News

indianexpress:  Dashing the hopes of 2,700 workers camping outside the company premises since September 1, Bajaj Auto managing director Rajiv Bajaj on Wednesday made it plain that production at Akurdi plant would not be restarted. “We are not going to restart production and we have no intention to restart the production at Akurdi plant,” the junior Bajaj said at his 55-minute maiden press conference at the Akurdi plant.

Bajaj said a meeting has been scheduled at Circuit House in Pune on November 5 where he will personally meet Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar and union leaders. “We are open to all suggestions, other than the ones of restarting production. But we are looking for a positive outcome from the meeting,” he said.

He said every motorcycle made at Akurdi was costing them an additional burden of Rs 1,000 by way of octroi and sales tax. “That is why we have moved our motorcycle production to Chakan and Panthnagar which is helping us save Rs 100 crore annually.” He said suppliers have not been affected due to closure of production as they have moved their supplies to Chakan and Aurangabad plants.
 
Stating that he was holding the press conference to clear the prevailing confusion in general, Bajaj said the company intends to use the Akurdi vehicular production site for other activities. “We have decided to set up a Rs 100-crore development centre on a 20-acre site within Akurdi plant premises. This site includes land where our production units stood and have been lying empty, besides the colony land which has been vacated by many of our employees,” he said. “We have only shut down production at the Akurdi plant while other activities like R&D, engineering, machine tools, marketing, sales, finance, IT, MIS and commercial are proceeding as usual,” he added.

indianexpress:  In 1985, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation gave an interest-free loan of Rs five crore to the Pimpri-Chinchwad New Township Development Authority (PCNTDA), better known as Pradhikaran. Of this, the PCMC got back a little over Rs 1.74 crore. The balance, Rs 3.25 crore, is still pending with the PCNTDA, according to the audit report for 2003-2004.

In his report submitted to Municipal Commissioner Dilip Band, civic chief auditor Sudhir Rajdarkar has said the outstanding should be now recovered with interest from the PCNTDA. “It’s time to put pressure on the PCNTDA and make it pay up,” said the auditor. Audit department officials said it is the responsibility of the civic accounts and town planning departments to ensure that the amount is recovered. “But surprisingly, the two departments have not even raised the issue with the PCNTDA so far. We have already informed them about the need to do so,” said senior audit officials.

Rajdarkar said a PCNTDA letter dated 26.6.91 claimed it settled the entire Rs five crore against the land made available to the PCMC. “The PCNTDA claimed it made land available to the PCMC for setting up a playground, gymnasium and library. It said the cost of this land should be adjusted against the loan.”

indianexpress: With the Supreme Court ruling that all marriages be compulsorily registered, a taxing time awaits the already overburdened and understaffed office of the District Registrar of Marriages here. They are already dealing with an average 35 to 40 cases daily.

“Though registration of marriages had been made compulsory last year by the apex court, the new ruling may see more couples opting for registration,” said Registrar Pradip Ahire.

After the SC order last year, 9,581 marriages have been registered so far this year as against 9,088 in 2006 under the Maharashtra Marriage Council Regulation and Marriage Registration Act, 1998. In case of marriages under the Special Marriage Act, the number was 1,047 against 1,078. “We register an average of 35 to 40 marriages every day, and the number may increase,” said Ahire.

But there is a big question mark over how effectively the four-member Registrar’s office will deal with the newsituation.

The current functioning is not without its delays and hiccups. An applicant Henrietta Aranha, a Christian married to a Hindu, who requires a certificate urgently now for a court matter, has been making the rounds since Friday. “I was told to come on Monday as the clerk was out on some work. On Monday, I was put on hold again as the clerk was busy with some other work,” said Aranha.

A member of the staff said they are grappling with over 30 sundry applications, around 10-12 intended marriage notices, in addition to conducting an average of 10-12 court marriages. Besides, there are urgent matters coming from higher officials and RTI applications.

The Registrar’s office has jurisdiction over the PMC, PCMC and three cantonment boards.

There was a plan to decentralise the whole process and Pune was all set to have 21 marriage registrars. Municipal corporation ward officers, officers from municipal councils and nagar panchayats and CEOs of cantonment boards were to be authorised to register marriages. However the plan was put on hold without any explanation, according to Ahire.

indianexpress: The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) will soon undertake a census of the trees under its jurisdiction including old city limits as well as the 23 merged villages. No tree census was conducted by the PMC in the last 15 years even as the city limits have been extended.

“The city jurisdiction has increased, while the environment situation has changed a lot in last few years. Yet the PMC record on the vegetation is 15 years old,” Municipal Commissioner Praveensinh Pardeshi said. “So a tree census will be taken up through eligible organisations soon.”

The census will help the Tree Authority Committee to take decisions on various proposals submitted to them for approval, he added. Pardeshi also said the committee proposed its budget for the year with Rs two crore for a biodiversity park and Rs three crore for a water conservation project along with the state Forest department.

To avoid delay in taking decisions on proposals due to the failure of a consensus in the 30-member committee, Pardeshi said a sub-committee would be constituted to filter the proposals before discussing it in the main committee. “The committee meets once in a month and it is impossible to discuss all the proposals in the agenda for the meeting,” he said.

The sub-committee will have one representative from each political party, NGOs and a Garden department officer. The sub-committee will submit a report on the proposals with recommendations to the main committee for a final decision.

indianexpress: Alleging that the State government was hiding information about the manufacturing of spurious drugs, Chinchwad-based resident Lakhpatraj Mehta produced a “confidential letter” addressed to the Directorate of Medical Education and Research (DMER) — from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — that listed the names of 40 companies blacklisted for selling “sub-standard drugs.”

Mehta attached the letter dated March 1, 2006 as an affidavit in his PIL. During the course of the hearing in the court, the State government time and again maintained there was no such pharmaceutical company selling sub-standard drugs.

In his affidavit however, Mehta said the government had intentionally tried hiding information about the spurious drugs.

He cited the ‘confidential letter’ sent by the then FDA commissioner Ramesh Kumar to W B Tayade of the DMER, in which he had named 40 companies whose products had been labelled as “sub-standard” while testing at a laboratory in Mumbai. Of these 40 companies, seven are from Maharashtra.

indianexpress: At the Rale basti in Khed taluka, around 65 km from the city, 70 students studying at the Zilla Parishad Primary School saw running water in their school toilet taps for the first time on Saturday.

“Earlier, the students would have to get water from the hand pump, which was a kilometre away from the toilet. Few of them opted for this, the toilets that were built around four months ago were usually filthy,” said gram sevak Suresh Ghanwati (31) of the Kurkundi village panchayat. Rale basti is at the outskirts of Kurkundi, around 2 km from the village.

On Saturday, officials from the city-based Groundwater Surveys and Development Agency (GSDA) installed a modified hand pump, half a kilometre from the toilet, connected it with a pipeline to an overhead tank above the toilet so that water could reach the taps below. “In cities we use power pumps to do the same thing — to raise the water to the overhead tanks above, but there is a lot of load shedding in the villages, here a hand pump makes better sense,” said the chief drilling officer, GSDA, Pune, Shrinivas Deshpande. Out of the 1,75,000 borewells in the State, only 11,000 have power pumps or electric pumps, the rest use hand pumps, he said.

While the hand pump raises water from the depths through the borewell to the spout, the GSD officials modified the plate to prevent water leakage when it is raised to a higher level through a pipeline. Using a power pump, the same water can be raised to the level at the switch of a button.

The other school at the Kurkundi village is connected through a water scheme. Four months ago, zilla parishad officials approached the village to declare this water scheme. “We had to deposit 10 per cent of the project cost for the scheme, which we did promptly within a few days,” said Kurkundi village panchayat sarpanch Sachin Popat Bhogate (30).