Unfriendly act?

SPEAKER Somnath Chatterjee feels that parliamentarians should form their own country-specific Indo-friendship groups and not lend their names to friendship societies in which commercial and private bodies are also associated. The speaker recently constituted several such friendship associations, including the Indo-US Friendship Association. The composition of this body has raised eyebrows. Chatterjee has appointed Yashwant Sinha of the BJP as chairperson of the group and Sitaram Yechury and Janardhan Reddy as vice-chairpersons. The first two have come out publicly against the Indo-US treaty in no uncertain terms. Yechury, in fact, has made no bones about the anti-US imperialism stance of his party.

Spaced-out delivery

THE parliamentary standing committee on information technology headed by former police officer Nikhil Kumar has exposed just how sloppily the department of posts has been managing its huge real-estate reserves. Consider this: the postal department has a total of 1,871 plots which have been lying vacant, some for as long as 50 years, covering an area of over 3.82 lakh square feet. Despite sitting on such huge land reserves, the department has been paying an annual rent of Rs 45 crore for hiring space. Additionally, 99 departmental buildings have had vacant space for years. In Uttar Pradesh, in the Hamirpur circle, space has been vacant since 1854. When this glaring statistic was brought to the notice of the postal department, it tried to wriggle out by claiming that the concerned department had got confused between vacant space and vacant land. Either way, someone somewhere has a lot of explaining to do.

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