Delhi Confidential: Honour From Pak

Manohar Singh Gill, a former Agriculture Secretary of Punjab, is well known for introducing the popular “Apni Mandi” in Punjab.

In what could be a first in recent years, former Union minister and Chief Election Commissioner Manohar Singh Gill was last week conferred an honorary doctorate by Pakistan’s University of Agriculture, Faisalabad. Singh, a former Agriculture Secretary of Punjab, is well known for introducing the popular “Apni Mandi” in Punjab. He is currently a Congress MP in Rajya Sabha.

QUESTIONS COMING

India may be in for some uncomfortable moments at the SAARC health ministers’ summit that New Delhi will host on April 8. Coming on the heels of the controversial decision to postpone 85 per cent pictorial warnings on tobacco packets — a decision emulated by several others in the region including Nepal — India may have to field some queries from the visiting ministers.

PRIORITY DROP

With the modest health allocation in the 2015-16 Budget, prospects look bleak for the National Health Assurance Mission, so the handover of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana to the Health Ministry that was effected from April 1 is also a much more low-key affair. While earlier the ministry was planning to get a joint secretary exclusively for RSBY, now Joint Secretary Nikunj Dhall has been given its additional charge.

PECKING ORDER

By virtue of being the Water Resources Minister, Uma Bharti is the vice-chairperson of the National Ganga River Basin Authority, which is headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But in a body that also has senior ministers Arun Jaitley, M Venkaiah Nadu and Nitin Gadkari as members, she clearly cannot be the number two. The seating arrangement establishes that. At the recent meeting of the NGRBA those sitting on either side of the Prime Minister were Jaitley and Naidu, the two senior most ministers in the Authority. Bharti’s seat came only after that. Incidentally, at the previous meeting of NGRBA, at which Modi was not present, Bharti had acted as the chairperson. While Naidu and Gadkari had attended that meeting, Jaitley had not.

THE MYSTERY

The case of derailment of the Dehradun-Varanasi Janata Express that killed more than 30 people and injured 150 last month has turned into something of a whodunit. Both Railways and Commissioner of Railway Safety are yet to figure out what caused it. The CRS even did a whole day trial run on the same stretch with the remains of the rolling stock in a bid to simulate what might have happened. This is apart from speaking to all the witnesses of the accident. The theory that there might have been an equipment malfunction is gaining ground but no one’s sure how that could have happened. The pressure to solve the mystery is not ignorable considering it’s the highest death toll in a train accident during this government’s tenure.

Source:: Indian Express