Every year at least half a dozen students in the IITs ended their lives. IIT Council has decided to constitute a Task Force to study the issue of increasing suicides and recommend appropriate measures to prevent such cases. The Task Force shall be headed by an eminent person and include representatives of parents, teachers, alumni, professional counselors and will submit its report in four months. The panel may be headed by the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Science, Bangalore and comprise five or six mental health experts.
This hangama over the death of half a dozen students every year is in a land where two million U-5 kids perish annually due to malnutrition. TB swallows each year half a million. A few may chide me for comparing suicides with natural deaths. These are not natural deaths but state assisted killings. Let us consider another suicide issue. Since 1995, a quarter million farmers ended their lives due to rural economic stress. Every hour two food providers terminate their lives. That is nearly three thousand times the suicide deaths in IITs. Recent 11 deaths in Delhi shook the entire creamy layer. None cared to look at this farm suicide for one decade. Only after the 'India Shining' brigade was stopped from 'Feeling Good', the UPA appointed a commission to study the issue and suggest remedial measures. Six years passed after this committee gave its recommendations. But the suicides continue unabated. No question of any task force. Why this monumental apathy from the 'informed' society?
IIT Kanpur and Rajasthan Chairman Anandakrishnan gives the answer: “IIT students are valuable assets to the nation. Only the cream of the society joins the IITs and they have a very good opportunity of becoming leaders in the society”. Poor farmers don’t have the ghost of a chance to enter any IIT to get salvation.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Singara Chennai
Monsoon season is round the corner. It will be busy time for Chennai Corporation officials leasing out maintenance and de-silting of Super-Ultra-filthy Storm water drains on the road margins of Chennai, so that people can weather the rain without flooded roads and nullahs. But, it will nevertheless be flooded on account of shoddy maintenance work and lack of any visible, scientific solid waste management system on the ground. You see, we are an almost arrived superpower with a great growth story of consistently 9% per annum & now and then touching 10%,against a depressing global recession. And as an arriving superpower, we have technology only for moon missions, Atomic bombs, Nuclear tipped Missiles & 4-laned Golden Quadrilaterals..
Not for maintaining storm water drains and building walking platforms.
The video at the bottom will give you a glimpse of how we provide the much touted Urban Amenities in Chennai, say for example, the storm water maintenance - through high exploitation of migrant labourers. The Corporation gives out the Contract. The Contractor (invariably a Binami of a councilor/s) subcontracts the work to another, again. The nepotism in such deals is as filthy as the storm water drains & public toilets of Chennai. The subcontractor gets migrant families from western districts like Salem/Darmapuri or from the Telangana region to de-silt the filthy drains. Of late, Bihari & UP migrants have increased the competition for such jobs. Coolie is paid by metre desilted. The more metre they desilt per day, the better. This is the motivation for entire families to 'plunge' themselves into the desilting work.
But, most of the 'dirty' money is invariably earned back by the Government, thanks to Government peddled liquor shops. How else, our Government can distribute laptops and sheep? And give subsidized plots to the IAS, MLAs, Filmy association people, etc & hectares to the SEZ? These ignorant migrants don't understand how they support the household economy of the IAS, the business class & finance the Government's welfare schemes too.
Husband, wife, brother, brother-in-law, sister, sister-in-law, grandpa with kids around undertake to desilting without any safety protection. Broken brandy & beer bottles dumped after drinking episodes (or rather drinking epidemic) in Tasmac liquor shops, all types of plastic waste, raw chicken waste from butchers' shops, rotting wastes dumped by roadside eat-outs, construction rubbish, sewerage illegally let out by establishments & houses and of course silt are to be removed.
Cockroaches, variety of other insects, rodents gives them great company. They outdo the so-called dangerous reality shows on TV. Children of the families will play dangerously on the platform as traffic whizzes past .Watching their elders scoop out filth provide some amusement to the children.
The amusement is not only to their Children, of course to the people driving, walking past.Or are these migrant families, a necessary evil, some kind of an annoying nuisance to tolerate before the much bigger nuisance, monsoon sets in?
http://www.paadam.in/videos.php
Not for maintaining storm water drains and building walking platforms.
The video at the bottom will give you a glimpse of how we provide the much touted Urban Amenities in Chennai, say for example, the storm water maintenance - through high exploitation of migrant labourers. The Corporation gives out the Contract. The Contractor (invariably a Binami of a councilor/s) subcontracts the work to another, again. The nepotism in such deals is as filthy as the storm water drains & public toilets of Chennai. The subcontractor gets migrant families from western districts like Salem/Darmapuri or from the Telangana region to de-silt the filthy drains. Of late, Bihari & UP migrants have increased the competition for such jobs. Coolie is paid by metre desilted. The more metre they desilt per day, the better. This is the motivation for entire families to 'plunge' themselves into the desilting work.
But, most of the 'dirty' money is invariably earned back by the Government, thanks to Government peddled liquor shops. How else, our Government can distribute laptops and sheep? And give subsidized plots to the IAS, MLAs, Filmy association people, etc & hectares to the SEZ? These ignorant migrants don't understand how they support the household economy of the IAS, the business class & finance the Government's welfare schemes too.
Husband, wife, brother, brother-in-law, sister, sister-in-law, grandpa with kids around undertake to desilting without any safety protection. Broken brandy & beer bottles dumped after drinking episodes (or rather drinking epidemic) in Tasmac liquor shops, all types of plastic waste, raw chicken waste from butchers' shops, rotting wastes dumped by roadside eat-outs, construction rubbish, sewerage illegally let out by establishments & houses and of course silt are to be removed.
Cockroaches, variety of other insects, rodents gives them great company. They outdo the so-called dangerous reality shows on TV. Children of the families will play dangerously on the platform as traffic whizzes past .Watching their elders scoop out filth provide some amusement to the children.
The amusement is not only to their Children, of course to the people driving, walking past.Or are these migrant families, a necessary evil, some kind of an annoying nuisance to tolerate before the much bigger nuisance, monsoon sets in?
http://www.paadam.in/videos.php
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