Chennai NOC: April 2011

Friday, April 29, 2011

LOKPAL

Dear All,
You must be reading and watching the people's will for fight against corruption which has reached currently, at unprecedented height perpetrated by national or provincial regimes. Anna Hazare's fast unto death supported by veterans like Swami Agnivesh, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Kiran Bedi, Arvind Kejariwal etc. is for the creation of Jan Lokpal Bill.
Here I am providing you the very brief, the gist of 'What is Jan Lokpal Bill and what is its importance?' and 'What is the key difference b/n Jan Lokpal Bill and Govt's Lokpal Bill and what is the reason for opposing Govt's Bill?'
Please spare some of your valuable time, it is very important for us to read the following to make yourself aware of India's fight against corruption. (Source - NDTV and http://www.indiaagainstcorruption.org/#)

What is the Jan Lokpal Bill, why it's important
Source: http://indiaagainstcorruption.org/
The Jan Lokpal Bill (Citizen's ombudsman Bill) is a draft anti-corruption bill drawn up by prominent civil society activists seeking the appointment of a Jan Lokpal, an independent body that would investigate corruption cases, complete the investigation within a year and envisages trial in the case getting over in the next one year.
Drafted by Justice Santosh Hegde (former Supreme Court Judge and present Lokayukta of Karnataka), Prashant Bhushan (Supreme Court Lawyer) and Arvind Kejriwal (RTI activist), the draft Bill envisages a system where a corrupt person found guilty would go to jail within two years of the complaint being made and his ill-gotten wealth being confiscated. It also seeks power to the Jan Lokpal to prosecute politicians and bureaucrats without government permission.
Retired IPS officer Kiran Bedi and other known people like Swami Agnivesh, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Anna Hazare and Mallika Sarabhai are also part of the movement, called India Against Corruption. Its website describes the movement as "an expression of collective anger of people of India against corruption. We have all come together to force/request/persuade/pressurize the Government to enact the Jan Lokpal Bill. We feel that if this Bill were enacted it would create an effective deterrence against corruption."
Anna Hazare, anti-corruption crusader, began a fast-unto-death today, demanding that this bill, drafted by the civil society, be adopted. The website of the India Against Corruption movement calls the Lokpal Bill of the government an "eyewash" and has on it a critique of that government Bill. It also lists the difference between the Bills drafted by the government and civil society.
A look at the salient features of Jan Lokpal Bill:
1. An institution called LOKPAL at the centre and LOKAYUKTA in each state will be set up
2. Like Supreme Court and Election Commission, they will be completely independent of the governments. No minister or bureaucrat will be able to influence their investigations.
3. Cases against corrupt people will not linger on for years anymore: Investigations in any case will have to be completed in one year. Trial should be completed in next one year so that the corrupt politician, officer or judge is sent to jail within two years.
4. The loss that a corrupt person caused to the government will be recovered at the time of conviction.
5. How will it help a common citizen: If any work of any citizen is not done in prescribed time in any government office, Lokpal will impose financial penalty on guilty officers, which will be given as compensation to the complainant.
6. So, you could approach Lokpal if your ration card or passport or voter card is not being made or if police is not registering your case or any other work is not being done in prescribed time. Lokpal will have to get it done in a month's time. You could also report any case of corruption to Lokpal like ration being siphoned off, poor quality roads been constructed or panchayat funds being siphoned off. Lokpal will have to complete its investigations in a year, trial will be over in next one year and the guilty will go to jail within two years.
7. But won't the government appoint corrupt and weak people as Lokpal members? That won't be possible because its members will be selected by judges, citizens and constitutional authorities and not by politicians, through a completely transparent and participatory process.
8. What if some officer in Lokpal becomes corrupt? The entire functioning of Lokpal/ Lokayukta will be completely transparent. Any complaint against any officer of Lokpal shall be investigated and the officer dismissed within two months.
9. What will happen to existing anti-corruption agencies? CVC, departmental vigilance and anti-corruption branch of CBI will be merged into Lokpal. Lokpal will have complete powers and machinery to independently investigate and prosecute any officer, judge or politician.
10. It will be the duty of the Lokpal to provide protection to those who are being victimized for raising their voice against corruption.

Difference b/n Govt Lokpal Bill & Jan Lokpal Bill and why others oppose Govt's Lokpal Bill 2010
(Excerpts from reports on indiaagainstcorruption.org)
Lokpal will not have any power to either initiate action suo motu in any case or even receive complaints of corruption from general public. The general public will make complaints to the speaker of Lok Sabha or chairperson of Rajya Sabha. Only those complaints forwarded by Speaker of Lok Sabha/Chairperson of Rajya Sabha to Lokpal would be investigated by Lokpal. This not only severely restricts the functioning of Lokpal, it also provides a tool in the hands of the ruling party to have only those cases referred to Lokpal which pertain to political opponents (since speaker is always from the ruling party).
1. Lokpal has been proposed to be an advisory body. Lokpal, after enquiry in any case, will forward its report to the competent authority. The competent authority will have final powers to decide whether to take action on Lokpal's report or not. In the case of cabinet ministers, the competent authority is Prime Minister. In the case of PM and MPs the competent authority is Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha, as the case may be. In the coalition era when the government of the day depends upon the support of its political partners, it will be impossible for the PM to act against any of his cabinet ministers on the basis of Lokpal's report. For instance, if there were such a Lokpal today and if Lokpal made a recommendation to the PM to prosecute A. Raja, obviously the PM will not have the political courage to initiate prosecution against A. Raja. Likewise, if Lokpal made a report against the PM or any MP of the ruling party, will the house ever pass a resolution to prosecute the PM or the ruling party MP? Obviously, they will never do that.
2. The bill is legally unsound. Lokpal has not been given police powers. Therefore Lokpal cannot register an FIR. Therefore all the enquiries conducted by Lokpal will tantamount to "preliminary enquiries". Even if the report of Lokpal is accepted, who will file the chargesheet in the court? Who will initiate prosecution? Who will appoint the prosecution lawyer? The entire bill is silent on that.
3. Lokpal will have jurisdiction only on MPs, ministers and PM. It will not have jurisdiction over officers. The officers and politicians do not indulge in corruption separately. In any case of corruption, there is always an involvement of both of them. So according to government's proposal, every case would need to be investigated by both CVC and Lokpal. So now, in each case, CVC will look into the role of bureaucrats while Lokpal will look into the role of politicians. Obviously the case records will be with one agency and the way government functions it will not share its records with the other agency. It is also possible that in the same case the two agencies arrive at completely opposite conclusions. Therefore it appears to be a sure way of killing any case.
4. Lokpal will consist of three members, all of them being retired judges. There is no reason why the choice should be restricted to judiciary. By creating so many post retirement posts for judges, the government will make the retiring judges vulnerable to government influences just before retirement as is already happening in the case of retiring bureaucrats. The retiring judges, in the hope of getting post retirement employment would do the bidding of the government in their last few years.
5. The selection committee consists of Vice President, PM, Leaders of both houses, Leaders of opposition in both houses, Law Minister and Home minister. Barring Vice President, all of them are politicians whose corruption Lokpal is supposed to investigate. So there is a direct conflict of interest. Also selection committee is heavily loaded in favor of the ruling party. Effectively ruling party will make the final selections. And obviously ruling party will never appoint strong and effective Lokpal.
6. Lokpal will not have powers to investigate any case against PM, which deals with foreign affairs, security and defence. This means that corruption in defence deals will be out of any scrutiny whatsoever. It will become impossible to investigate into any Bofors in future.

Amazing facts about human body - Save this

Fact
1 The average red blood cell lives for 120 days.
2 There are 2.5 trillion (give or take) of red blood cells in your body at any moment. To maintain this number, about two and a half million new ones need to be produced every second by your bone marrow.That's like a new population of the city of Toronto every second.
3 Considering all the tissues and cells in your body, 25 million new cells are being produced each second. That's a little less than the population of Canada - every second !
4 A red blood cell can circumnavigate your body in under 20 seconds.
5 Nerve Impulses travel at over 400 km/hr (25 mi/hr).
6 A sneeze generates a wind of 166 km/hr (100 mi/hr), and a cough moves out at 100 km/hr (60 mi/hr).
7 Our heart beats around 100,00 times every day.
8 Our blood is on a 60,000-mile journey.
9 Our eyes can distinguish up to one million colour surfaces and take in more information than the largest telescope known to man.
10 Our lungs inhale over two million litres of air every day, without even thinking. They are large enough to cover a tennis court.
11 We give birth to 100 billion red cells every day.
12 When we touch something, we send a message to our brain

at 124 mph
13 We exercise at least 30 muscles when we smile.
14 We are about 70 percent water.
15 We make one litre of saliva a day.
16 Our nose is our personal air-conditioning system: it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters impurities.
17 In one square inch of our hand we have nine feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat sensors and 75 pressure sensors.
18 We have copper, zinc, cobalt, calcium, manganese, phosphates, nickel and silicon in our bodies.
19 It is believed that the main purpose of eyebrows is to keep sweat out of the eyes.
20 A person can expect to breathe in about 40 pounds of dust over his/her lifetime.

21 There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human beings on the surface of the earth.
22 From the age of thirty, humans gradually begin to shrink in size.
23 Your body contains enough iron to make a spike strong enough to hold your weight.
24 The surface area of a human lung is equal to that of a tennis court.
25 Most people have lost fifty per cent of their taste buds by the time they reach the age of sixty.
26 The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill about 9,000 'lead' pencils.
27 One square inch of human skin contains 625 sweat glands.
28 When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.
29 The human body has less muscles in it than a caterpillar.
30 If you could save all the times your eyes blink in one life time and use them all at once you would see blackness for 1.2 years!
31 The life span of a taste bud is ten days.
32 It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
33 Give a tennis ball a good, hard squee ze. You're using about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood out to the body.
34 The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose.
35 Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
36 Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute.
37 The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime--that's enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.
38 Babies start dreaming even before they're born.
39 The human body can function without a brain

.
40 Humans are the only primates that don't have pigment in the palms of their hands.

41 10% of human dry weight comes from bacteria.
42 There is more bacteria in your mouth than the human population of the United States and Canada combined .
43 Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.
44 A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months
45 You sit on the biggest muscle in your body, the gluteus maximus a.k.a. the butt. Each of the two cheeky muscles tips the scales at about two pounds (not including the overlying fat layer).
46 The tiniest muscle, the stapedius of the middle ear , is just one-fifth of an inch long.
47 The average human head weighs about 10 pounds.
48 The average human brain weighs three pounds.
49 The DNA helix measures 80 billionths of an inch wide.
50 Your eyeballs are three and a half percent salt.
51 Head lice actually prefer to live on clean heads, not on dirty ones.
52 If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall and have a neck twice the length of a normal human's neck.
53 It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.
54 An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
55 Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
56 Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.
57 It only takes 7lbs of pressure to rip your ear off.
58 When you sneeze, all your bodily functions stop - even your heart.
59 Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks.
60 You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching T.V.

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