Cabinet to approve Rs. 4000 cr to fight Encephalitis

A Cabinet committee tomorrow is expected to approve Rs. 4000 crore assistance plan to states to fight Japanese Encephalitis, which has claimed around 400 live in western Uttar Pradesh, Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Oct 10, 2012, 21:17:09 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Central government will provide financial assistance to states to fight Japanese Encephalitis, which has already claimed around 1,000 lives, including 400 in western Uttar Pradesh alone.

A Cabinet committee on Thursday is expected to approve Rs 4,000 crore assistance plan which includes Rs 2,000 crore for providing safe drinking water and sanitation and Rs. 1,300 crore to other ministries.

The plan includes funding for expanding the encephalitis vaccination programme to 62 districts, setting up special Intensive Care Units for the patients and capacity building at the district and the state level.

As per the Cabinet note circulated by the Health Ministry, the Central government will also provide funds for rehabilitation of the victims and improving their nutrition levels to fight the disease which has repeatedly hit several districts in western Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

A group of ministers had recommended a set of measures to check spread of the dreaded disease.

There are said to be 116 districts endemic to encephalitis. According to official records, about 4482 cases and 774 deaths due to acute encephalitis syndrome and Japanese encephalitis was reported in 2009.

The number was 5149 cases and 677 deaths in 15 states in 2010, which increased to around 6,000 cases and 700 deaths in 2011. In 2012, around 400 deaths have been reported till early October.

The Cabinet is also expected to consider amendments to Indecent Representation of Women Act to include cyber space, multi-media messaging and television under its ambit and impose hefty fines for any violation.

The women and child development ministry has proposed that indecent representation of women through any other medium such as print, audio, visual including ads would also be punishable with a fine of Rs. 50,000 and a three-year jail term.

The proposed amendments have not only widened the scope of the existing legislation to include indecent portrayal of women through newer forms of communication but have also substantially enhanced the penalties for violation of the Act, a cognizable offence.

The original Act, enacted in 1986 relates primarily to the print media and prohibited indecent portrayal of women through ads, publication, writing and painting.

The proposed amendments have enhanced the punishment for the first offence with a fine of Rs. 50,000 and jail term of three years.

For subsequent offence the proposed fine has been fixed at Rs. 1 lakh. In the existing Act, the fine was a mere Rs. 2,000 for the first offence and two-year jail term.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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