Posts Tagged ‘Agartala’
Written by admin on 23 April 2012
Agartala, April 23 (IANS) Tripura will launch a disaster management programme in its schools to enhance the state’s preparedness in an event of a natural calamity striking it, an official said here Monday.
“The government has launched an ambitious School Disaster Management Planning (SDMP) project from this academic session. Under it, teachers and students will be trained to deal with any natural disaster, including earthquake,” state education department joint director Dilip Debbarma told IANS.
“The project will cover all the 4,465 schools across the mountainous state,” he added.
According to Debbarma, the first phase of the disaster management training project will cover the teachers and subsequently it will be extended to the students.
The education department has sanctioned a fund of Rs.250,000 for this academic session to launch the programme in all schools up to Class 12.
Debbarma said that the district magistrates, sub-divisional magistrates and district education officials will supervise the project in areas under their jurisdiction.
Education ministers of eight northeastern states last year submitted an eight-point resolution to the union human resource development ministry, highlighting the vulnerability of a large number of schools in the region in case of a natural disaster hitting the region.
“Thousands of school buildings, constructed more than 50 to 100 years ago, are not safe to sustain high seismic tremors,” said an education department official.
The Geological Survey of India had earlier notified that the northeastern region could experience a devastating earthquake as it falls in the sixth highest earthquake prone regions of the world.
Tags: Agartala
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Written by admin on 22 April 2012
Agartala, April 22 (IANS) To deal with the huge backlog of pending cases related to land, revenue and insurance, the Tripura government held Lok Adalats and resolved 640 of the 800 cases, an official said here Sunday.
“To dispose of pending cases, four courts of ‘Revenue Lok Adalat’ and five courts of ‘Lok Adalat’ were simultaneously held at the offices of West Tripura district magistrate and collector Saturday,” Revenue Secretary Swapan Saha told IANS.
“Of the 800 pending cases, 80 percent were settled in these two adalats. Both the litigants, petitioners and the authorities were happy about the quick settlement of cases,” he said.
It was for the first time that such adalats were held in the northeastern region, he said.
Tags: Agartala
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Written by admin on 22 April 2012
Agartala, April 22 (IANS) Timely vaccination of birds and animals, access to standard laboratories and maintaining bio-security are among the measures required to curb the sporadic outbreak of bird flu in India’s northeast, says a team of international and Indian experts touring the region.
Experts of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and India, who are on a five-day visit to Tripura to probe the causes of frequent bird flu outbreaks, have asked the northeastern states to maintain stipulated protocols to stop the contagious disease from resurfacing.
“The FAO and Indian experts have also suggested reaching out to common people with scientific methods of protection of poultry farms, birds, ducks and poultry products,” Tripura’s animal resources development secretary Swapan Saha told IANS.
He said the state government had decided to hold at least 1,000 awareness camps across the state.
Saha said the team, which is likely to visit Assam, Meghalaya and other northeastern states too, would soon submit a detailed report to the central government.
Apart from maintenance of bio-security, the suggested protocols include timely vaccination for birds and animals, close coordination between lab and land and access to standard laboratories.
The five-member team comprises FAO’s Emergency Centre for Trans-boundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD) national project coordinator A.B. Negi, ECTAD’s chief technical adviser John Weaver, ECTAD national consultant Madhur S. Dhingra, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) project director H. Rahman and senior scientist of Bhopal-based High Security Animal Disease Laboratory (HSADL) Chakradhar Tosh.
The northeastern states, bordering China, Myanmar, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal, are occasionally hit by avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu, affecting the poultry industry.
“Sporadic outbreak of bird flu has been badly affecting the poultry industry in the northeastern states,” animal resources development department director Manoranjan Sarkar told IANS.
Four northeastern states – Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Assam – share a 1,880-km border with bird flu-hit Bangladesh, where the contagious disease is rampant in many districts.
Even though India declared itself bird flu-free in December last year, Tripura and Meghalaya witnessed outbreaks of the disease in January.
Bird flu influenza recently resurfaced in the government-owned Gandhigram Poultry Farm in western Tripura after one and a half months, forcing the authorities to cull thousands of poultry birds, ducks and poultry products in the farm and in the adjacent four villages in a three-kilometre radius.
The authorities in Meghalaya’s East Garo Hills district had culled 6,538 birds, while 9,157 eggs and more than 800 kg of feed were destroyed at Williamnagar and adjoining villages late January.
The disease also erupted in various districts of eastern, western and southern Assam last year and earlier this year.
Tripura had been affected by avian influenza since in April-May 2008, forcing the authorities to cull over 250,000 poultry birds and ducks since then.
According to an FAO report, the influenza A (H5N1) virus is very contagious among birds and carries a high mortality rate. In addition, if an outbreak occurs, many healthy birds risk being culled to prevent the spread of the disease.
“As of mid-2006, it is widely estimated that at least 200 million domestic birds (out of a total world population of 10 billion) have either died or been culled as a result of H5N1,” the report said.
The report said FAO recently launched projects in four Asian countries, including India, to step up defences against avian influenza by moving the focus beyond domestic poultry to addressing threats posed by the mingling of humans, wild animals and livestock and the potentially devastating influenza viruses they share.
(Sujit Chakraborty can be contacted at sujit.c@ians.in)
Tags: Agartala, Tripura
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Written by admin on 21 April 2012
Agartala, April 21 (IANS) Three-time legislator Sudip Roy Barman has been named the chief of the Congress’s Tripura state unit, sources said here Saturday. The new leader immediately vowed to oust the ruling Left Front from power.
“This is an enormous task that was bestowed on me. The responsibility to lead the party in the Left ruled state became all the more important because the state would go to the crucial assembly polls next year,” Barman, an engineer-turned-politician, said.
Barman, 46, replaces former minister Surajit Datta as the president of the Tripura Pradesh Congress. Datta is a member of the Tripura legislative assembly. The announcement was made by the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in New Delhi.
“An AICC communique was issued in New Delhi Friday night by party general secretary Janardhan Trivedi appointing Barman as the president of the Tripura party,” a Congress spokesman told reporters.
Barman was elected to the state assembly thrice and also headed the party’s youth wing for several years.
Barman said: “My top priority would be to unite all the leaders and party factions and go all out to oust the Communist Party of India-Marxist-led Left Front from the helm of affairs.”
Tags: Agartala, Tripura
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Written by admin on 20 April 2012
Agartala, April 20 (IANS) A quarrel over family matters led two youths to axe their father to death in Tripura, police said here Friday.
“Following a squabble on family affairs, two youths aged 22 and 24 hit their father Mani Goswai Jamatia, 42, with an axe. He died on the spot at Killa in southern Tripura Thursday night,” Inspector General of Police (police control) Nepal Das told reporters.
The tribal-dominated village of Killa is 150 km south of Tripura’s capital Agartala.
Das said that one of Mani Goswai’s sons, Mangal Dayal Jamatia, was injured in the fight and has been admitted to a government hospital while another, Ananda Kumar Jamatia, ran away.
Tags: Agartala
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Written by admin on 19 April 2012
Agartala, April 19 (IANS) A prompt response from fire service personnel averted a major disaster here after they successfully contained an Ammonia gas leak from a local cold storage, officials said here Thursday.
The gas leak started abruptly Wednesday night and triggered panic among people residing near the cold storage who then informed the Fire department, a fire official told reporters. The leakage was temporarily sealed off soon after with the help of cold storage workers.
“Experts from Kolkata will arrive here soon to permanently cap the gas leakage from the cold storage in the congested capital city,” the official said.
Fire service director general Kuldip Kumar and senior officials from the state pollution control board have visited the area and asked the owner to seal off the storeroom of the cold storage.
“There is no cause for concern at the moment. Our officials are keeping a close watch on the situation,” Tripura Pollution Control Board chairman Mihir Deb told IANS.
Tags: Agartala
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