Newswallah: Bharat Edition

September 29, 2012, 7:03 am

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jammu and Kashmir: Chief Minister Omar Abdullah dismissed reports of a brewing “battle” between himself and Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party over the issue of providing security to sarpanches, the elected heads of village councils, Kashmir Live reported. A group of  sarpanches from Kashmir met with Mr. Gandhi in New Delhi on Thursday to discuss security concerns after the killing of two village council heads in the Kashmir valley earlier this week.

Arunachal Pradesh: The state government on Thursday introduced a legislation to enhance protection of tigers, according to a report on Firstpost's Web site citing Press Trust of India.  The move came after a Royal Bengal tigress was killed in a zoo in Itanagar, the state capital.

West Bengal: The state legislature passed a resolution Thursday opposing the central  government's recent decision to allow foreign direct investment in retail, India Today reported. The resolution was introduced by the governing Trinamool Congress party, which walked out of the central governing coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, over the issue.

Jharkhand: Government employees on Friday protested the state's decision to privatize the distribution and maintenance of electricity in Ranchi, the state capital, and cities including Jamshedpur and Dhanbad, The Times of India reported.

Rajasthan: The state government has assigned an all-female task force to conduct sting operations in clinics suspected of conducting tests to determine the sex of a fetus, The Daily Bhaskar reported.  Such tests are illegal in India, where female fetuses are often aborted because of a widespread preferen ce for boys.   

Maharashtra: The state faced a week of political turmoil, with the deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar handing in his resignation on Tuesday, Firstpost reported. Nineteen state ministers said they would follow suit, “in what was widely seen as a show of strength,” according to the report.

Andhra Pradesh: Six activists supporting the formation of a separate state of Telangana were arrested Wednesday after chanting slogans against Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy outside his office, The New Indian Express reported. The activists were protesting Mr. Kumar's statement that the fate of Telangana would be decided by the majority of people in Andhra Pradesh.

Vidya Balan and Jairam Ramesh Team Up For Toilets

September 29, 2012, 6:45 am

By SRUTHI GOTTIPATI

NEW DELHIâ€" A traveling village fair is scheduled to kick off next week in India, but instead of cotton candy and tchotchkes, it will sell an important message: Use soap to wash your hands, and don't defecate in the open.

India faces a severe sanitation crisis. More than half of all households have no toilet facilities, according to the latest census figures, a rate that has worsened in the last decade. Earlier this year, the government announced an ambitious goal to end open defecation in the country within 10 years. But it was only on Friday afternoon that the campaign got a bit of glamour: Vidya Balan, a popular actress, was introduced as something of a brand ambassador, to promote the distinctl y unglamorous issues of sanitation and hygiene.

“We have to inspire more and more people to make our country open-defecation-free,” she said, sparkling under the flash of cameras in the capital.

Starting next week, Ms. Balan will appear in radio and television advertisements in which she cajoles villagers to use toilets. In one ad, she notes that brides in India are too shy to lift their veils, much less to defecate in the open.

Ms. Balan said she was drawn to the cause after reading the statistics on sanitation. Advocacy groups say that open defecation has led to the deaths of more than 1,000 children from preventable diarrhea every day. It is also said to have caused a loss of 6.4 percent of G.D.P., due to higher health costs and lower productivity.

India has struggled with sanitation for decades. Critics of government policy contend that people decline to buy toilets not due to their price but because the government fails to supply running water.

Jairam Ramesh, the minister for sanitation and rural development, whose strategy has included raising awareness and pouring funds into village councils if they meet their toilet targets, acknowledged to India Ink on email that running water is a problem but said it wasn't the primary one.

“In India people always like to externalise the reasons for inaction,” he said. ”Behavioral change is of paramount importance.”

At the news conference Friday where Ms. Balan appeared, Mr. Ramesh said that for the next five years, his ministry of clean water and sanitation would have a budget of about $20 billion. “There's no shortage of funds,” he said. “If there's a shortage, it's of resolve.”

The traveling village fair â€" whose purpose, besides encouraging good hygiene, is to increase awareness and demand for sanitation facilities in rural areas â€" is being promoted and facilitated by Mr. Ramesh's ministry , but its funding comes from a host of organizations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which together raised a little more than $2 million for it.

The concept for the fair was developed by Quicksand, an Indian consultancy, and WASH United, a nongovernment organization that often uses sports stars as ambassadors to promote hygiene.

Organizers said they would use two Indian passions, cricket and Bollywood, to generate excitement about the awareness drive, with stars from both fields to join the fair. They will also use more standard village fair diversions, like a game in which players knock down cans that look like germs.

Ms. Balan promised to make an appearance during the fair, which is scheduled to travel through five states over 51 days. Called the Nirmal Bharat Yatra, which loosely translates as “Clean India Journey,” the fair will stop at a couple of places associated with in India's independence movement to make the point that India n ow needs to become free from poor sanitation.

The last stop will be Bettiah in the state of Bihar, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha, his tactic of nonviolent resistance. It's a fitting end. Gandhi himself often stressed the importance of sanitation.

Government Can Decide How to Allocate Natural Resources, Supreme Court Rules

September 29, 2012, 2:53 am

By HARI KUMAR

NEW DELHIâ€"India's Supreme Court upheld the government's right to sell natural resources as it sees fit, saying it wasn't necessary for the administration to use auctions.

The ruling, which was issued Thursday, was prompted by the government's petition to clarify the Supreme Court's decision in February that canceled the government's sale of 122 telecommunications licenses, which were sold at below-market prices in 2008. The court ordered the government to sell the licenses through an auction, but the Indian president's office asked the court to rule on whether all sales of national assets had to be sold this way.

On Thursday, the court said that while the judges believed that it would be better if auctions were used, it was the government's prerogative to allocate resources as a policy decision and that the order for an auction applied only to the wireless spectrum case.

The court said that if the maximization of revenue was not the goal of the sale of a national asset, then the government could use whatever methods it wanted. The judges also said that the government didn't have to always seek the highest bid because “revenue maximization is not the only way in which the common good can be subserved.”

“This is what we were saying for last one and half years,” said Kapil Sibal, communications minister, who held a news conference in Delhi on Friday with Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and the law minister, Salman Khurshid.

Mr. Chidambaram said, “Revenue maximization may be the goal in one case, but may not be the goal in several other cases.”

Whether or not it resorts to auctions, Mr. Sibal said, the gove rnment was committed to transparency in its dealings and has never “defended irregularities and illegalities.” The auction of the wireless spectrum is scheduled to be held later this year.

“Now the government can start taking decisions without fearing that other constitutional authority will interfere,” said Mr. Sibal. “The judgment applies to all of us. It applies to us; it applies to courts; it applies to other constitutional authorities.”

The Congress-led government has been battling corruption scandals while it has been trying to shore up support for a ruling coalition. In August, the government was accused of losing nearly $40 billion by selling coal blocks through negotiated prices rather than through an auction.

Business associations in India called on the government to keep its transactions transparent. “Any method of allocating natural resources should be based on the principles of transparency and fairness,” Adi Godrej, president o f the Confederation of Indian Industry, said in a statement.