Letters to the editor

Apropos of your leader, ‘Joint People’s Committee’ , it may not be out of place to remind the country’s main Opposition party...

House call

• Apropos of your leader, ‘Joint People’s Committee’ (IE, September 7), it may not be out of place to remind the country’s main Opposition party, the BJP, that ever since the UPA came to power, it has not been playing a “constructive” role in Parliament, but a negative one. It did not even bat an eyelid when Budget proposals too were allowed to be passed without discussion. If this is how it chooses to function in Parliament, do we need an Opposition in Parliament at all? Well, when someone called Parliament ‘a talking shop’ some years ago, I thought he was being cynical. But now, going by the way the BJP has been conducting itself in both Houses of Parliament, perhaps Parliament has been reduced to either ‘a shouting shop’ or, on some days, ‘a closed shop’. While your editorial suggests that an election to Parliament may help address the problem, you do not seem to reckon with the possibility of another hung House being voted back, and a repetition of these very same tactics.

— Prasad Malladi

Basivireddypeta, AP

• THE suggestion you made in your editorial, ‘Joint People’s Committee’, is probably the only answer to the ongoing fracas on the floors of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha every day. And when Prakash Karat himself admits that the majority in the Parliament is against the Indo-US deal, why should the incumbent UPA not call for a JPC? After all the Parliament is supreme. Alternatively, as you have suggested, let the elected parliamentarians go to the people.

—Kedarnath R. Aiyar

Mumbai

Scientific lag

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• AS explained in ‘Remember Homi, Vikram’ (IE, September 4) by Raja Mohan, the nation has a simple choice before it today: either ‘enable’ your scientists by giving them access to global high technology or get these bright Indian minds to reinvent what their colleagues in other countries did at least five decades ago. The cryogenic engine for space rockets is one such instance. Some of our political parties seem willing to take the second choice because of misguided electoral interests. Such parties would do well to understand that the course advocated by them in regard to the Indo-US nuclear deal would progressively widen the technological gap between India and others like the US, China, Russia, by at least 50 ‘scientific’ years in each calendar year.

— Satish Dayal

New Delhi

Why not identikit?

• THIS refers to the recent news that a Mumbai artist has finally sketched the suspected bomber behind the terror attack in Hyderabad. It appears that unprofessional policing methods will continue hampering solution of such cases. What is needed is not attempts by artists but creation of the suspects’ images with the proper identikit procedure. This relatively simple software, which can be loaded on a standard desktop computer, is a powerful investigative tool whenever there is at least one eye-witness or victim in a terrorist attack, murder, rape, robbery or other crime.

It creates accurate photo realistic composite sketches based on verbal descriptions provided by a witness or victim. Based on scientific questioning and the recall memory of the witness or victim, a picture is pieced together on the computer from a variety of types of skin colours, foreheads, hair, ears, noses, lips, spectacles and so on, to arrive at a fairly accurate picture of the criminal. Employing such a system will certainly contribute to solving a larger number of the cases by the police.

— Dan Jog

Goa

Kurnool bus fire: Several feared dead in Andhra tragedy, CM grieves loss of families

Cities40 min ago

A massive fire gutted a bus in Andhra Pradesh's Kurnool on the intervening night of Thursday and Friday. Several people are feared to have died in the fire. The Volvo bus, carrying 40 people, was reportedly going from Hyderabad to Bengaluru.

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