Dehradun, March 6 (IANS) It was a close contest in Uttarakhand with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leading in 23 seats and the Congress close behind with 22 seats in trends available for 59 of the 70 assembly constituencies.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was third with six seats and the Samajwadi Party (SP) had yet to open its account.
Smaller parties bagged the remaining nine seats.
Dehradun, Feb 19 (IANS) Some spend a week, some a fortnight. And some like Germany’s Stephanie have spent more than 40 days away from their mainstream lives on an off-grid community farm in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand.
The farm is an attempt to demonstrate that an elementary way of leading one’s life could also give the happiness people search for in the materialistic world around them. Hari Pant and Richa, a father-daughter duo, call it the Himalayan Farm Project (HFP) in absence of a more appropriate name.
Promoting organic farming, HFP is a community farm in Raila village, some 200 km from this Uttarakhand capital, disconnected from cities and spread across five acres of land, isolated and situated at about 4,500 feet above sea level and has absolutely no electricity.
Still it is “heaven on earth’ for Pant, a 70-year-old retired brigadier, and those who visit it as volunteers from as far as Australia, Belgium, Croatia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Switzerland and the US.
The idea is to live a simple life, where you recycle and harness natural sustainable resources to build a world, grow your own food, and thereby reduce the carbon footprint.
Pant got the idea after returning from a six-month fellowship for studying agro-ecology and sustainable food systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So, he started looking for a farm near his family home in Bhimtal.
In June 2011, the father-daughter duo acquired the farm with some financial help from friends who supported them.
The farm had been abandoned by its earlier owner. “It took us a couple of months to restore what all was left there, like turmeric, ginger, potatoes, onions, garlic and mango and lychee trees,” Richa told IANS.
“People practised sustenance farming in mountains. They have small lands. So they grew a range of crops, i.e., from vegetables to pulses for family consumption. But, because people slowly began to find mixed farming insufficient to make ends meet, they shifted to mono agriculture.” explained Pant, who has been attached with the local community through his association with some NGOs in the region.
His experience had also formed the basis of why he decided to take up this project. “Mono farming ruined our food cycles. Farmers began to use pesticides and chemicals to increase the crop yield to sell more and compromised their healthy food for money.”
Another reason he gave for HFP is the increasing disconnect with nature among city dwellers. “They do not even know the source of their food. I want people to experience the joy growing one’s own food could give,” he says.
It is this reason which makes this project globally appealing. Elliot Mercier, a student from France, who learned about this project last August, explained: “In the West where I grew up, people tend to forget their essence and what life is all about. They search for happiness in buying a new car, a new house, a new dog – only to get rid of them a year later. It is sad to see that people don’t know what to do any more to be happy”.
So far, the volunteers (26 foreign and four Indian) who have visited the farm have successfully built up a walled compost toilet (which earlier had no wall) and a new and more spacious kitchen, apart from repairing and maintaining the existing shelter and farming area. All this despite being inexperienced in farming or building any structures.
“I know organic farming is not a profitable proposition and it is difficult for people to leave their existing lifestyles. All we are trying to tell people is that there can be an alternative, yet healthy and happy life” Pant told IANS.
(Shikha Nehra can be reached at shikhanehra92@gmail.com)
New Delhi/Dehradun, Feb 10 (IANS) A moderate earthquake measuring 5 on the Richter Scale jolted parts of Uttarakhand and neighbouring Himachal Pradesh shortly after midnight, an official from the Met department said Friday.
‘The epicentre was Uttarkashi district. The quake took place at 12.47 a.m. Friday,’ J.L. Gautam, director (operations) of seismology division of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) headquartered in the national capital, told IANS.
‘The area is under seismic zone 5, which makes the region prone to quakes,’ added Gautam.
Uttarkashi district is located in the northwest corner of the state.
While there were no reports of loss of life or property, tremors were also felt in parts of neighbouring Himachal Pradesh.
Earlier, Met department officials said the epicentre was Chamoli in Uttarakhand.
Dehradun, Jan 30 (IANS) Bright sunshine, and the consequent let up in the cold conditions, resulted in the highest turnout of voters in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, which recorded nearly 70 percent polling in the state assembly elections Monday.
“Nearly 70 percent of the state’s 63 lakh voters came out to cast their vote,” state chief electoral officer Radha Raturi told reporters.
“The Lok Sabha election in 2007 witnessed a turnout of 62 percent, while it stood at about 59 percent in 2002,” she said.
The weather gods were kind to the voters. In fact, the change in the weather became noticeable since Jan 26, when the first bright sun of the otherwise freezing winter season pierced out of the thick clouds and mist.
“But for improvement in the weather conditions, the voting would not have been as good,” admitted a senior government official.
The otherwise harsh winter had, earlier, become a serious cause of worry for all political parties. Even Chief Minister B.C. Khanduri had openly expressed his fears that this year’s unusually high snowfall would render several hilly areas inaccessible.
While the Election Commission is euphoric about the high turnout, it is seen as a bad signal for ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“Higher the turnout, worse for the BJP,” observed a senior political analyst, who preferred anonymity. “My reading about the people of this state is that they turn out in high numbers to vote essentially against the incumbent regime and there were several good reasons for a high anti-incumbency against the sitting BJP,” he added.
The BJP regime had taken much beating largely on account of the tremendous rise in corruption levels and poor governance during the chief ministership of Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank. While the BJP leadership tried to salvage things by replacing Nishank with a clean Maj Gen (Retd) B.C. Khanduri, it was rather late in the day, said an analyst.
Meanwhile, the Congress party pumped in all its resources and its star campaigners, including Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Shiela Dikshit and even Pranab Mukherjee, to assure the people of Uttarakhand that they were capable of providing better governance than the BJP.
Counting of votes is on March 6.
Delhi/Dehradun, Jan 30 (IANS) The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Monday slammed the government over the blacklisting of former ISRO chief G. Madhavan Nair and questioned the ‘silence’ of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi on the issue.
Talking to reporters in the national capital, party spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman said the prime minister should answer as he directly holds the charge of ISRO.
‘The prime minister needs to answer… What happened to the report of the high-level probe ordered by the prime minister,’ Sitharaman asked.
She also linked the issue with other corruption cases.
‘The Prime Minister’s Office has got a lot of things to answer especially on ISRO-Devas deal,’ she said.
‘The PMO has a lot of things to answer why Shunglu Committee has remained on paper. The PMO has to say why, in spite of briefing him, Raja is being questioned and not Mr Chidambaram. The PMO is remaining silent,’ Sitharaman added.
The party’s national spokesperson Tarun Vijay also accused the government of having lost its ‘grace to govern’.
‘The unsavoury controversy involving senior scientists from ISRO is seriously damaging the reputation of one of India’s best and highly respected institutions, of which the country has always been proud,’ Vijay said.
‘The ISRO controversy, blacklisting of top scientists who had given their best in terms of scientific achievement and then again sending signals to rethink on the decision, gives a clear signal that this government has lost all sense of balance and grace to govern the country,’ Vijay said.
Vijay also slammed the government and the defence ministry for its stand on the age row surrounding Army chief Gen. V.K. Singh.
‘The government has failed to uphold the constitutional principles of law, justice and fairness and is systematically ruining the institutions that have held the basic foundations of the constitution high,’ Vijay said.
Former ISRO chief G. Madhavan Nair and three other top scientists were blacklisted by the government for their alleged role in the $300 million (Rs.60 crore) spectrum deal between Antrix and the Bangalore-based Devas Multimedia Ltd in violation of rules, including competitive bidding through a global tender.
Antrix is the commercial arm of ISRO. Besides Nair, the other scientists indicted include former scientific secretary A. Bhaskarnarayana, ISRO’s former satellite centre director K.N. Shankara and former Antrix Corporation executive director K.R. Sridharamurthi.
Dehradun, Jan 30 (IANS) The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Monday slammed the union defence ministry for the blacklisting of ISRO and accused the government of having lost its “grace to govern”.
“The unsavoury controversy involving senior scientists from ISRO is seriously damaging the reputation of one of India’s best and highly respected institutions, of which the country has always been proud,” BJP’s national spokesperson Tarun Vijay said.
“The ISRO controversy, blacklisting of top scientists who had given their best in terms of scientific achievement and then again sending signals to rethink on the decision, gives a clear signal that this government has lost all sense of balance and grace to govern the country,” Vijay said.
Vijay also slammed the government and the defence ministry for its stand on the age row surrounding Army chief Gen. V.K. Singh.
“The government has failed to uphold the constitutional principles of law, justice and fairness and is systematically ruining the institutions that have held the basic foundations of the constitution high,” Vijay said.
ISRO chief G. Madhavan Nair and three other top scientists were blacklisted by the government for their alleged role in the $300 million (Rs.60 crore) spectrum deal between Antrix and the Bangalore-based Devas Multimedia Ltd in violation of rules, including competitive bidding through a global tender.
Antrix is the commercial arm of ISRO. Besides Nair, the other scientists indicted include former scientific secretary A. Bhaskarnarayana, ISRO’s former satellite centre director K.N. Shankara and former Antrix Corporation executive director K.R. Sridharamurthi.
