Add Pallavaram & Chromepet to GCC, urge locals

BETTER THAN TAMBARAM

Add Pallavaram & Chromepet to GCC, urge locals

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

25.09.2021

Residents associations of Pallavaram and Chromepet have raised a flag of rebellion against the government move to merge the municipalities to the proposed Tambaram corporation and have since been holding protests. Seeing the drastic change in conservancy work, road repairs and other upgrades in areas such as Nanganallur after it was merged with Chennai corporation, residents feel that it will be better to join Chennai, which also has experienced officials and better access to funds.

Sources said more than 60 residents associations have sent petitions against the merger with Tambaram. V Govindarajan, a social activist and a resident, said, “Merging these neighbourhoods into the new corporation will not help improve amenities. Pallavaram earns 100 crore annual revenue, which is higher than Tambaram. They will end up using our money but will not bring development to Pallavaram and Chromepet. We do not want that situation.”

“We had sent petitions to the government saying Pallavaram and Chromepet should be merged with GCC. Our MLA too spoke about it in the assembly. We want them to hold a public hearing as a majority of the people are against the proposed move,” he said, adding that residents plan to intensify protests.

The government announcing corporations by adding the areas despite residents’ opposition is undemocratic, said V Santhanam of Chromepet. “Pallavaram and Chrompet are so close to the borders of the Chennai corporation. The areas are far more developed, with commercial complexes, brand outlets, restaurants, bridges and other amenities than Tambaram. It makes more sense to add them to Chennai than to a new corporation,” he added.

However, K P Subramanian, a former CMDA planner, said the upgrade is a good move. “It may not be possible to add all areas to Chennai. But the government should offer a hand-holding in terms of allocating funds and augmenting the staff in all departments such as health, engineering, town planning so that the neighbourhoods can be developed.”

It's going to take more than a name change to make Tambaram a corpn

It's going to take more than a name change to make Tambaram a corpn

Unlike Avadi, Govt Must Set Aside Funds & Expertise To Develop New Corporation Well: Experts

Ayyappan.V@timesgroup.com

25.09.2021

Sarvamangala Nagar in Chitlapakkam was a quiet neighbourhood more than 20 years ago, with mostly independent houses overlooking the Sembakkam lake. Now, almost all streets are crammed with four-storey and five-storey buildings. It lacks good roads, an underground sewage system and proper water supply a perfect example of unplanned urbanisation.

While residents are upbeat that the decision to convert Tambaram into a corporation comprising neighbouring local bodies will bring in better amenities, experts caution that the change in status should reflect on the ground. That means the new corporation should get experienced officers, more functions or powers and funds. They also say the Chennai model should be followed so that Tambaram doesn’t go the Avadi-way, where little has changed since the municipality became a corporation.

D S Sivasamy, former additional director in the local administration department, said the government should ensure an experienced bureaucrat is posted as commissioner and more posts created at zonal level.

With the government notifying the forming of the new corporation, Palvaram, Pammal, Anakaputhur, etc., can be divided into separate zones. The revenue earned by local bodies that will now be under Tambaram will be around 300 crore. But that may not be enough. “Funds are needed because the government often takes away a good portion of the revenue generated by a local body in certain taxes. A local body earns money from tax, building tax, licences, surcharges and stamp duty. But, the government gives only a portion of the surcharges to the local body…,” said Sivasamy.

More officials are needed, municipalities do not have enough. “There is hardly anyone to do a ground check if a project is suggested.”

The new corporation will have to take up underground sewerage work, drinking water supply, relay roads, stormwater drains and improving public transport in almost all the neighbourhoods spread over 87.64sqkm.

In Pallavaram, nothing much has changed in the staff strength after it was made into a municipality. That should not be the case, he added.

Ramakrishnan of Sarvamangala Nagar Residents Association hoped amenities will improve when the areas are attached to a corporation. “The change is evident at the next neighbourhood, which is in Pallavaram municipality. They have better facilities.”

Similar is the hope of residents in many neighbourhoods in Tambaram, Sembakkam, Pammal, Anakaputhur, Chitlapakkam, Madambakkam, Thiruneermalai, Peerkankaranai and other areas who have seen the way Nanganallur got good roads and other amenities after it was attached to Greater Chennai Corporation.

Chengalpet collector Rahulnath said a public hearing will be held after the model code of conduct for local body elections is over. “We have informed the government of the feedback from the people. The GO is a preliminary one. The government will take a final call.”

TIME TO PAUSE & PLAN

Tambaram has undergone rapid, unplanned urbanisation, in photo is Tambaram West. (Above) Work to build a subway to replace a level crossing at Radha Nagar in Chromepet, mooted a decade ago, is underway for many years. The proposed upgrading of Tambaram local body into a corporation is expected to speed up many works such as replacing level crossings to make traffic smooth in the suburbs.

CoWIN to add date of birth for those travelling abroad

CoWIN to add date of birth for those travelling abroad

Neha.Madaan@timesgroup.com

Pune:25.09.2021

People fully inoculated against Covid-19 and wanting to travel abroad will have a vaccination certificate with their full date of birth on the CoWIN app. As of now, the certificate refers only to age based on the year of birth. The new feature may go live by next week.

A senior Union government official with the CoWIN management portal said the introduction of the new feature stems from ongoing technical discussions between India and the UK on CoWIN certification. A senior official with the portal told TOI, “We believe that the UK wants the date of birth format in the CoWIN certificate as per WHO standards — in the ddmm-yy format — for international travellers. Hence, the same feature will be introduced in certificates for those going abroad.”

The UK government’s relaxed travel rules come into force from October 4. “You must be able to prove that you have been fully vaccinated (plus14 days) with a document (digital or paper-based) from a national or state-level public health body that includes, as a minimum, forename and surname(s), date of birth, vaccine brand and manufacturer, date of vaccination for every dose, country or territory of vaccination and/or certificate issuer. If your document from a public health body does not include all of these, you must follow the non-vaccinated rules. If not, you may be denied boarding,” the website added.

A senior official from the ministry of health and family welfare told TOI, “No changes are required in the current CoWIN certificates as the format is in sync with WHO standards.”

Can’t speak or hear but aces IAS in first attempt

Can’t speak or hear but aces IAS in first attempt

36 TN Candidates Crack CSE 2020

Chennai:25.09.2021

D Ranjith, a 27-year-old differently abled candidate from Coimbatore with hearing and speech impairment let his achievements speak on Friday by securing 750th rank in the tough civil services exam in his first attempt, reports Ragu Raman.

His mother, who did her BEd in special education and taught him lip reading, was lost for words after the UPSC declared the results on Friday. Her son, a topper among differently abled category who wrote the exam in Tamil, is likely to get the coveted IAS.

“We were worried about his future. But today all our worries have gone and we are happy and proud,” Ranjith’s mother Amrithavalli told TOI.

Ranjith chose Tamil literature as his optional subject and wrote the exam in Tamil.

“He would sit on the front row and read our lips while attending classes,” K Sabarinathan, one of the trainers who coached him on current affairs, said.

Narayana Sarma V S from Coimbatore got the all India 33rd rank and emerged state topper.

This year, 36 students from Tamil Nadu have cracked the exam. Last year, 45 TN candidates were succesful.

SC nod must for EWS reservation: Apex court nixes Madras HC order

SC nod must for EWS reservation: Apex court nixes Madras HC order

AmitAnand.Choudhary@timesgroup.com

New Delhi:25.09.2021

A two-judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice D Y Chandrachud on Friday quashed an order of the Madras high court 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. 

In a related development, another bench headed by CJI N V Ramana stayed the proceedings of a PIL before the Kerala HC that challenged the validity of the 103rd Constitution Amendment Act, 2019, providing for 10% EWS quota in jobs and admissions to government educational institutions.

The bench of Justices D Y Chandrachud and B V Nagarathna said the Madras HC had erred in passing the order while adjudicating a contempt petition filed by the DMK on OBC reservations. The order was “unnecessary” and was “alien” to the subject matter it was adjudicating upon, the judges said, but made it clear that they were not passing an order on the merit of the case or expressing any view on the reservation policy. “These observations were not connected with the case. The HC has gone beyond the contempt jurisdiction by making unnecessary observations,” the bench said.

SC flags juvenility plea of convicts

Nearly a decade after giving convicts the right to raise juvenility plea at any stage, the SC on Friday said there may be a need to review the ruling after an accused in a gang-rape case raised the the plea of juvenility after 22 years. P 15

SC stays Kerala HC trial on 10% EWS quota in jobs plea

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 who are aspiring to pursue higher medical education.

The doctors have approached the apex court through advocate Vivek Singh and sought interim stay on the notification issued by the Centre on July 29. The petitioners alleged that the attempt to provide for reservation in All-India Quota (AIQ) seats in PG medical courses is clearly contrary to the law laid down by the apex court and the general category students applying for PG medical courses are being reduced to a minuscule minority.

“The attempt of Union of India to provide for reservation in All India Quota of 50% seats in PG medical course is clearly contrary to law laid down by this court. It is pertinent to note that 50% All India Quota was a tool devised by this court to provide seats without any preference of any nature, solely on the basis of merit to the students. It is clear that to overcome the difficulty of institutional preference and high percentage of reservation, this court directed that 50% seats should be reserved in PG medical courses for All India Quota which will be without any reservations,” the petition said.

“In view of the above facts the impugned notification for reservation of 27% to the OBC candidates and 10% to EWS in All India Quota is not only in clear contravention of the judgement of of this court but also defeats the entire purpose for which seats were carved out,” it said.

In a related development, a bench headed by CJI N V Ramana stayed the proceedings before the Kerala HC on a PIL challenging the validity of 103rd Constitution Amendment Act, 2019 providing for 10% EWS quota in jobs and admissions to government educational institutions.

Solicitor general Tushar Mehta informed a bench headed by CJI N V Ramana that when the SC is seized of the issue, it would not be appropriate for the Kerala HC to proceed with the same exercise in a parallel proceeding. The bench issued notice to PIL petitioner Nujaim PK and stayed the proceedings before the HC.

On August 5 last year, a three-judge bench of the SC had accepted the Centre’s request to transfer all similar cases pending in various HCs challenging the 10% EWS reservation to the Supreme Court and had also referred the matter to five judge bench, saying that the petitions raised a substantial question of law having great importance.

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.