Opinion Unhealthy humour
Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azads lighthearted remark on World Population Day that TV was the best birth control device....
Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azads lighthearted remark on World Population Day that TV was the best birth control device in the villages has not gone down very well with the medical profession and NGOs. They feel that family planning is a serious matter and should not be talked about frivolously. As a take off on Azads speech,a wag joked that now Doordarshan in the villages would literally mean door ka darshan. Even Azads advice that women should marry around the age of 29 to 30 has raised the hackles of gynaecologists who point out that complications set in if women have babies so late.
At the same function,former Minister for Rural Development,Raghuvansh Prasad,remarked that in the old days people had even larger families and gave the example of Dritharashtra who had hundred sons. It was left to the MoS Health Dinesh Trivedi to put things in context. In the old days,the accepted form of blessings was may you have a hundred sons and let rivers flow with milk. Today even the milk we drink has a lot of water in it,he pointed out.
No room for outsider
A proposal for Sanjaya Baru,a trusted aide of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and formerly the PMs media adviser,to head the Delivery Monitoring Unit (DMU) appears to have been quietly scuttled,at least temporarily. The unit is to monitor the progress of all ministries on key government programmes. The PMs Principal Secretary TKA Nair insisted that the DMU had to be located in the PMO,or it would be viewed as an erosion of the PMOs authority. He also asserted that it should be headed only by an IAS officer since the bureaucracy would be resistant to reporting to an outsider.
Mamata makes changes
One place where Mamata Banerjees presence as the new railway minister is already being felt is in Parliaments Central Hall,where meals are served by the railway canteen. Earlier there were only six waiters deployed and there were complaints that the bearers favoured a few politicians who were lavish tippers and ignored others. Under the new dispensation,there are two lady supervisors,multi-coloured menu cards,the number of waiters has increased to 16 and each server earmarked for specific tables. The old waiters grumble that there is not enough space in the kitchen for all of them. Perhaps they also resent the fact that now the generous tips have to be split among more people.
Preoccupied with patch up
The CPI(M) made little noise over the USs latest attempt to arm twist India on the non-proliferation treaty. The party is preoccupied trying to put its own house in order. State secretary Pinarayi Vijayan may have packed the state organisation with his people,but the hostilities between him and Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan are far from over. In the next round of the ongoing war,details of expensive houses built by CPI(M) leaders and the amount spent on their childrens education abroad may surface.
You tell me
Minister of State for External Affairs,Preneet Kaur,needs to take her ministerial position more seriously. Asked by newspersons at a private function about the ongoing talks between India and Pakistan,Kaur,dressed in her party finery,turned to the journalists for confirmation as to whether it was Zardari or Gilani who had made the particular remark she was quoting.
Third Front rump
Contrary to popular perception,the Third Front is not quite dead. The CPI(M),the TDP,the AIADMK and the BJD plan to request the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs to be counted as one entity when allotting chairpersonships of parliamentary committees. To stake a claim to head a parliamentary committee,the party in question requires a minimum of 16 MPs. Some of the smaller parties fall short of the required numbers and hence lose out. Since the combined strength of these four parties comes to 60-odd MPs,they feel they can stake a claim to four chairpersonships between them. In contrast,in the NDA,the BJP and the Janata Dal (U) filed separate requests for representation in the parliamentary committees. The Janata Dal (U) President Sharad Yadav says his party had to per force to file on its own,since the BJP put in its claims without consulting NDA partners.
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