Category: Bihari

Jitan Ram Manjhi Threatens To Pull Out Of Opposition Alliance In Bihar.

Source – ndtv.com

PATNA: Disarray in the opposition Grand Alliance in Bihar again emerged on Friday when former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi’s fresh threat of pulling out of the five-party formation was rubbished by other coalition partners as his pressure tactics.

They expressed the view that the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) chief was merely trying to play hardball and would ultimately fall in line.

Mr Manjhi had announced at the meeting of his party’s national executive meeting in Bihar capital Patna Thursday night it will go it alone in Jharkhand where it has never contested an election so far and field its candidates in all the 243 assembly segments in Bihar when Vidhan Sabha polls were held next year.

The mercurial leader, however, was yet to make up his mind as to which seats to contest in Jharkhand where elections have been announced and polling would commence by the end of this month.

His announcement of fighting all the Bihar seats was in line with his repeated threats issued in the aftermath of the drubbing received by the grand alliance in the Lok Sabha polls.

HAM had lost all the five Lok Sabha seats it had contested, including Gaya which Mr Manjhi himself lost to a relative newcomer Vijay Manjhi of the JD(U).

Speculation is rife that after having gravitated to the grand alliance last year, when he quit the NDA and ended up clinching a legislative council berth for his son from the quota of the RJD the wily leader may be eyeing a return to the formation headed by the BJP which seems on the upswing in the state as well as the country.

However, Mr Manjhi firmly denied any plans to return to the NDA when asked by reporters on Friday.

NDA sources say that Mr Manjhi’s entry is likely to meet with stiff opposition from Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who heads the JD(U) and against whom the HAM president had revolted before floating his own outfit.

Besides, the LJP of Ram Vilas Paswan would also not like to share his political space with another Dalit leader.

Meanwhile, RJD national vice president Raghuvansh Prasad Singh dismissed Mr Manjhi’s latest outburst, saying “he is simply engaging in a bit of shadow boxing to enthuse his party’s rank and file.”

“He may be having some demands which are not being met. But that happens to all parties in a coalition. Once the process of campaign for Bihar assembly elections picks up, he is going to find no other abode except the grand alliance”.

The views were echoed by Congress Rajya Sabha member Akhilesh Prasad Singh, who hoped that his current foul mood notwithstanding, Mr Manjhi will be firmly with the grand alliance when the poll bugle is sounded in Bihar.

Interestingly, former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni whose support Mr Manjhi has been counting on since the recent by-polls, ended up at a press conference addressed jointly by leaders of the grand alliance and Left parties as a show of solidarity among forces opposed to the BJP-led coalition, which rules the Centre as well as the state.

The press conference was organized by RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha on Friday and Mr Manjhi took care to ensure no leader of his party attended the same.

However, RLSP national secretary general Madhaw Anand told PTI “we are not able to understand the grouse of Manjhi, who is a senior and respected leader. He seems to be impatient about things like the grand alliance chief ministerial candidate and the respective share of seats for each constituent. We can only urge him not to cause more damage to the Mahagathbandhan by haste,” Mr Anand said.

Mr Anand was hinting at Mr Manjhi having fielded his candidate from Nathnagar assembly segment where by-polls were held last month and which the RJD lost by a margin less than the number of votes secured by the HAM candidate.

Taking a cue from Mr Manjhi, Mr Sahni had also fielded his party’s candidate from Simri Bakhtiyarpur though it did not come in the way of the RJD wresting the seat from JD(U) by a comfortable margin.

Mr Manjhi’s defiant stance during elections had followed repeated attacks on RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav on whose inexperience he blamed the Lok Sabha debacle of grand alliance and threw his hat in the ring for being projected as the opposition coalitions cm candidate, much to the annoyance of Lalu Yadav’s party.

CARE’s Work In Bihar Shows Progress Is Possible Against The Toughest Problems.

Source – forbes.com

Where will you find CARE? Think of trouble spots around the world where there are humanitarian disasters tied to extreme poverty, conflict, hunger, or a lack of basic healthcare or education. CARE is on the ground in these places, addressing survival needs, running clinics, and helping individuals, families, and communities rebuild their lives.

CARE’s scope is truly global. In 2018, the organization reached 56 million needy people through 965 programs in 95 countries, in places such as Mali, Jordan, Bangladesh, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, India, the Dominican Republic, and Niger.

CARE didn’t start out as a huge global charity, though. Founded in 1945, CARE provided a way for Americans to send lifesaving food and supplies to survivors of World War II—“CARE packages.” Today, it responds to dozens of disasters each year, reaching nearly 12 million people through its emergency programs. The rest of CARE’s work is through longer-term engagements, such as its work in Bihar State, in northern India.

Bihar, with a population of more than 110 million people, is one of India’s poorest states—and has some of the country’s highest rates of infant and maternal mortality as well as childhood malnutrition. Since 2011, CARE has been working with the Bihar state government and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to address those problems and to increase immunization rates for mothers and children.

The results to date have been significant: The percentage of 1-year-olds with completed immunization schedules increased from 12% to 84% between 2005 and 2018; there were nearly 20,000 fewer newborn deaths in 2016 than in 2011; and the maternal mortality rate fell by nearly half, from 312 to 165 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births between 2005 and 2018. How? Some of CARE’s initiatives involved improving healthcare facilities, mentoring nurses, supporting local social workers and midwives, and tracking the care given to weak and low-weight newborns.

Wherever you find CARE, you’ll also find the impact of CARE’s donors, putting their dollars and euros to work buying food and medicine, paying teachers, and offsetting the million-and-one costs of providing relief on a truly global scale. Like all large NGOs, CARE needs to communicate with its donors, especially the largest foundations, providing timely reports, demonstrating compliance with grant terms and conditions, and displaying complete fiscal transparency. That’s part of their necessary overhead. For CARE, the cloud is helping it improve communications while reducing that overhead.

Lowering Back-Office Costs

In fiscal 2018, CARE’s total incoming support was $604 million, from sources including private donations, government funding, and other grants. CARE solicits donations from individuals through its website and direct mail, but a significant part of its finances come from governmental and foundation grants, explains Jared Janeczko, interim CIO.

“As an NGO we have many sources of funding, and all of those sources have different compliance requirements,” says Janeczko. “We’ve configured our software to adhere to those requirements, whether imposed by a donor government or foundation or the country in which we are operating.”

A particular donor might have restrictions that say its grant money may—or may not—be used only for specific purposes. CARE needs to show that the money was spent in accordance with those requirements. Similarly, the country where CARE is spending the money on expenses such as food, fuel, salaries, rent, or electricity, might charge certain taxes or insist on specific documentation.

This requires sophisticated accounting and business management software. For a number of years, CARE has used Oracle’s PeopleSoft to manage its operations and satisfy both donors and governments in host countries.

“At the end of the day, donors want to know that their donation is going to the beneficiary, so having a financial solution like PeopleSoft gives us that ability,” says Janeczko. “A grant manager uses PeopleSoft to run grant reports based on financial transactional data. We deliver those reports together with impact data to provide a comprehensive overview of our programs.”

Over the past year, CARE has migrated from instances of PeopleSoft running in its own private cloud to PeopleSoft running within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Janeczko sees two major benefits to the PeopleSoft migration to the cloud. The first is reduced operating costs. “Our focus is on delivering humanitarian aid. It’s not on supporting global systems. So the main motivation for us was to minimize costs,” he says.

The second improvement is that they’re always current on the latest version of PeopleSoft, as well as all of its patches and fixes. “We were so far behind with our PeopleSoft updates,” he grimaces. “As an organization, we weren’t able to keep up with the release cycle.” Now, PeopleSoft running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a fully managed service. “That frees up our IT team to focus on delivering internal customer support, supporting our country offices as well as our donor requirements.”

The PeopleSoft migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure proved a fast and painless lift and shift, with the system up after four days. “It was a nonevent from the end-user perspective,” Janeczko says.

The next process CARE’s IT team plans to simplify via the cloud is travel and expense reporting. “As a global organization we send people all over the world, yet we are still doing travel and expense reports in Excel spreadsheets—it’s a huge inefficiency,” Janeczko says. “It’s also functionality that we plan to deploy in PeopleSoft, now that we’re on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”

Time is money, and the less time spent running reports, the more resources become available for the children of Bihar, refugees, the poor, the displaced, the hungry—all over the world. Because if one thing is certain, CARE’s work won’t be finished anytime soon.

Share of Women in Subordinate Courts Highest in Telangana, Least in Bihar.

Source – news18.com

Telangana has the highest share of women judges at 44 per cent and Bihar the lowest at 11.5 per cent in subordinate courts, while seven states did not have a single woman judge in their high courts as of June 2018, according to a report.

The share of women in the judiciary has come down and despite wide acceptance of value of gender diversity, the actual presence of women in state judiciaries is underwhelming, the Tata Trusts’ India Justice Report-2019 stated.

It said that “among the large and mid-sized states, at just above 44 per cent, Telangana had the largest share of women in the subordinate courts, but at the high court level, this drops to a meagre 10 per cent.”

“Similarly, Punjab with 39 per cent at the subordinate level, (the share of women judges) drops down to 12 per cent in the high court,” it said.

“This pattern is apparent everywhere with only Tamil Nadu breaking the trend with a high number of women at the high court level (19.6 per cent), and more women than its quota of 35 per cent at the subordinate courts,” according to the report.

Data of 18 large and mid-sized states, and seven small states was taken for the Tata Trust report.

The share of women judges at subordinate courts in Meghalaya is 74 per cent and in Goa, 66 per cent the highest among small states.

“However, Goa’s share at the high court level was just 12.68 per cent. Sikkim demonstrates a high share of women at both levels, with 64.71 per cent in the high court and 33.33 per cent at the subordinate court level.

“In terms of absolute numbers, however, this would be one female judge of three, at the high court-level, and 11 female judges out of 17 at the level of subordinate courts,” the report said.

The ranking is an initiative of Tata Trusts in collaboration with Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, DAKSH, TISS- Prayas and Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

“The presence of women judges portrays the institution that upholds law and dispenses justice as an equal opportunity space driven by fair, meritocratic, and non-discriminatory practices and norms.

“Arguably, women on the bench also influence the quality of judicial decision-making, because the inclusion of their life experiences must necessarily allow a wider variety of human experiences into the process of judging,” the report said.

The country has about 18,200 judges with about 23 per cent sanctioned posts vacant, as per the findings of the report.

UP, Bihar at bottom of India’s justice league.

Source – indiatoday.in

Law and order has always been a major concern in the two big states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Despite claims of improvement over the years by respective state leaderships, a recent report by Tata Trusts has statistically proven that these two states have the worst justice system in India.

The study, titled India Justice Report’, which Tata Trusts published on Thursday, developed an index of justice system across the country using four parameters police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid. An assessment of 18 bigger states revealed that UP and Bihar have the worst justice system in India. While UP ranked at the bottom of the list, Bihar stood at number 17.

On the basis of these parameters, a score was allotted to each state on a scale of 10. None of the states had the perfect score. UP and Bihar got a score of 3.32 and 4.02 respectively. Following them from the bottom were Jharkhand (4.3), Uttarakhand (4.49), Rajasthan (4.52) and Andhra Pradesh (4.77).

The state with the best justice system according to the report is Maharashtra with a score of 5.92. It is followed by Kerala (5.85), Tamil Nadu (5.76), Punjab (5.53) and Haryana (5.53).

The average score of all the bigger states turned out to be 4.95, which means more than 50 per cent conditions to get a perfect score for the justice system have not been met. In fact, of the 18 big states surveyed, 11 had a score of above 5.

Collectively, the data paints a grim picture. It highlights that each individual sub-system is starved for budgets, manpower and infrastructure; no state is fully compliant with the standards it has set for itself. Governments are content to create ad hoc and patchwork remedies to cure deeply embedded systemic failures. Inevitably, the burden of all this falls on the public, the report says.

Why UP, Bihar rank at the bottom

A deeper look at the statistics reveals that in almost every aspect, UP and Bihar exchanged the last and second last position.

Policing

The study took several factors to assess the police system in the states, ranging from modernisation, inducing women, diversity, budgeting, human resource planning and infrastructure.

On this front, the best score was achieved by Tamil Nadu 6.49. UP received a score of 2.98, whereas Bihar got 3.77. UP fared poor in terms of budgeting, spending on police per person, vacancies and diversity.

Prisons

This parameter was assessed on various factors ranging from overcrowding, inclusion of women staff, adequate human resources, budgeting, infrastructure, etc.

Jharkhand fared the worst with a score of 3.46. It was followed by Uttarakhand (3.72), Punjab (4.35), Andhra Pradesh (4.35) and UP (4.42). Surprisingly, Bihar stood at number six with a score of 5.61. The best in this regard was Kerala with a score of 7.18.

Judiciary

This parameter was assessed on availability of judges, clearance of cases, spending on judiciary, etc.

Bihar, with a score of 2.41, fared the worst in this regard. It was followed by UP (3.7), Karnataka (3.76), Uttarakhand (4.17) and Jharkhand (4.3). Tamil Nadu again featured on the top in terms of judiciary with a score of 6.99. It was followed by Punjab (6.57), Haryana (6.23) and Maharashtra (5.96).

On an average, Bihar saw a bleak growth in expenditure on judiciary in comparison to total spending. From 2011 to 2016, the state expenditure rose by 17.8 per cent; however, expenditure on judiciary rose by only 8 per cent.

Legal aid

The report also highlighted the importance of legal aid. It said that almost 80 per cent of India’s 1.25-billion population is eligible for free legal aid, but only 15 million people have availed it since 1995.

Here too, the parameter was assessed on the basis of budgeting, human resources, diversity, infrastructure and work load. With a score of 2.5, UP fared worst, followed by Uttarakhand (4.46), Bihar (4.52) and Odisha (4.61).

In alert on Chhath Puja, Bihar district admn names Muslims.

Source – indianexpress.com

In an order to the local police and administration, Madhepura District Magistrate Navdeep Shukla has warned against attempts by “mischievous elements from Muslim community (to) cause tension” during the ongoing Chhath festival.

Frowning at the order, the state home department said it would look into the issue. “It was inadvertently phrased,” Additional Chief Secretary, Home, Amir Subhani, said. Bihar DGP Gupteshwar Pandey said the “tone of the order should have been changed”.

In the order, dated October 31, the district magistrate has said: “Water deposit in lanes through which Chhath Puja devotees cross, especially through Muslim settlements… overflowing drain water running through (these) roads causes tension. At times, dismantling of ghat structure because of the crowd also causes problems. Incidents of eve-teasing of relatives and acquaintances of devotees by mischievous elements from Muslim community cause tension. Passing objectionable remarks on Chhath devotees and their relatives causes law and order problems”.

The order also warns against “mischievous elements intending to disturb communal harmony by placing flesh or body parts of dead animals in ponds and rivers”. Citing incidents of communal tension during Dussehra and Muharram in Bihariganj area of the district in 2016, the district administration said special precautions were being taken this time.

When contacted, Shukla told The Sunday Express: “The order is based on Intelligence inputs. Other districts would have also issued such orders. Our idea is to avoid any breach of communal harmony”.

Asked why a particular community had been named, he said: “We put the Intelligence input the way it is. We cannot tone down the language. It is about issuing alerts to ensure that there is no law and order problem… Our goal is to maintain communal harmony”.

The district magistrate, in his order, has referred to an October 23 note from the office of the Additional Director General of Police (Special Branch) on security precautions to be taken during Chhath Puja. This note, however, was a general advisory and did not name any community.

“It will be looked into… I spoke to the DM. He said that it was inadvertently phrased like that. He has been suitably advised,” Bihar Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Amir Subhani said.

Bihar temple wall collapses during Chhath Puja celebrations, 3 dead, many feared trapped.

Source – indiatoday.in

Three people, including two women and one man, were killed and many injured after a temple wall collapsed in Bihar’s Samastipur during Chhath Puja celebrations on Sunday.

Several devotees have been feared trapped under the debris after the wall of Kali temple in Badgaon village of Hasanpur police station area collapsed.

A team of State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) is at the spot and rescue operation is underway.

Also, Rosera SDO and DSP are at the scene to probe the matter.

Officials feared that the death toll may go up as many may have been buried under the debris of the collapsed temple wall.

Meanwhile, a compensation of Rs 4 lakh by the government have been announced for the families of the deceased.

Earlier in a separate incident, two minors were killed in a stampede during Chhath puja celebrations in Suryanagari Dev area of the district on Saturday evening.

The deceased include a six-year-old boy from Patna’s Bihta and a 1.5 year-old-girl, resident of Sahar in Bhojpur. Some other devotees also sustained injuries in the incident during the incident.

Officials and security personnel deployed at the area immediately sprung to action to control the mob and prevent any further escalation of the unfortunate situation.

District Magistrate Rahul Ranjan Mahiwal and Superintendent of Police (SP) Deepak Barnwal also met with the kin of the deceased and expressed condolences.

The officers said they will ensure an ex-gratia to the family members and will make necessary arrangements to ensure that the incident does not recure.

Riding high on wins in recent polls, AIMIM seeks to expand in Bihar, Jharkhand.

Source – livemint.com

Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) has set its sights on the Bihar and Jharkhand assembly elections due next year, after winning the Kishanganj assembly seat in Bihar in the recent by-election.

The Hyderabad-based party lost Maharashtra’s Byculla and Aurangabad Central seats in the state assembly election partly because of its failure to sew a coalition with Prakash Ambedkar-led Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi. However, it won two new seats —Malegaon and Dhule City.

“Right now, we are focussed on building our organizational strength,” Adil Hassan, leader of AIMIM’s youth wing in Bihar, said over the phone. “We had 1.5 lakh members and that may go up to 5 lakh after the Kishanganj bypoll win this month, and our aim is to have 15 lakh members across Bihar by end of December. The voters in Seemanchal and other areas now have faith in Barrister (Owaisi), who has raised various issues of ours in the Parliament. Minority areas in Bihar are the most deprived for decades.”

In Maharashtra, the AIMIM contested 44 assembly seats and managed to win two, getting about 740,000 votes across the state. It was an increase from the 500,000 votes in the 2014 polls, where it contested 24 seats.

In Bihar’s Kishanganj, AIMIM’s Qamrul Hoda won with a margin of more than 10,000 votes over the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Sweety Singh. More interestingly, the Congress lost its deposit, getting just 25,825 votes, indicating a shift among Muslim voters. The seat falls under Seemanchal, one of the most backward areas in the state. If AIMIM manages to make deeper inroads, it might change the state’s political landscape, especially for the Congress, which gets a chunk of votes from Muslim voters.

Hassan did not say how many seats the AIMIM plans to contest in the Bihar state polls next year.

Another AIMIM leader based in Hyderabad, who did not want to be named, said that in the 2015 elections, the party had contested just six of the 24 seats in Seemanchal, and plans to contest more than six seats in the 2020 state polls, adding that a decision will be taken on the final tally later for both Bihar and Jharkhand. “We will be contesting in Jharkhand for the first time, and will also put up tribal candidates,” he added.

The AIMIM would have won a few more votes had its alliance with VBA (an alliance of Ambedkar’s Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh and other caste/community organizations) gone through. The VBA, which managed to get significant deposits in some of the 250-plus seats it contested like Aurangabad Central, however, did not win any seats.

The alliance between the VBA and the AIMIM broke in September, just a month before the Maharashtra assembly elections, as the former offered the AIMIM just eight out of the 288 seats. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the AIMIM had wrested the Aurangabad seat from the Shiv Sena, when the alliance between AIMIM and VBA was still intact. AIMIM’s Maharashtra head Imtiyaz Jaleel won the seat, and is the party’s only other parliamentarian apart from Owaisi.

“The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress would have won some more seats had the VBA and AIMIM not been in the fray. This very much goes much in line with what Owaisi said during the results of the 2019 general elections, that the myth of the Muslim vote bank has been broken. He said that if there is any vote bank, it is the Hindu vote bank (with the BJP),” said political analyst Palwai Raghavendra Reddy.

Reddy added that the results of the Maharashtra state polls and the Bihar bye-poll will only help Owaisi and the AIMIM expand across the country. “He will go ahead with his plans, and it is to be seen how the opposition and Congress will deal with that situation,” he opined.

Top NDA Leaders Campaign Together For Bihar By-Polls

Source: ndtv.com


PATNA: Top leaders of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Bihar have hit the campaign trail together for the upcoming by-polls, also called the “semi-finals” ahead of the assembly elections due next year.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who heads the JD(U), Union minister and LJP founding president Ram Vilas Paswan and Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi a BJP veteran on Thursday shared the stage at rallies in Duraunda and Kishanganj assembly segments and Samastipur Lok Sabha seat.

The itinerary seemed to highlight the coherence within the ruling coalition, with each constituent backing the others to the hilt.

This is in stark contrast to the five-party Grand Alliance which is riven by infighting and may end up posing a feeble challenge.

Duraunda is being contested by the JD(U) which has fielded Ajay Singh, husband of Kavita Singh whose election to the Lok Sabha from Siwan has necessitated the by-poll. Ajay Singhs mother Jagmata Devi had been the MLA from the seat until her death in 2011.

Kishanganj, a Muslim-dominated seat, is being fought by the BJP which has reposed its trust in the runner-up of 2015 assembly polls Sweety Singh who seeks to wrest the seat from the Congress which has fielded the septuagenarian mother of the previous winner Mohd Jawed, now representing the Lok Sabha seat of the same name.

Samastipur, a reserved seat, has fallen vacant upon the death of Ram Chandra Paswan, younger brother of the LJP chief who was serving his second term. The deceased leaders
son Prince is making his debut from the seat.

In addition to the three seats, by-polls are also scheduled in Belhar, Nathnagar and Simri Bakhtiyarpur all of which were won by the JD(U) in the assembly polls and have fallen vacant upon the incumbents getting elected to the Lok Sabha.

In Nathnaagar and Simri Bakhtiyarpur, Jitan Ram Manjhis Hindustani Awam Morcha and Mukesh Sahnis Vikassheel Insaan Party respectively have put up candidates despite candidates of the RJD which leads the opposition coalition being in the contest.

The Grand Alliance also includes the Congress and the RLSP which has not fielded its candidate in any of these constituencies.

Discord within the five-party formation was evident at the rallies with Manjhi and Sahni launching attacks on RJD heir apparent Tejashwi Yadav.

Yadav, on his part, remained conspicuous by his absence at a rally held in Samastipur where Congress candidate Ashok Kumar the runner-up of the last two elections, is once
again in the contest.

The RJD-Congress ties are nearly two decades old and Yadavs’ father Lalu Prasad has been known to be a trusted ally of AICC president Sonia Gandhi

Seat-sharing Woes, No CM Face: How Alienated Allies Have Brought Bihar’s Grand Alliance to Breaking Point

Source: news18.com

Bypolls often go unnoticed as their results do not matter much to the party in power or in opposition. They just add to or subtract from their tally in the state assembly or Lok Sabha.

However, next week’s by-elections for five assembly constituencies and a Lok Sabha seat in Bihar may turn out to be the breaking point for the so-called “mahagathbandhan”, or “grand alliance”. Recent unity efforts, after remaining at loggerheads for nearly five months, have failed as the parties could not arrive at a consensus on seat-sharing for the polls.

The by-elections will be held for the Samastipur Lok Sabha seat besides Belhar, Daraundha, Nathnagar, Simri-Bakhtiarpur and Kishanganj assembly seats on October 21 and the counting of votes will take place on October 24.

The bypoll for the Samastipur Lok Sabha seat was necessitated by the death of Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) MP Ramchandra Paswan. The five assembly seats are going to polls as four MLAs of the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), and one from the Congress were elected to the Lok Sabha this year.

After initial hiccups, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Congress have firmed up a seat-sharing arrangement, with the RJD contesting from four assembly constituencies and the Congress from one assembly and the lone Lok Sabha seat. RJD leaders defended the party’s decision, saying the four assembly seats were its “traditional strongholds” and that no ally would be able to take on their rivals in these areas.

Congress was divided over the issue of continuing the collaboration with the RJD and other grand alliance partners but the intervention of central leadership sealed the pact for the bypolls. Congress insiders claimed that altogether 19 state election committee members insisted on going it alone in the bypolls but nine of them strongly endorsed continuation of the alignment with the RJD.

The trouble started when the RJD unilaterally announced its candidates from the Belhar, Daraundha, Simri-Bakhtiarpur and Nathnagar assembly seats, leaving only Kishanganj for the Congress. The state Congress unit was also demanding the Simri-Bakhtiarpur seat but agreed to only one assembly seat following the intervention of the party’s central leadership.

The demands of three other grand alliance partners including the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) and Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) were ignored, prompting them to field their candidates against the official Rashtriya Janata Dal nominees.

Spurned by the RJD, former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi-led HAM has fielded Ajay Rai as its candidate from the Nathnagar seat while the VIP, headed by Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni, has put up its candidate from the Simri-Bakhtiarpur constituency. Sahni has also announced support to the HAM candidate in Nathnagar. The RLSP has not shown interest in the bypolls.

So, it will be RJD vs JD(U) on four assembly seats – Belhar, Simri-Bakhtiarpur, Nathnagar and Daraundha – while the BJP and Congress will cross swords on the Kishanganj seat. In the Samastipur Lok Sabha constituency, the Congress is challenging the LJP.

Angered by the “arbitrary act” of the RJD, Manjhi sought to know whether the party wanted to remain in the grand alliance or walk out. He went on to accuse the RJD of helping the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the name of fighting it. The former chief minister has been upset since not getting a “respectable” number of seats in the last Lok Sabha polls.

The HAM president also rejected RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav as the mahagathbandhan’s chief ministerial face for the 2020 state assembly elections. “Tejashwi may be the chief ministerial face of the RJD but not of the grand alliance for the 2020 polls. That will be decided after a discussion among the front’s leaders,” Manjhi said.

Backing the former chief minister, VIP chief Mukesh Sahni maintained that the grand alliance was formed not to project only one person as the leader. “Five parties have formed the grand alliance and nothing has been discussed as yet as to who will be the chief ministerial candidate,” he said.

Though RJD leaders claimed everything was hunky-dory within the mahagathbandhan, they flatly said there will be no compromise on Tejashwi as the chief ministerial candidate. “If the mahagathbandhan forms the government in Bihar, Tejashwi will be the chief minister as his name has been announced after consultation with the allies,” said RJD MLA Bhai Virendra.

Tejashwi Yadav wants the allies to hold their horses and ignore petty matters during the bypolls as the political equation may change before the high-stakes assembly elections in 2020.

However, a section of the allies led by HAM has alleged Tejashwi is acting at the behest of the BJP and attacking Nitish Kumar on one pretext or another. On the contrary, some senior RJD leaders led by former union minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh want to cosy up with Nitish given the blow-hot-blow-cold relationship between the BJP and JD(U).

Against this backdrop, questions are now being raised on whether the mahagathbandhan exists only on paper or it is still a reality as its constituents are making competing claims on the assembly seats where bypolls are scheduled after a week.

Separate medical university to be set up in Bihar

Source: hindustantimes.com

Bihar will have a separate full-fledged medical university to cater to all medical, nursing and paramedical courses.

Announcing this, deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi on Monday said the government was working in this direction and had constituted a four-member committee to explore possibilities to have an independent medical university.

He said the idea was to carve out medical education from the Aryabhatta Knowledge University (AKU), which currently mentors all technical and medical institutions, and to create a separate medical university, which will have under its ambit all medical, ayurvedic, unani, paramedical and nursing colleges. The AKU will then cater to only technical institutes like engineering colleges, added Modi.

Speaking at a function to mark the completion of first year of the Ayushman Bharat universal health scheme, he said Bihar should strive to improve its coverage, both in terms of treatment and issuance of e-golden cards to its beneficiaries.

He said Bihar would open 11 new medical colleges, which would wipe out the shortage of doctors in the next four-five years. At the same time, Modi was critical of the Congress, for opening only four medical colleges in undivided Bihar since independence during the nearly-65-years period it governed the country.

The deputy CM said the Centre was committed to opening 75 new medical colleges in India this year and asked the health minister to avail of the opportunity by giving 20 acre land and making a formal request on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Expressing concern over booming population, he also urged the health department to study the total fertility rate (TFR – child bearing capacity of a woman) pattern in West Bengal, where it was as low as 1.6, whereas the same was 3.2 in Bihar.

The TFR in other southern and western states like Tamil Nadu (1.6), Maharashtra and Karnataka (1.6 each) was also less, while those in Uttar Pradesh (3), Madhya Pradesh (2.7), Rajasthan (2.6), Jharkhand (2.5) and Assam (2.3) was higher.

Earlier, state health minister Mangal Pandey said the state had to achieve much more than what it had achieved in the first year under Ayushman Bharat. He expressed concern at the fact that only 147 private health facilities were empanelled under the scheme in Bihar against 18,000 private centres in the country.

Highlighting efforts to improve health services in the state, Pandey said the government would issue the tender this week for the ₹5,500-crore project to convert the existing 2,500-bed Patna Medical College Hospital into 5,400 beds over the next seven-eight years. He also said nine district hospitals would be upgraded and 22 others would get CT scan facility.

Earlier, state principal secretary, health, Sanjay Kumar said this would be a year of recruitment for the health department as it would recruit 2,425 doctors in addition to 4,000 general duty medical officers as also 9,130 grade A nurses to tide over the shortage of doctors and nurses.

Health secretary and chief executive officer of Bihar health authority, Lokesh Kumar Singh, gave a brief overview of the Ayushman Bharat scheme in the state.