The Election Commission on Monday refused permission to the women and child development ministry to notify appointments of four members to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, reports Chetan Chauhan.
The Election Commission on Monday refused permission to the women and child development ministry to notify appointments of four members to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. The Prime Minister’s Office had cleared the names last Monday, the day elections were called.
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The Hindustan Times wrote on Monday that the ministry was keen to see the appointments through but its officiating secretary, K M. Acharya, had sought poll panel’s permission to notify the appointments.
In a communiqué to the ministry, the poll panel said the appointments could only be made after the election process was over. The decision was made after the three election commissioners returned from a three-day tour of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The poll panel also refused permission to appoint a Karnataka Congress worker as a National Commission for Women member in place of Nirmala Venkatesh, who was sacked last month after she took on Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhury over the Mangalore pub violence. Venkatesh has since joined the BJP.
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Taking note of a representation sent to it by the Panthers Party, the poll panel told the Indian Oil Corporation chairperson to stop the process of allotment of new pumps to the applicants from the scheduled castes and to the families of Kargil martyrs.
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Taking note of a representation sent to it by the Panthers Party, the poll panel told the Indian Oil Corporation chairperson to stop the process of allotment of new pumps to the applicants from the scheduled castes and to the families of Kargil martyrs.
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The government’s plan to allot petrol pumps after the polls had been called a violation of the conduct code, Sanjoy Sachdeva, president of the Delhi Pradesh Panthers Party, said.
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.
