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The petition challenged the state government's move to appeal against the Railway Minister's acquittal in a disproportionate assets case filed subsequent to the fodder scam. Both have claimed that since the prosecuting agency was the CBI, the state has no locus standi to ap- peal against the acquittal order.

However, the bench, headed by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrish- nan, did not stay the hearing of the Bihar government's appeal in the Patna High Court.

Before directing Nitish Ku- mar's government to respond, the bench expressed its dis- agreement with the move. "How has the state government come into the picture when the case was investigated and prosecuted by the CBI? The CBI, as a prosecuting agency, can file an appeal. The state has no role to play in the case," it said.

Bihar government counsel Harish Salve accused the CBI of not filing an appeal due to ulterior motives. Solicitor General G.E. Vahanvati defended the agency, saying the CBI was not a political animal. "We have appealed in the Supreme Court because there have been instances where state governments have opposed high court orders to direct CBI investigation in criminal cases. In this case, the Bihar government itself has appealed. The CBI wants to know what it should do in such cases," Vahanvati said.

Salve opposed the appeals saying that the state was entitled to file an appeal under the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPc). "Whichever agency probes a case, the state government continues to the prosecutor. Therefore, it can appeal against an acquittal even if the CBI is involved," he said.

Announced last year in the budget speech by union finance minister P. Chidambaram, the scheme seeks to arrest the high dropout rate at secondary-level by offering financial support to economically backward students.

About Rs 3,004.04 crore will be spent towards the objective during the 11th five year plan. One lakh scholarships worth Rs 6,000 each, per annum, will be awarded to meritorious class IX students from economically weak sections every year. Monetary support will continue till the students reach secondary stage and complete class XII. Each successful student will thus get Rs 6,000 per year to study in classes IX, X, XI and XII.

Any student with parental income of not more than Rs 1.5 lakh from all sources will be eligible to apply for the scheme, to enable him to study in government, local body and government-aided schools.

After the cabinet meeting today, the finance minister said the purpose of the scheme was to award scholarships to deserving students from financially weaker sections and arrest the dropout at class VIII, besides encouraging students to complete their education up to class XII.

Caught in a dilemma over replacing deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi, against whom majority of party MLAs have raised banner revolt in the state, senior BJP leaders are working and holding high-level consultations on the new formula to come out and lend outside support to the government.

Earlier, even after two-hours' of brain storming session of the party's parliamentary board on Wednesday, BJP leaders failed to thrash out the Bihar imbroglio. It was, however, agreed upon that a decision on the issue would be taken after the Karnataka Assembly elections.

In the mean time, the party's central leadership is expected to weigh various options to diffuse the Bihar crisis, keeping in mind the interest of the party. Till now, though all the options are open, the leaders are busy evaluating gain and loss in either removing Modi or coming out of the government.

As per the indications, disgruntled party leaders of Bihar have so far been successful in convincing the central leadership that if Modi continued as the BJP legislature party leader, the party in the state would have to pay heavy price.

They complained that because of soft attitude of Modi, the chief minister has been ignoring the BJP while taking many of the government decisions, on which the party has strong ideological reservations. They argued that many decisions in favour of minority, which Kumar took, were against the principles of the party and exactly on these issue the party had been criticising the Central government. But they are unable to raise their voice, as they are part of the government.

Sources in the party circle revealed that a senior party minister from Bihar informed BJP president Rajnath Singh that if the current state of affairs were allowed to continue, the party would lose its base and would reach to a point of no return.

The minister suggested that the high command might think of taking a decision to come out of the government and lend issue-based support to the state government. This would enable the party to continue its own programme and raise its voice against the wrong decisions of the state government, he said adding that the move would also suit the party in view of the Lok Sabha elections next year.

Confirming that Singh appeared positive on the proposal, sources said, the party president needs senior leader LK Advani's consent before taking a final call.

According to the principal secretary, the urban development department, S Jalja the state government is considering replicating the Delhi Municipal Corporation model for collection of municipal taxes in Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Darbanga, Bhagalpur, Biharsharif and Ara municipal corporations.

A tax collector will not go house-to-house, but is assigned a particular, for example, bank, post office and municipal corporation office, where residents will go and pay their taxes.

She said that the urban development department had asked the corporations to come up with a clear model. The idea is to make the municipal tax collection system more efficient, participative and voluntary.

Jalja said the department had also decided to outsource sanitation work to overcome the crisis of shortage of sanitary workers in urban areas.

Now the Nitish Kumar Government has decided to actually arrange the bait (read bribe), and all you have to do is to make the prey accept the money while the vigilance sleuths would do the rest.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has cleared a proposal mooted to this effect by Additional Director General of Police (Vigilance) Neelmani.

"To begin with, we now have an allocation of Rs 20 lakh to reimburse the complainant of the money he pays to the bribe seekers," Neelmani told India Today. "This initiative has been mooted to mitigate the hardship of the genuine complainants who cannot afford to pay the bribe," he said.

"Now, an amount equal to the amount of bribe money would be withdrawn from the special fund and paid to the complainant after each successful trap.

When the trap money is returned by the court on conclusion of the judicial proceedings it would then be deposited in that special fund," he said, adding "Now new rules are in place, and a complainant will get back his money within a fortnight of the trap."  

Earlier, the practice was that the State Vigilance Investigation Bureau, on receiving a complaint about a bribe demand, would ask the complainant to go ahead and pay the graft seeker.

The vigilance sleuths then used to lay trap and arrest the official red-handed. But the trap money, the one that is used to pay bribe was to be arranged by the complainant.

This was sort of deterrent for the complainants because the trap money would become case property-something that cannot be refunded to the complainant until the conclusion of the judicial proceedings.

State Road Construction minister Dr Prem Kumar inspected the works carried out by the company and after holding a discussion with the officials of his department, including its principal secretary R K Singh, ordered rescinding the Rs 150 crore contract it had with TCCPL.

"The works have been sub-standard and of inferior quality and the project for which the company was assigned by the state government have been inordinately delayed," he said.

Despite the state government serving notices to the company 30 times and slapping fine of Rs 3.56 crore for tardy pace of work, the TCCPL failed to meet the deadline, the minister said.

Singh said the state government would soon float fresh tenders of completing the unfinished works. The department of road construction had earlier served a show-cause notice to the TCCPL seeking to know why it should not not be blacklisted for unsatisfactory works.

Main opposition RJD had alleged that the Nitish Kumar government failed to check corruption and sub-standard work being carried out by agencies in the state.

TCCPL was assigned jobs for construction and expansion of roads on Birchand Patel Path, Boring Road, Hardinge Road, Sahdeo Mahato Marg, Jagdeo Path, Old Bypass, West Boring Canal Road, East Boring Canal Road, Rajendra Path, Mithapur-Khagaul Road, Bailey Road, Exhibition Road and others.

This is a well known fact that next to UP, Bihar sends the highest number of students to AMU. Moreover, as Bihar has not been given any central university, by every justification, it has stronger claim.

I would propose to have at least four more centres for AMU Entrance tests. They should be: Patna, Lucknow, Delhi, and Hyderabad.

We have reasons to believe that compared to any other centre for entrance tests, Patna would have attracted largest number of candidates.

Those, who apprehend any unwelcome eventuality in the case of Bihar, with regard to tests, they must know that UPSC ,IIT and any other august bodies [conducting various tests/recruitment exams], don't have such complaints against Bihar.

May one hope, such a glaring regional injustice will be rectified?

regards,
Mohammad Sajjad
Lecturer, History, AMU

Even as the Congress was patting itself on the back for getting the controversial bill tabled in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, its two partners from Bihar forced a reality-check, making it clear that their backing on the bill was limited to its introduction. The two parties, while making common cause with JD(U) and the Samajwadi Party on the subject, look set to derail the government's plans to get the bill passed during the monsoon session of Parliament.

``We've two important suggestions, and we'll try to persuade the standing committee to incorporate them in its final report on the bill,'' LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan told newspersons here on Wednesday afternoon. ``The country's population has gone up three-fold since Independence, the strength of the Lok Sabha's should be increased by a third, which would mean increasing the total number of seats by an additional 181. The new seats should be reserved for women, and even within this category, there should be a quota for minorities, Backwards and SCs/STs,'' the LJP chief said.

The move is aimed at evolving a smooth tax payment procedure so as to bring it to the doorstep of the holder.

"We are considering replicating the Delhi Municipal Corporation model for collection of municipal taxes,"

Principal secretary of the state urban development department S Jalja said.

As per the Delhi model, a tax collector does not go house to house, but is assigned a particular place where residents go and pay their municipal taxes. Besides the ward offices, the tax collection centre could even be a post office or a bank.

"We have asked the corporations to come back to us with a clear model. The idea is to make the municipal tax collection system more efficient, participative and voluntary," Jalja added.

She said the department had also decided to outsource on public-private-partnership basis sanitation work to tide over the crisis of shortage of sanitary workers in urban bodies.

Taking a cue from railway minister Lalu Prasad's promise to upgrade them to grade IV staff, several among the 90-odd porters of Ranchi and Hatia stations have begun learning the alphabets  from kã, khã, gã, ghã in Hindi to A, B, C, D.

"I have arranged primary school books to take lessons from a schoolboy in my neighbourhood every evening," said Naglal Mahto (35), a porter working at Ranchi railway station for the last 15 years.

Mahto, from Bihar's Chapra district neighbouring Lalu Prasad's Gopalgunj, however, never thought it necessary to learn the alphabets and numbers.

Now, he is already able to sign his name.

"I could only sign my name, but did not know anything beyond," said Brij Mohan Ram, another porter who has bought himself books and pens. "Now, I am determined to study a little more. I should at least be able to read newspapers in the next couple of months."

Thirty-six members have written to association chief general secretary against Singh alleging "misappropriation of association funds for acquiring assets".

The man in question, while talking to The Telegraph said: "All allegations are bogus. I will present my side to the media very soon." Bihar SBI Staff Association has over 10,000 members.

Talking to The Telegraph, the association's deputy-general secretary (headquarters) Devendra Singh confirmed: "I have heard that 36 members wrote to chief general secretary Ashok Dutta at his Calcutta office on March 25, 2008, about Singh defalcating lakhs of association funds in contravention of trade union rules." Singh added, though he "unofficially" discussed the allegations with Dutta, he did not sign the complaint by staffers because of his "constraints" as the holder of the same office. Singh said the complaint was also addressed to CVC to take immediate action against Singh. CVC, however, has not yet taken up the matter.

ITI Begusarai would receive Rs 250 million Central assistance which would be used to make the institute a centre of excellence in electrical branch, in addition to increasing the annual intake of 114 extra students in the ITI.

The institute admits 138 students in various trades at present.  

Shares of the company closed up Rs 3.95, or 2.01%, at Rs 200.7. The total volume of shares traded at the BSE was 2,990,913. (Friday)

The provision is one among a series of changes approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday. The changes will be incorporated in the CrPC (Amendment) Bill 2006 which is likely to be brought in Parliament during the monsoon session in July-August.

Making arrest the "last possibility" in cases of minor offences, the Cabinet pitched for amendment in section 41 of CrPC (relating to power of police to arrest) so that the powers to arrest "must be exercised after reasonable care and justification" that such arrest was necessary and required under the section.

Though the changes do not completely rule out arrest, the police will have to provide justification on four counts before bringing any suspect to the lock-up if his/her crime falls under non-cognizable offence.

Under the provision, the offender can only be arrested if the police thinks that the accused may run away or he/she may commit the crime again or he/she may not appear before the cops during investigation or may disrupt the probe by any means if he/she remained out of the lock-up.

The survey, the first of its kind, covers the controversial issues of judicial corruption and appointment of judges to the Supreme Court and high courts. The BCI also wants to know about nepotism in judiciary or what in bar parlance has come to be known as the concept of "uncle judges".

The BCI has sent an elaborate questionnaire to the chairmen of all state bar councils and presidents of high court bar associations along with a letter asking them to circulate it among their members for responses within a month from the date of its receipt.

The two-part, nine-page questionnaire contains 36 questions. The first part deals with the state of the legalprofession and aims to ascertain the strength and weaknesses of the profession. The second part deals with some very controversial issues in the judiciary.

The BCI wants to know if there was rampant corruption in judiciary and how to deal with it. On the present secretive mode of appointment of judges to the SC and HCs, which has come under attack from a parliamentary panel, the BCI asked: "Is it fair and impartial? If not, what is your suggestion to make it translarent and fair?

Another controversial matter raised by the BCI is the issue of "uncle judges". "What is your view on the judges sitting in the same court centre where their near relatives, like children, nephews, in-laws etc. are practising?"

The BCI asked the lawyers to articulate their view on the quality and performance of the judiciary in their state, particularly, the high court.

In the letter dated February 22, BCI Chairman S. Gopakumaran Nair said the exercise was aimed at collecting relevant data on a national basis to make an authoritative "empirical study" on the current status of the Indian legal profession.

The BCI said the findings would be used for all official purposes in future to improve the standard of the profession.

Assuring confidentiality to the lawyers, Nair said: "This is a very responsible job and part of your duty to assist the apex body to make a realistic study and arrive at right conclusions." The BCI also asked the lawyers for their views on the entry of foreign lawyers and foreign law firms. It asked if there was a need for a central law like Advocates' Protection Act on the lines of the Judges' Protection Act, in view of "the increasing number of interference and onslaught on advocates' professional freedom".

Asked about the need for conducting such a survey, BCI member Jagdev told HT: "Basically we want to know from advocates whether the present system is transparent or not and how to improve it." The Delhi High Court Bar Association has accepted the BCI's request and started the process of sending the questionnaire to its members.

Most of those who attended the meeting, including the two who were dropped from the state ministry, reportedly raised their voice against Kumar. Hasan was unhappy for being sacked by Kumar.

The meeting took place a day after party issued show cause notice to Hasan and another legislator, Poonam Yadav, for issuing statements against each other.

Last week, Hasan charged Kumar with using Poonam Yadav to attack the dropped ministers. Yadav described the dropped ministers as corrupt.

Hasan told IANS by telephone that JD (U) legislators had gathered at his residence to show solidarity and sympathy to him. "We discussed politics and other things," said Hasan and added that more meetings may take place in the coming days.

Wednesday's meeting is seen here as the first collective move to challenge Kumar, whom the legislators accused of behaving like a dictator.

Hasan was one of the 10 ministers Nitish Kumar dropped April 13. Kumar also inducted 19 new faces in his ministry to improve his government's performance.

Addressing a press conference on 22nd April in the state capital, he said Nitish Kumar was trying to weaken minorities by dividing them. He demanded the state government to take immediate steps to ensure that the central government schemes recommended by the Sachar Committee be implemented in the state.

Khan criticized the state government for lapse of central funds meant for scholarships for minority students. Under the Post-Matriculation Scholarship scheme, meant for minorities, around 5,500 students were to be given about Rs10,000 each but the state government failed to forward the application forms to the centre in time. This led to the lapse of the fund.

He blamed the government for non-implementation of another central government scheme for minority students. The scheme was related to coaching of students of minority community for entrance in technical and professional courses in different institutes of the country. The centre was ready to spend Rs 15,000-20,000 per student under this scheme. The amount was to be paid to coaching institutes directly. Around 36 coaching institutes in the state had applied for the scheme. The state government was to send a credibility report about the coaching institutes to the central government but it has failed to do so and the minority students cannot get benefit of this scheme, the RJD leader said.

Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.

That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)

"The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning," said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. "It was really just that, a belief."

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Though the experiment tested college students, the researchers suggested that their findings might also be true for math education in elementary through high school, the subject of decades of debates about the best teaching methods.

In the experiment, the college students learned a simple but unfamiliar mathematical system, essentially a set of rules. Some learned the system through purely abstract symbols, and others learned it through concrete examples like combining liquids in measuring cups and tennis balls in a container.

Then the students were tested on a different situation -- what they were told was a children's game -- that used the same math. "We told students you can use the knowledge you just acquired to figure out these rules of the game," Dr. Kaminski said.

The move comes a year after Mr Nitish Kumar's government decided to use eunuchs for realisation of outstanding municipal taxes.
The government believes eunuchs are more effective than regular staff and also plans to use them for publicising development schemes for women.

The government's move to "exploit" the talents of eunuchs were revealed this week when the social welfare department organized a day-long workshop for them. More than a hundred heavily made-up eunuchs, dressed in their festive outfits, responded to the government's call and participated in the workshop, organised for the first time by the Bihar government.

"We are very much serious about the plight of a community that has suffered discrimination for centuries. Now, my department is planning to give them some important responsibilities which include deploying them as security guards at places like remand homes, hospitals and women's colleges, or utilizing their services in publicising government-sponsored women and child welfare schemes," said the social welfare minister, Mr Damodar Raut. Reports said the government is also considering reservation for them.

The social welfare department says that eunuchs have vast, untapped potential. According to a senior official of the department, they could be very useful in making women's development schemes popular as they visit homes at weddings and when children are born.

As expected, the government's move has drawn huge applause from eunuchs, although not all of them are amused. "If we get out of this age-old job, our society will suffer. Yet we are willing to change our profile provided that the state government arranges for permanent rehabilitation of our community", said Rajkumari alias Lalan Hijra.

If the plans are finalised and a private party comes forward to foot the bill, trains will run at up to 350 km/hour along these corridors. Other routes, where similar proposals have been made, are Delhi-Amritsar via Ludhiana, Mumbai-Ahmedabad and Chennai-Bangalore.

While the corridor between Delhi and Amritsar may take Rs 60,000 crore to build, the one between Mumbai and Ahmedabad is expected to cost Rs 75,000 crore. The corridors from Howrah are expected to cost as much. The costs will be high as everythingrom sleepers, tracks, signals and rolling stock will have to undergo modification.

"The entire stretch will have to be fenced off and there can't be any crossings. A collision even with a man or a cow, at such a high speed will be catastrophic for the train. Our tracks cannot withstand such high speed and will have to be replaced. New locomotives and rakes will have to be brought in. Power consumption will also go up," a senior railway officer said.

Danapur-Rajgir Intercity Express and Lokmanya Tilak Express were affected the most by the disruptive leftists as dozens of protestors sat on the track and climbed on the engines scaring away the drivers and their assistants essentially shutting down the traffic for hours.

Demanding a stop on black-marketing of food items and tough measures against hoarders, and fine-tuning of the public distribution system, the protestors said if such measures were not immediately taken by the Congress-led UPA government, they would further intensify their agitation that would spread across the nation.

Government Railway Police (GRP) and the Railway Protection Force (RPF) jawans, after much effort, were able to remove the protestors from the tracks enabling the trains to proceed towards their destinations.