Skewed spending

This refers to ‘Laloo’s package for Rabri: 32 Rly bridges’ (IE, August 10). Already, train travel on the Bihar ...

This refers to ‘Laloo’s package for Rabri: 32 Rly bridges’ (IE, August 10). Already, train travel on the Bihar section is a nightmare. Our experience of a journey between Gaya and Varanasi in 2002 witnessed the daylight snatching of a necklace in a second class reserved compartment where unauthorised passengers numbered more than the reserved passengers. At night a dozen tea vendors were patrolling the compartments with kerosene stoves, a fire hazard in trains, and the patrolling railway police enjoyed free tea from them. Smoke emanating from the stoves was suffocating and we were unable to sleep due to the movement, smoke and overcrowding. Bridges at the cost of railway safety?

— V. Andanallur Pune

Good work

• Apropos of ‘Welcome Home’ (IE, August 10) and your campaign ‘Return their Home & Honour’, great job, Indian Express. You deserve our gratitude for bringing our sons home. If it had not been for you they would be rotting in Pakistani jails. Keep up your good work.

— Surinder Puri On e-mail

Amnesty’s silence

• This refers to the letter by Bikram Jeet Batra, legal officer, Amnesty International India, New Delhi (IE, August 9). Amnesty is ‘‘disappointed’’ at India for being on the wrong side of the justice divide. However, it is intriguing that when Dara Singh was sentenced to death for the gruesome murder of Graham Staines in Orissa, Amnesty did not make any noise. Why now? Is the rape and murder of an innocent teenage girl less gruesome than the Staines murder? Amnesty will get a lot more credibility in India if it starts talking also about the killing of railway engineers in Kashmir or of innocent Muslims in Bihar by the Yadavs. Amnesty’s silence in these instances erodes its credibility. It is also unfortunate for the cause of human rights.

— Munir Parikh Ahmedabad

Two standards

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• Apropos of the passing of the law terminating all agreements related to sharing of river waters by the Amarinder Singh government in Punjab, the fact is that even UN guidelines on water management and usage state that all water treaties be reviewed every 25 years. An agreement is always signed in a particular situation and context. When the situation changes, its terms can always be altered. In the Narmada tribunal, when Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh were in dispute and Rajasthan made a plea that it be given a share of the water, the claim was put down on the ground that it was neither a riparian nor a basin state. But Punjab did not get any water from rivers in the Yamuna basin even though parts of Punjab fall within it. If not being a riparian or a basin state was a consideration in one case why should the same consideration lose significance in others?

— Nitin Anand Delhi

Rethink on talaq

• Akhtar Sultan Begum indeed has a fascinating story to tell in ‘68 years ago, she gave herself divorce rights’ (IE, July 28). The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) chairman is taking a very flimsy plea in not considering again the issue of the talaq clause in the nikahnama. A nikahnama has to have a mention of mehr which is the compensation promised to the woman in the event of talaq. Thus the issue of talaq is covered in the mention of the mehr itself.

— L.S. Narain New Delhi

Donald Trump may replace H-1B lottery with wage-based selection process

World3 hr ago

Days after hiking the fees for new H-1B applications to $100,000, the Donald Trump administration has proposed to overhaul the visa process for high-skilled non-immigrant workers. The Trump administration has suggested a wage-based selection process for the H-1B programme, instead of the current lottery system.

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