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Ordinance to restore Bhopal gas victims' property

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NK SINGH Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh Government on Thursday promulgated an ordinance for the restoration of moveable property sold by some people while fleeing Bhopal in panic following the gas leakage. The ordinance covers any transaction made by a person residing within the limits of the municipal corporation of Bhopal and specifies the period of the transaction as December 3 to December 24, 1984,  Any person who sold the moveable property within the specified period for a consideration which he feels was not commensurate with the prevailing market price may apply to the competent authority to be appointed by the state Government for declaring the transaction of sale to be void.  The applicant will furnish in his application the name and address of the purchaser, details of the moveable property sold, consideration received, the date and place of sale and any other particular which may be required.  The competent authority, on receipt of such an application, will conduct...

OPERATION ONION, A CRAZY PLAN

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Buyingfor Rs 8 and selling for Rs 2 is a recipe for scandals NK SINGH Onion is selling in Bhopal at a retail price of Rs 13 a kg. MP Government is purchasing it from farmers at Rs 8 a kg and, then, auctioning it to wholesale dealers for Rs 2.50 a kg, the minimum sell price fixed. The middlemen are raking in unbelievable profit of 500 percent. An economist may call it a harebrained idea: purchasing something for Rs eight a kg and then selling it at one-third of the price. But the government is doing it in the name of bailing out farmer, hit by a plunging market. Operation Onion looks like a get-rich-quick scheme. Step one: Government buys at the rate of Rs eight a kg. Step two: Government sells at the rate of Rs 2.50 a kg.  Step three: Traders sell it back to farmers for Rs 5 a kg. Step four: Farmers recycle the sold-purchased-sold onions to government at Rs 8 a kg. Everyone makes a quick buck. Everyone is happy. It is simple. It is beautiful. The scheme anno...

Government of Utmost Hapiness

MP CM believes that a promise a day keeps Congress away NK SINGH Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan loves to make promises. His political opponents call him Ghosna Veer ---- announcement warrior. The derisive Hindi term conjures up image of a Don Quixote, a knight in shining armour, out to save his subjects by creating a canopy of announcements to shield them from Unhappiness. Sample this. In the first ten years of his tenure he made nearly 8,000 promises. The average comes to more than two announcements a day. During the last three years, as he settled in his job, the speed slowed down --- onlyy 1,500 announcements, at the rate of 1.3 per day. Every time the chief minister climbs a stage to make a public speech, heartbeat of his officers in Vallabh Bhavan, the state secretariat, goes up. They tighten their belts, waiting for the unexpected. Often they learn about decisions having grave implications for public finances through public address syste...

MP, A GRAZING GROUND FOR POLITICIANS

Leaders shortchange the State, make it a political orphan NK SINGH Country’s first high speed premium luxury train, Tejas, rolled out last week between Goa and Mumbai, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu's area. The second Tejas will ply between New Delhi and Chandigarh. Bhopal is, of course, no where in the picture. Eighteen years ago, Madhavrao Scindia, who was Railway Minister then, gifted country’s first Shatabdi Express to Bhopal. It was a world class train. Anyone who has travelled by Shatabdi during its initial years was thrilled by its level of punctuality, cleanliness and quality of food. You could set your watch by the train’s arrival and departure. It was The Most Prestigious Train. Now travelling by the same train has become a nightmare. Coaches stink. Seats are broken. So are most of the fixtures in toilets. Windowpanes are cracked. Doors don't close. You need to be a brave soul to visit its loo. Even Executive Class coaches are in dilapidated condition. Tra...

TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK MP

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MP Govt ends up with egg on face for mishandling farmers’ agitation NK SINGH The Madhya Pradesh Government has never had such an incompetent Home Minister. Bhupendra Singh has ended up with egg on his face due to his mishandling of the ongoing farmers’ agitation. Earlier this week, after six farmers were killed in Mandsaur firing ---- the toll has now gone up to seven ---- he insisted that police had not opened fire on the crowd. It took him three days to find out that it was his police that had opened fire! The least that he could have done was to apologise for his brazen attempt to mislead people. But, apparently, he belongs to the genre of politicians whose skin is thicker than a crocodile’s. Bhupendra Singh is not the only one with egg on his face. As the agitation turned violent, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan described the farmers as “anti-social elements”. Later, he declared an unprecedented compensation of Rs one crore to relatives of the same “anti-social ...