Opinion Delhi civic nonsense

Last year,Sandhya Bajaj,a member of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR),flew to London to attend a UN-sponsored international conference. The government spent almost a lakh on Bajaj’s airfare and the advance for hotel reservation. When Bajaj landed in London,she discovered to her shock that there was no conference and no hotel booking in her name.

The invitation to the non-existent UN-sponsored conference and subsequent messages had all come on email and no one had checked their authenticity. A case was filed with the cyber cell of the Delhi Police but there has been no progress in the last 10 months. An embarrassed NCPCR in any case does not want to pursue the matter. The Ministry for Women and Child Welfare and the External Affairs Ministry,which cleared the trip without suspecting anything fishy,are also culpable. The Indian High Commission in the UK was not consulted for verifying the bonafides of the organisers. Nor did anyone bother to check with the UN office in Delhi.

Outsourcing training

Senior Congress leaders are apprehensive of Rahul Gandhi’s plan to hire professional agencies and management gurus to train the Congress youth cadre. But the old guard is too fearful of offending the Gandhi scion to voice their reservations publicly. Privately,they point out that the young recruits require political and ideological training and not schooling in business management techniques. Their real apprehension is that the scheme could make them redundant.

Gandhi plans to outsource the training to professional agencies,such as the Infosys Leadership Initiative. The idea is to hold camps of Youth Congress and NSUI (National Students Union of India) recruits in various states. Rahul’s handpicked team,including party secretary Jitendra Singh and MPs Ashok Tanwar and Manik Tagore,will be responsible for organising the training camps.

Parsimonious amount

The population of the Parsis has been declining steadily for over half a century and is now down to 70,000. But is the Rs 1 crore allocated in the Budget towards tackling the serious problem really going to help? Minister for Minority Affairs Salman Khursheed acknowledges that the sum is a token gesture. The talented community does not share the same concerns as other minorities. Parsi groups did not claim discrimination or shortage of funds in their interactions with the minister. In fact,the community has not even availed of its quota of government funded minority scholarships in schools.

A major complaint of Parsi groups is that they do not have enough qualified people to supervise the community’s numerous institutions,welfare trusts and land. Outsiders have encroached on large tracts of Parsi institutional property and some builders have unlawfully taken possession of heritage properties because managing bodies have fallen into the wrong hands. The decline in the vulture population has made disposal of the dead in the prescribed fashion a problem. Different groups have different perceptions and suggestions. For instance,the Mumbai Parsi Panchayat is far more conservative in its approach than those in Delhi and Lucknow.

Royal snub

Minister of State for External Affairs Preneet Kaur feels doubly betrayed by her husband Captain Amarinder Singh. The former chief minister of Punjab insisted on bringing his long-term house guest,Pakistani media personality Aroosa Alam,to the function celebrating the release of his book,The Last Sunset,in Delhi last week. Which is why Kaur decided not to attend the function. When Singh was asked why his maharani was missing,he claimed she was at a Cabinet meeting. A weak excuse since ministers of state do not attend Cabinet meetings and central ministers like M.S. Gill were present at the book release.