Even one false complaint is matrimonial cruelty: HC

Even one false complaint is matrimonial cruelty: HC

Rules That Man Is Entitled To Divorce In Such Cirumstances

Ajay.Sura@timesgroup.com

Chandigarh:25.09.2021

The Punjab and Haryana high court has held that even one defamatory complaint filed by a wife in an agitated mood to falsely implicate her husband and his family amounts to cruelty and the man in the case is entitled to divorce on this ground.

“Filing of the complaints for the initiation of criminal proceedings, which were found to be baseless and false, causes harassment and torture to the husband and his family. One such complaint is sufficient to constitute matrimonial cruelty,” observed a division bench comprising Justice Ritu Bahri and Justice Archana Puri.

They passed these orders while upholding the decision of a family court in Rohtak and dismissed the woman’s appeal against the dissolution of her marriage.

“It stands established as detailed aforesaid that the appellant-wife, after leaving the matrimonial home in less than three months of the marriage, indulged in the filing of the applications/complaints against her husband and his family members, while being in an agitated mood, she had made defamatory complaints against her husband and his family members and the same were found to be false and the police did not find it fit case to be tried. Considering the same in totality, the act and conduct of the appellantwife definitely caused mental cruelty to the husband,” the bench held.

In this case, the marriage of the couple was solemnized in February 2012 in the Rohtak district of Haryana and they had a son together.

According to the husband, the woman was of quarrelsome nature and her family members started interfering in their matrimonial life after their marriage. She was not happy to live in her husband’s joint family of husband in the village and started pressuring him to arrange separate accommodation in Rohtak town, far away from his parents.

When he was unable to arrange separate accommodation, his wife became annoyed and started extending threats to implicate him and his family members in a false dowry case. In order to pacify the matter, the man’s parents arranged a rental accommodation in Rohtak, so that the couple may live peacefully. However, the wife’s family members started frequently visiting the house and when he objected to the same, she became more arrogant and started causing cruelty, harassment, and torture to him and his family members, on one pretext or the other. She had not given any breathing time to her husband and his family members, to try to rehabilitate her. Rather, she had filed complaints, one after the other, and the same were found to be false and baseless and the police never thought it appropriate to initiate an investigation on the basis thereof. Some complaints were also filed thereby trying to implicate menfolk of her in-laws’ family in sexual harassment cases but in the same also, her version was disbelieved.

mind field SHORT TAKES ON BIG IDEAS

How Medicine Always Lets Women Down

Even today, research is male-biased

25.09.2021

Most of us have heard words like hysterical, hormonal or menopausal applied to women. It is also common knowledge that women get less medical attention than men, that there are gendered disparities in research, clinical care and treatment. And yet, Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by British historian Elinor Cleghorn leaves you freshly appalled by the way women have been misunderstood and ill-treated by medical science.

Modern medicine has Western roots, and Cleghorn’s social history is focussed firmly in that world. Social prejudice has passed as biological fact, women’s illnesses and pain, trivialised. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was assumed that women were entirely governed by the whims of the womb, the organ that defined her social purpose.

As centuries rolled on, dismissing all the empirical knowledge of midwives or the testimony of women themselves, physicians kept telling men that women’s maladies stemmed from their dangerous imaginations. There were exceptions – in 1405, Italian writer Christine De Pizan rebelled against this medical misogyny, that women’s bodies were not weak and inferior just because they were different from the male.

As medicine became professionalised, more men studied the female body. But the idea of the ‘hysteric’, which literally means ‘of or from the uterus’ was still held chiefly responsible for any kind of trouble anywhere in a woman’s body. It became a diagnostic dumping ground. Hysteria, of course, is the word for the fits, furies and frenzies that men attribute to women.

Women’s pain was either dismissed as irrational panic, or mystified. White upper-class women’s exquisite sensitivity to pain was seen as a mark of civility – physicians assumed they could cajole them out of it. They were assumed to get breast cancer merely by feeling intense sympathy at another’s pain. Meanwhile, it was assumed that black women feel less pain – an idea that lives on, insidiously.

The book explores the work of Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, who did so much to advance reproductive freedom. Stopes wrote a revelatory book on women’s sexuality, given how men were oblivious to their wants and needs, and opened birth control clinics everywhere in Britain.

But both Sanger and Stopes were racist and ableist eugenicists, who saw their mission as a way to stop the wrong kinds of babies, to stop working-class women from rampant breeding, Cleghorn points out. As the 20th century proceeded, women’s health was suddenly dominated by endocrinology, seen as a matter of glands, hormones and secretions.

The fact is, even today, things that specifically afflict women are understudied – chronic conditions like fibromyalgia, endometriosis. There is even less biomedical research on conditions that affect women from specific racial groups, like uterine fibroids.

In a short section at the end, Cleghorn talks of her own experience with lupus, a chronic auto-immune disease that is understudied because 9 out of 10 sufferers are women. Even the variety of menopause experiences is reduced to a few symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness – making it hard to support women through nearly a decade of perimenopause.

Medicine and health are a matter of social power, the book underlines. Male bodies have set the standard, and male knowledge has delegitimised unwell women. In a fairer world, medicine must believe our testimonies and solve our medical mysteries with equal care.

Missing Skills ----- Low employability calls for academia-industry link

Missing Skills

Low employability calls for academia-industry link

25.09.2021

Three IITs, India’s premier higher education institutions (HEIs), figure in the top 200 institutions across the world ranked according to employability of students in the 2022 QS Graduate Employability Rankings. No Indian HEI is in the top 100. In comparison, an HEI each from China and Hong Kong have challenged Anglosphere hegemony in the top 10. That no Indian HEI has been able to breach the top 100 aptly sums up the employability crisis of Indian graduates.

An employability report in 2019 based on standardised testing by Aspiring Minds termed the challenge as “stubborn unemployability”. It concluded that employability of Indian engineers has not changed at the aggregate level since 2010. Only 3.84% engineers are employable at software start-ups. It’s not any better at HEIs in other streams. India Skills Report 2021 estimated overall employability at 45.9%, that is, at least one of two graduates is not ready for the job market. In polytechnics, which is a pathway for intergenerational mobility, employability level is as low as 25%. A country’s employability quotient significantly influences both the quantity and quality of investment.

The good news is that there’s recognition of the problem at GoI’s level. The National Education Policy 2020 addresses it in broadly two ways. It provides flexibility for students, proposing multiple exit options from undergraduate programmes with appropriate certification. There’s also a call for tighter integration between academia and industry. This is the key. Two successful models, Germany and Japan, offer useful lessons. Germany’s apprenticeship programme is a building block of its manufacturing prowess. Japan’s school system plays an important role in matching student skills with industry’s requirements. This intermediation role needs to be replicated in India. If and when, post-pandemic, India’s economy starts growing at around 7% annually, the job market will demand skill sets that current HEIs are not providing.

Italy recognises Covishield, Indians can get Green Pass

Italy recognises Covishield, Indians can get Green Pass

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi:25.09.2021

Italy has become the latest EU member to recognise WHO-approved Covid-19 vaccine Covishield, after several others like Germany, Switzerland, France and Spain. Indian vaccine cardholders are now eligible for GreenPass, the Indian embassy in Rome tweeted on Friday.

The UK now sticks out like a sore thumb with its refusal to recognise those getting Covishield jabs in India as vaccinated to exempt quarantine to arrivals from October

4. “As an outcome of G20 health ministers’ meeting between (health ministers of India and Italy) coupled with Indian foreign ministry persistent efforts, Italy’s health ministry recognises India’s Covishield. Indian vaccine CardHolders are now eligible for GreenPass,” the Indian embassy tweeted. A green pass proves that the cardholder has been fully vaccinated or recovered from Covid, granting them access to restaurants and other indoor venues.

ICMR drops Ivermectin, HCQ from Covid-19 treatment protocol

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has dropped popular medicines Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) from the approved Covid-19 treatment guidelines.

The usage of the drugs had already been stopped by the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) in May.

DGHS had issued comprehensive guidelines to stop use of Ivermectin and HCQ along with many other drugs for Covid-19 treatment. While ICMR had not recognised the DGHS guidelines at that point due to some differences in opinion, researchers at ICMR have now recommended removing the two medicines from the Covid-19 treatment protocol in the absence of adequate evidence to show their efficacy for such patients, an official said. TNN

Caretaker can’t claim property ownership: SC

 Caretaker can’t claim property ownership: SC

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi:25.09.2021

The Supreme Court has said a caretaker/ servant can never acquire interest in the property irrespective of his long possession and he has to vacate the premises on owner’s demand.

The SC set aside the order of a trial court and high court which had refused to allow a plea of an owner for not proceeding on a suit filed by a caretaker seeking that he be not vacated from the premises.

The trial judge had dismissed the application on the premise that these are the subject matter of disputes which can be examined only after the written statement being filed at the behest of the owner and is not within the scope of Order VII Rule11, Civil Procedure Code and that order was confirmed by the high court. Order 7 Rule 11(d) of CPC provides that the plaint shall be rejected “where the suit appears from the statement in the plaint to be barred by any law”.

Setting aside the order, a bench headed by Justice Ajay Rastogi said, “...the trial court has committed a manifest error in appreciating the pleadings on record from the plaint filed at the instance of respondent No. 1-plaintiff who as a caretaker/servant can never acquire interest in the property irrespective of his long possession and the caretaker/ servant has to give possession forthwith on demand and so far as the plea of adverse possession is concerned...”

Apex court junks Madras HC ruling on EWS quota in all-India med edu seats

Apex court junks Madras HC ruling on EWS quota in all-India med edu seats

TOI 25.09.2021

The Supreme Court on Friday quashed the Madras high court order directing the Centre to first get approval of the top court before implementing 10% reservation for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) in All-India Quota for medical admissions and said that the HC erred by passing the order while adjudicating a contempt petition of DMK on OBC reservations, reports Amit Anand Choudhary.

 A bench of Justices D Y Chandrachud and B V Nagarathna said the HC order was “unnecessary” and was “alien” to the subject matter it was adjudicating upon and made it clear that it was not passing the order on the merit of the case and also not expressing any view on reservation policy. The bench, however, agreed to examine a batch of petitions against the Centre’s decision to extend 27% reservation for OBCs and 10% for EWS category in PG medical admissions and asked the government to file its response to decide on the plea for interim stay of the policy as pleaded by a group of MBBS doctors aspiring to pursue higher education.

Free bus rides for women eating into our incentive: TNSTC drivers

Free bus rides for women eating into our incentive: TNSTC drivers

The driver and the conductor of a government bus are collectively given a Rs 1.33 (66 paisa each for driver and conductor) incentive rate for every Rs 100 of the total collection for the day.

Published: 24th September 2021 05:18 AM |

By Thinakaran Rajamani

Express News Service

TENKASI: Government bus drivers and conductors said the ‘free bus travel for women’ scheme was eating into their collection incentive and it had become difficult to manage their daily expenses with the current earnings.

“Earlier we used to get collection incentive of Rs 60 to Rs 70 daily. Now it has come down to Rs 15 to Rs 20. 60% of the daily passengers in my bus are women. The collection amount has drastically decreased from Rs 8000 to Rs 2500. I used to pay for tea, vada and tiffin with my incentive until the State government launched this scheme. Now I have to pay for these things out of my pocket. My family budget has taken a hit,” said Kasthuri Mariappan, a government bus driver from Tirunelveli.

The driver and the conductor of a government bus are collectively given a Rs 1.33 (66 paisa each for driver and conductor) incentive rate for every Rs 100 of the total collection for the day. “There is an agreement that transport corporations should keep the rate of collection incentive the same even if the bus fare is increased.

However, the corporation reduced the rate of the incentive in 2018 after the government increased the bus fare. Now, the free bus travel scheme has put another dent into the incentive. The State government should bear this loss,” demanded Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporations’ Workers Federation’s General Secretary R Radhakrishnan.

He added his federation made a representation to the State government in this connection. “The government allotted Rs 1200 crore for free travel scheme. However, the need of transport corporations is roughly Rs 2000 crore each year. Corporations should utilise the fund allocation to not only bear the expenses of women travellers but also compensate workers for the loss,” he said.

When contacted by TNIE, Managing Director of Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation (TNSTC), Tirunelveli, S Rajeswaran, said, “As of now we are giving drivers and conductors the collection incentive based on their daily collection but we will consider their demand.” Another official of the Transport Department said the State’s policy decision in favour of the workers would resolve their problem.