Goa has been going through a period of turmoil for many years now. Given that there are only 40 members in the assembly, and the 2 competing blocs of the Congress and BJP are not far away in terms of distribution of seats, there is the potential for a lot of horse-trading and governments getting over-turned. In the past, the Governor and the speaker would play key roles in fashioning a government as per their political affiliations. However, with the courts and the media getting more attentive on issues of horse-trading and bias shown by the speakers and the governor, the incidence of such misuse had decreased.
Well, no longer, since the current situation on Goa has turned all these beliefs upside down. In a test ordered by the Governor as the first business of the day, the speaker in an interim order disqualified 3 members from voting and with this change, the Congress managed to retain victory. Now, there was a hope that the Congress will provide a stable administration, but those hopes flew out of the window when 3 members moved out of the Congress side. But this action by the speaker on behalf of the Congress has just made things worse. This issue will be sure to go the courts for further decision-making:
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Sometimes the Indian legal system does things which make you wonder. Over the last few years, there have been a series of judgments that have changed the concept of age of marriage and age of consent of sex. My generic understanding, and I would think that of the public is the following:
A female cannot get married until the age of 18, and a male cannot get married until the age of 21. Linked, and yet somewhat separate is the age of consent for having willing sex, which is 18 for both. So a boy of 19 can have a sexual relationship and not yet get married. The corollary to that is the age restrictions, which is that a boy or girl under the age of 18 is considered to be not of the age of consent, and hence not qualified to agree to sex. Put another way, if a boy or girl under the age of 18 has sex, then the law would believe that even if they had agreed, because it is considered that such agreement could have been under an influence and hence invalid, a rape has occurred.
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After the Domestic Violence Law was enacted, there was immense controversy about whether the law would help save the fate of innumerable women who face dowry claims, who face abuse in their households over whether they they give birth to male children vs. female children, and about their overall status in the household. Sadly, a lot of this abuse is also directed at them from other females in the household; or whether the law would end up being misused. No clear answers, but 2 separate stories. As an example, read this article:
It is a horror story of sorts. Two Vadodara women, who could not bear the macabre torture meted out to them by their husband for not bearing a son, have escaped to Ahmedabad to get their gut-wrenching tale heard and dealt with.
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In a far-reaching judgment that threatens the nature of banks to give out loans to people with a high risk, and then when a high number of such loans fail, use force to recover the money, the Supreme Court came out and said that all banks need to use the process of law to recover non-paid loans and cannot use musclemen or other force to recover the loans.
In the case of a lady who was unable to pay some months of her EMI for a Tata Indica car and who was negotiating with the bank, ABN Amro, the bank sent over some people who took possession of the car by force and sold the car. The lady then applied to a consumer court which awarded her damages.
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For some time now, people and organizations working to promote the use of RTI as an instrument to bring the babudom in check have been advocating the use of RTI by people in a more wide spread way. Frequent use of RTI for ferreting out information, along with penalizing officials for failure to carry out their duties is the only way to sensitize the bureaucracy towards their responsibilities.
The best way to do is to keep on bringing out success stories of the use of RTI, thus making sure that more and more people feel that they can also use this act if they are struck with something in government and they are getting the run-around or not getting satisfactory movement.
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India has the distinction of probably having the largest backlog of cases in the judicial system. This backlog contributes to a common perception that using the legal system is a waste of time, people avoid the legal system and curse their luck if they get stuck in a case. Common perception is that there are innumerable delays with easy adjournments, that it could take a decade to clear a case. This is also the reason why people would do anything to avoid getting stuck in a case, including all means of corruption, of using muscle power, and so on.
The judiciary as well as prominent legal experts have been highlighting for some time that there are essentially 2-3 reasons for this huge number of cases;
- The Government is a ligitator in a large number of cases and does not try to do anything to clear this backlog or withdraw the frivolous cases
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I was reading this article in the TOI today, and I read this article about a man being convicted of rape. Now rape is a very serious crime, and especially in Indian society where a girl’s rape means that she suffers grave dishonour (inflicted by society) in addition to the attack on her self-respect and confidence. And rape is also seen as the subjugation of a women. It is a matter of such great shame that it is hidden many times with the lady left to deal with the emotional trauma on her own. The number of reported rapes per year are in the tens of thousands, and needs to be controlled. So I read the story as a case of a person having committed this attack being punished. Then as I read further on, things started getting troubling:
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Goa has become the latest state to show the classic symptoms of horse-trading. With a total assembly size of 40, it has always been susceptible to horse-trading; after all, with the past election resulting in the parties being separated by only around 4 seats, it is always on the cards that things would change and with the switch of just 3-4 people, the Government in power will totally change, and this is what has happened.
So, in the latest from there, the Congress led Government lost the support of an ally and its sole women member, and automatically the BJP led opposition is now all set to form the Government. This is not a positive trend. Such Governments are inherently unstable, and hence unable to have the focus on good administration. As long as elections are not threatened, the Government does not care for good policies, all they want is to ensure that legislators are kept in good humour, else they land up in situations similar to this one:
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The Indian Railways has shown a major turnaround in the recent past, with having turned around from having huge losses to starting to show profit. Given the size of the Indian railways, the turnaround is a big plus for the finances of the Indian Government, and has lead to a tremendous positive news for the Railways Minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav, especially after his Government in Bihar and then the Government run by his wife dragged Bihar down into the depths of bad rule and non-development.
Because of the way that Indian Railways is designed in the country, (similar for most countries with some sort of rail systems, especially one that goes to every nook and corner of the country), rail tracks run throughout the breadth and width of the country. In India especially, given the history of the rail system development where the Railways is more than 150 years old, the Railways runs through a large variety of urban and rural areas. These intersect with major and minor roads.
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This is a mess that is entirely of its own making. Everybody knows that the transport situation in Delhi has been a problem, and given the way that the Capital’s population is growing, things are only going to get worse unless some radical steps are taken. And the answer from Delhi’s popular Chief Minister, Shiela Dixit over the years? The Government has systematically crippled the Delhi Transport Corporation, letting its bus service deteriorate and basically formulating policies that have let private operators take the lead in running buses on the street.
It is only for the past 1-2 months that this entire mess of Blueline buses has taken hold, but even before that, they and their predecessor, the Redline buses, were known as killer buses. The Government is supposed to be a regulator, and if you take a simple instance of speed governors on these private buses, a special drive had to be launched to make sure that these buses had speed governors installed. Is it not that these buses need to be periodically inspected for safety and for compliance with rules, or is it that the Government looks the other way while the inspectors make money from the bus owners in return for giving them a pass certificate.
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