At a time when there is widespread condemnation of the going-ons in Nandigram over the last few days, there is a High Court direction to the West Bengal Government over the police firing on March 14th. That police firing was a widely condemned incident, and led to shockwaves through the country. The Left Front of course does not approve of anybody condemning any action of theirs, and so it was then. The Left Front claimed that this action was necessary to ensure the rule of law (sounds very familiar to the current series of incidents where the CPM sent in its goons to take control of the Nandigram area back to the hands of the CPM); and that is a normal policy of the Left. They claim to be conscience keepers of the nation, and are always ready to criticize the actions of others, but are totally unwilling to tolerate anybody else commenting on things they may have done.
In the incident of March 14th, a judicial line was breached that has not been breached before. Normally a CBI enquiry has to happen with the consent of the State Government, but in this case, the High Court ordered the CBI to start an enquiry; there was no way that the CPM would have ever agreed to such an enquiry (such enquiries only happen in other states and with other parties). Now, the High Court has given a further direction to the CBI for investigation and also ordered the State Government to pay compensation for an unjustifiable police action:
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From time to time, we come across cases where an insurance company will deny medical insurance to a person desperately needing the insurance; and why do they do so ? Well, obviously for an insurance company, the less claims that they can pay out, the more their profits. And in the case of medical insurance, using an excuse such as diabetes or hyper-tension gives an easy way to avoid making the insurance payment. If the concerned patient has either of these 2 modern diseases (that are very prevalent), then the insurance company can claim that these are pre-existing diseases and hence the claim can be rejected. This gambit must have succeeded in a number of cases, till this gentleman filed a case in the consumer forum against the insurance company and the consumer court rejected the contention of the insurance company:
The National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission has ruled that the claim for a particular ailment cannot be rejected merely because the insured person is suffering from some other disease, say for instance, diabetes. Diabetes and hypertension are two of the standard dodges used by insurance companies to reject claims.
Say you are dis-satisfied with your current mobile provider, and would really like to change to another telecom operator who has a better plan, or a better coverage where you live / work, or your current operator is hopeless at customer relations; but you find that changing your number would be a big hassle because of the fact that your number would change and that is a pain. Telling assorted friends and family about your changed number could be a big problem and a lot of effort and frankly, you continue to live with your current operator because of this headache of number changing.
For some time now, there has been talk in the air about bringing number portability into India. This is a global concept where once you have a phone number in a country, you can retain the number even when you change your operator. Once operators know that you can retain your number and yet change the telecom provider, they tend to be more customer friendly, avoiding excess charges and making sure that they present their best foot to customers. This is one reason why telecom operators in India have been resisting such a measure since they know it would force them to be more customer-friendly. But now it looks like India will get the number portability system next year: