Adidas had announced plans to sell a one dollar shoe in Bangladesh last year, but Hainer said it had not worked as expected.
“We sold 5,000 pairs during a test phase but we made only losses,” he said. “The shoes cost us three dollars to make and we had to pay USD 3.50 in import duty.”
Earlier this month Adidas said it was raising its full-year earnings targets after a stronger-than-expected third quarter and first nine months.
It was now pencilling in sales growth of close to 12 per cent instead of 10 per cent previously, while earnings per share were projected to rise by nearly 16 per cent.
“Our brands and products are resonating with consumers around the world like never before,” Hainer boasted on November 3.
Aizawl, Nov 21 : The abandoned Tuirial hydro power project, revived from April this year, is expected to generate power by 2014.
The public investment board (PIB) had last year given its nod to the Union power ministry’s proposal to revive the 60MW hydel project near Bilkhawtlir, about 135km from Aizawl.
''After arduous work of removing scrubs, trees and weeds, construction works actually began from September this year. At present, we are working on two diversion tunnels, 782 metres each, which we hope to complete by January next year,'' Gard, general manager of Patel Engineering Ltd, told visiting journalists on Friday.
The hydel project is designed to generate 60 MW of power 12 per cent of which would be shared by the state.
Works on the hydel project to produce electricity by harnessing the Tuirial river, initially pegged at Rs 359 crore, came to a grinding halt during the Mizo National Front ministry in 2003 following compensation row.
When Lal Thanhawla, who had laid the foundation stone during his previous tenure on September 12, 2007, came back in power, he took initiatives to revive the abandoned project.
Finally, the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Ltd (Neepco) was saddled with the responsibility to install the power plant with a revised outlay fixed at Rs 913 crore. The Neepco has awarded the contract to Patel Engineering Ltd.
The power tariff in the first year after commissioning of this much-vaunted project has been fixed at Rs 3.70 per unit.
A senior official of power and electricity, who accompanied the journalists at the site, said the government of Mizoram would get 12 per cent of the power generated from the hydel project free of cost.
Mizoram, at present, is a power-deficit state where the demand for power is 120MW while supply from various sources, including the state power department, is approximately 60MW.
The project envisaged the construction of a 77-metre-high earthen dam across Tuirial, a tributary of the Barak.
A surface power station on the left bank of the river at the toe of this dam would be constructed at Bilkhawtlir for generation of 60MW of power at 45 per cent load factor.
Patel engineers complained of bad roads connecting the project site. Road from Bilkhawthlir to Serlui B hydel project was okay, but the remaining road-from Serlui B project to Tuirial project-remained unmaintained since long time back, they said.
The 27-kilometre track from Saiphai to the project site took three hours.
The engineers requested the state works department to repair the road to ensure expeditious works.
Dhaka, Nov 21 : Though the Ministry of External Affairs has promised to provide Bangladesh with details of the agreement on the construction of the Tipaimukh Dam in Manipur, the very signing of the deal has sparked a fresh controversy.
Following media reports and criticism, the Bangladesh Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Saturday, disclosing that India had promised to give details of the deal signed recently by National Hydro Power Company, Sutlej Jal Vidyut Nigam Ltd. and the Manipur government to build the 1,500-MW project.
“The Indian External Affairs Ministry has referred to the assurances given by India at the highest level in this regard,” the statement said. “We will also remain in close contact with them.”
Criticism of Hasina
Since the deal was signed without any knowledge of Bangladesh, the Bangladeshi experts, Opposition parties and the media have blamed the government for failing to take diplomatic steps to stop the dam construction, arguing that it is in breach of India's commitment and it will harm the country's interests.
They have also criticised the Sheikh Hasina government for its “imprudence” of relying on India's “non-binding assurances” on the dam. And environmentalists have expressed grave concerns at the ecological, economic and, above all, human consequences the dam would have for Bangladesh.
Abdul Matin, head of the water resource engineering department of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, who visited the site as part of a team of experts, said: “The devastating effects … have long been discussed. Under the circumstances, this supposedly undisclosed agreement is a massive diplomatic failure.”
Experts' warning
Environmentalists and agriculture experts have warned that the twin dams, at Tipaimukh and Phulertal, across the cross-border Barak river would dry up rivers and waterbodies downstream, rendering vast farmland arid, hitting agriculture and threatening food security in the north-eastern districts of Bangladesh.
M. Inamul Haque, chairman of the Institute of Water and Environment, said: “The progress of the dam construction, despite [India's] repeated assurances to Bangladesh of not doing anything without taking its concerns into account, was revoked in the two joint declarations… [made] when the Bangladesh Prime Minister visited India in 2010 and the Indian Prime Minister visited Bangladesh in September.”
The agreement is also seen as “a violation of the framework agreement” signed between the two countries in Dhaka. “
The agreement for the construction of the Tipaimukh dam has made it clear that India is deviating from the formal and informal commitments it has made to Bangladesh,” said Ahsan Uddin Ahmed, executive director, Centre for Global Change.
A joint communiqué issued during Ms. Hasina's visit to New Delhi in January 2010 said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave the assurance that India would not take steps in respect of the Tipaimukh project that would adversely impact Bangladesh. He also reiterated the assurance in an identical statement during his return visit to Dhaka on September 6 this year.
