Northeast Note Book

Invoking Ganesh to fight elephants
After failing to scare away wild elephants from straying into their fields and homesteads, tribals in West Tripura have now taken to offering them puja in the name of Ganesh. Half-a-dozen tribals have been already trampled to death over a span of three weeks in the district, and now every day is Ganesh Puja for the tribals.

Assam cuts down on holidays
There was a time when Assam had earned notoriety as a Bandh Pradesh. While bandhs called by various organisations, both overground and underground, were common, the number of government holidays was also growing progressively. Four years ago, official holidays, Sundays and second Saturdays had almost overtaken the number of working days. But the state has now risen up to say enough is enough. Armed with recommendations of the Committee on Fiscal Reforms, the state government has decided to reduce the number of official holidays from the existing 37 to 29 from 2003, shifting Good Friday, Buddha Purnima, Chaath Puja, Martyrs8217; Day etc to the list of restricted holidays.

Women8217;s pen mightier in Sikkim
Believe it or not, Sikkim has as many as 16 weekly newspapers, though very small, whose editors are all women. What these enterprising ladies did last week was to constitute a body of their own, the Sikkim Mahila Patrakar Sangha, with its president Santosh Niraj saying women have never felt less incompetent in the field of journalism. Sikkim, incidentally, was the first state to have introduced the Balika Samriddhi Yojana, a model that was soon picked up by the union government as a central programme.