Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM) -INFORMATION

Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM) is a massive city-modernisation scheme launched by the Government of India under Ministry of Urban Development. 

It envisages a total investment of over $20 billion over seven years. Named after Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, the scheme was officially inaugurated by prime minister Manmohan Singh on 3 December 2005 as a programme meant to improve the quality of life and infrastructure in the cities. It was launched in 2005 for a seven-year period (up to March 2012) to encourage cities to initiate steps for bringing phased improvements in their civic service levels. The government has extended the tenure of the mission for two years, i.e., from April 2012 to March 31, 2014.

JnNURM is a huge mission which relates primarily to development in the context of urban conglomerates focusing to the Indian cities. JnNURM aims at creating ‘economically productive, efficient, equitable and responsive Cities’ by a strategy of upgrading the social and economic infrastructure in cities, provision of Basic Services to Urban Poor (BSUP)^[2] and wide-ranging urban sector reforms to strengthen municipal governance in accordance with the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992.

JnNURM is a unique project dedicated to the redevelopment of India's cities, as India has traditionally primarily focused on the development of rural areas, especially its underdeveloped villages.

As per the 2011 census, India is home to about 1.21 billion people, making it one of the most densely populated areas of the world. However, it was also estimated that 68.9% of India's population lies in rural areas. Urban India is fast growing but sometimes in unplanned ways.

India is benchmarked to be the next superpower that held a steady growth rate during the recent recession. But unplanned growth has taken a toll on urban India, especially due to problems in the rural agricultural sector. The rising population due to migration from rural to urban areas and other factors have contributed to the increase of slums and degradation of cities due to lack of planning.

Inadequate infrastructure, rising population rates as well as rising urban poverty are major causes to the degradation of the cities. Hence, the government of India has taken up the initiative to redevelop urban towns and cities by developing infrastructure, municipal reforms and providing aid to the state governments and the urban local bodies (ULBs). As per the information in the JnNURM mission brochure as launched by the authorities, cities and towns account for 30 percent of the country's population, contributing 50–55 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). The degrading conditions in cities have forced the government to rethink their strategies to adhere to the socio-economic objectives of the country.

Objectives

• Focused attention relating to infrastructural services in the context of integrated development is to be covered under the mission.
• Make efficient and increase self-sustaining capabilities of cities as per the sector proving infrastructural services by securing the linkages between asset creation and asset management
• Ensure adequate investment of funds to fulfill deficiencies in the urban infrastructural services.
• Planned development of identified cities including peri-urban areas, out growths, urban corridors, so that urbanization takes place in a dispersed manner.
• Scale up delivery of civic amenities and provision of utilities with emphasis on universal access to urban poor.
• To take up urban renewal programme, i.e., re-development of inner (old) cities area to reduce congestion

  Sub-missions

  JnNURM primarily incorporates two sub-missions into its program:
  • The Sub-Mission for Urban Infrastructure and Governance administered by the Ministry of Urban Development, with a focus on water supply and sanitation, solid waste management, road network, urban transport and redevelopment of old city areas.
  • The Sub-Mission for Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP)administered by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation with a focus on integrated development of slums.
  In addition to this, it has two further components:
  • The Sub-Mission for Urban Infrastructure Development of Small & Medium Towns (UIDSSMT) administered by the Ministry of Urban Development, with a focus on subsuming the schemes of Integrated Development of Small and Medium Towns (IDSMT) and Accelerated Urban Water Supply Programme (AUWSP) which aim at planned urban infrastructural improvement in towns and cities under its purview.
  • The Sub-Mission for Integrated Housing and Slum Development Programme (IHSDP) administered by Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (MHUPA) was envisaged and brought into effect in 1993–94 in accordance with providing the entire population with safe and adequate water supply facilities. 
  • The program is mainly implemented in towns with populations less than 20,000 as per the 1991 census.ACities/UAs with 4 million plus population as per 2001 census07BCities/UAs with 1 million plus but less than 4 million population as per 2001 census28CSelected cities/UAs (state capitals and other cities/UAs of religious/historic and touristic importance)28

Samveg IAS

53 p.c. of Indian households defecate in open: World Bank
As World Toilet Day was marked on Tuesday, India’s sanitation and toilet statistics continue to raise a stink. The World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimate that there are more than 620 million people practising open defecation in the country; over 50 per cent of the population.

Moreover, the latest Census data reveals that the percentage of households having access to television and telephones in rural India exceeds the percentage of households with access to toilet facilities. The economic impact of inadequate sanitation is about Rs. 2.4 trillion ($38.4 million), or 6.4 percent of India’s gross domestic product, according to the Water and Sanitation Programme.

According to a World Bank Report, released on Monday, access to improved sanitation can increase cognition among children. Further, Indian households defecating in the open, absence of toilet or latrine is one of the important contributors to malnutrition.

“Our research showed that six-year-olds, who had been exposed to India’s sanitation programme during their first year of life, were more likely to recognise letters and simple numbers on learning tests than those who were not,” said Dean Spears, lead author of the paper ‘Effects of Early - Life Exposure to Sanitation on Childhood Cognitive Skills.’

The paper studies the effects on childhood cognitive achievement of early life exposure to India’s Total Sanitation Campaign, a national scale government programme that encouraged local governments to build and promote use of inexpensive pit latrines.

“This is important news - the study suggests that low-cost rural sanitation strategies such as India’s Total Sanitation Campaign can support children’s cognitive development,” Ms. Spears said.

Threat to human capital

The results also suggest that open defecation is an important threat to human capital of developing countries and that a program accessible to countries where sanitation development capacity is lower could improve average cognitive skills.

According to UNICEF, hand washing with soap particularly after contact with excreta, can reduce diarrhoeal diseases by over 40 per cent and respiratory infections by 30 per cent. Diarrhoea and respiratory infections are the number one cause for child deaths in India.

With 638 million people defecating in the open and 44 per cent mothers disposing their children’s faeces in the open, there is a very high risk of microbial contamination (bacteria, viruses, amoeba) of water which causes diarrhoea in children.

Children weakened by frequent diarrhoea episodes are more vulnerable to malnutrition and opportunistic infections such as pneumonia. About 48 per cent of children are suffering from some degree of malnutrition.

According to Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, government’s programme to solve ‘toilet crisis’ in India, by 2017 the country will be declared as free from open defecation.

Frederick Sanger, double Nobel winner, dies at 95

Frederick Sanger, double Nobel winner, dies at 95


British biochemist Frederick Sanger, who twice won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and was a pioneer of genome sequencing, has died at the age of 95.

The laboratory praised Sanger, who died in his sleep Tuesday at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, as an “extremely modest and self—effacing man whose contributions have made an extraordinary impact on molecular biology.”

Sanger was one of just four individuals to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes; the others being Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, called Sanger “the father of the genomic era.”

Sanger first won the Nobel Prize in 1958 at the age of 40 for his work on the structure of proteins. He had determined the sequence of the amino acids in insulin and showed how they are linked together.

That work led to Sanger’s second Nobel Prize, awarded jointly in 1980 with Stanford University’s Paul Berg and Harvard University’s Walter Gilbert, for their work determining base sequences in nucleic acids.

Venki Ramakrishnan, deputy director of the MRC Laboratory, said it would be “impossible to overestimate the impact” Sanger had on modern genetics and molecular biology.

Sanger was born on Aug. 13, 1918, in Gloucestershire, southwestern England. While he initially planned to study medicine like his father, he switched fields and earned a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University 1939. A conscientious objector in World War II, he went on to earn a PhD working on protein metabolism from the same university.

In addition to the Nobel Prizes, Sanger was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1954, Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1963 and the Order of Merit in 1986.

Sanger declined a knighthood, however, because he preferred not to be called “sir,” according to the laboratory he helped found.

According to The Sanger Institute, when he was asked if he would mind an institute being named after him, Sanger agreed but said “It had better be good.”

Sanger is survived by three children Robin, Peter and Sally.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Samveg-ias-academy/531180886905120

Criminality in the Indian political system

Criminality in the Indian political system

In their own long-term interest, all political parties must jointly agree to stop sponsoring criminal candidates

Criminality in politics, or more pointedly, criminals sitting in our Parliament and legislatures, is an issue that has for long been debated in many forums and has also been at the forefront of reform proposals sent by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to the government. With elections to five States under way, and the 16th General Election due to be completed before May 31, 2014, India is now gripped by that special fever that besets us every five years. Unexpectedly, part of the backdrop already stands influenced by a few recent decisions of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has importantly passed three orders that relate directly to the conduct of elections. The first relates to the distribution of “freebies”, wherein the ECI has been asked to frame guidelines in consultation with political parties. The second is directing the installation of the None-of-The-Above (NOTA) button in the Electronic Voting Machines, which has already been implemented in the current round of Assembly elections. The third is the court’s order of July 10, 2013 in the Lily Thomas vs Union of India matter, wherein the Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional Section 8 (4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. The importance of this order cannot be overemphasised. The position that prevailed before this order was enacted was that all convicted MPs and MLAs enjoyed a three-month period in which to appeal against their conviction, and during this period they crucially retained their memberships in Parliament or legislatures respectively. What has changed is that while they still have the right to appeal, now they immediately cease to be members the House. While previously they were able to file appeals within the stipulated three months without giving up their membership, they managed, in effect, to remain MPs or MLAs often for long years after their terms had expired. Not only have these orders already impacted the elections under way but they will continue to have a profound impact on cleansing our political system.

The Lily Thomas matter was applied by the court prospectively and not retrospectively. The court would have had many reasons not to apply its order retrospectively, not the least of which is that it would possibly have thrown our current polity into disarray. Be that as it may, in the present and future, every parliamentarian or legislator who stands convicted for an offence that leads to a sentence of imprisonment for two years and more, will also be debarred from contesting an election for six years after his or her prison term ends. Moreover and equally importantly, there are offences which are already on the statute book and where conviction (even without sentence of imprisonment) leads to disqualification. These include conviction for rape, for promoting enmity and hatred between and among different classes or groups, conviction relating to bribery, and conviction under the Prevention of Corruption Act, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) and The Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 (POTA). Once again, since the grace period for remaining an MP or MLA has ended, this in effect means that the six year axe of debarment comes immediately into operation in these categories of cases as well.

Criminals among MPs, MLAs

Close on the heels of this order, the nation witnessed the jailing of Lalu Prasad, the president of a once nationally recognised political party, the RJD, as well as Rasheed Masood, a former Minister and sitting MP of the Rajya Sabha. While both stand debarred from contesting elections for six years after their jail terms are completed, in effect such a long banishment might well put an end to their political careers. For, as is well known, politics abhors a vacuum.

The abhorrence of criminality in politics is a common thread running through practically every student audience I have addressed across India in the last seven years. They are well aware of the figures compiled by non-governmental organisations such as NEW and ADR from the affidavits submitted to the ECI by contestants. Two vital orders of the Supreme Court in 2002 and 2003 made it compulsory for all candidates to file information regarding any and all criminal cases pending against them, as well as figures of the combined wealth or assets of the candidates and their spouses, and indeed their educational qualifications. With this information, the court hoped that voters could make informed choices about whom to vote for or not. Most of my student audiences knew the statistics; that in the present Parliament as many as 30 per cent of sitting Lok Sabha MPs and 31 per cent of Rajya Sabha MPs have criminal cases pending against them, that the Bihar Assembly (2010) has a high of 58 per cent criminals among its MLAs, while the Uttar Pradesh Assembly (2012) has 41 per cent. The Congress has 21 per cent declared criminals; the Bharatiya Janata Party has 31 per cent. At the other extreme, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha has 82 per cent criminals among its MPs and MLAs.

Is it any surprise then that student audiences inevitably ask what is the point of clean election processes if the end result is to elect tainted men and women?

When the government decided to rush headlong into enacting an Ordinance to counter the July 10, 2013 Order of the Supreme Court, this resulted in a surge of public sentiment bordering on revulsion, against what would arguably have been a very regressive step in the development of our democratic institutions. The dramatic demise of the proposed Ordinance ironically became a critically important milestone in the strengthening of our democratic edifice, which I think many of us realise is still a work in progress.

Three issues

In the rash of commentaries that followed the Supreme Court Order of July 10, followed in turn by the legislative proposals sought to be placed before the winter session of Parliament and finally by the Ordinance that the Cabinet cleared, I would like to comment on three issues. First, it is no secret that many politicians have their own criminal elements to protect and whom they need to use in elections to round up voters. They spend clandestinely and sometimes devise mafia-like strategies to reinforce the “winnability” concept that has now come to be the “mantra” which has displaced any truly democratic relationship between candidates and the public whom they seek to represent. Hence the political establishment quickly closed ranks in favour of the Ordinance.

The second issue to my mind was whether the President (who called in senior Ministers for consultation to raise questions and seek clarifications), would have signed this Ordinance, or whether he would have just let it asphyxiate itself.

The third issue is that it took Rahul Gandhi to speak out and publicly criticise the Ordinance. In the aftermath of his intervention, the cacophony of opinions on our news channels reached a crescendo. One of the few voices that I managed to hear over the din of panellists and anchors, was that of The Hindu’s N. Ram, who cut aside all rhetoric on the non-use of parliamentary language by saying, “Rahul Gandhi single-handedly killed the wretched Ordinance. Instead of acknowledging that, do we need to make a fuss about the words he used?”

For what we must also recognise is that if this Ordinance had been passed, it would have officially endorsed that criminality in parliamentary ranks was perfectly acceptable. It would also have rendered our elected representatives even more distant from our people. Not only that, it would almost certainly have put the Executive and the Supreme Court on a collision course, leading to unnecessarily troubled relations between vital institutions. We have only to look in our own neighbourhood to understand how such conflicts have in varying measure stunted the growth of democratic structures.

I read in the press with increasing disappointment that many political leaders and parties including the Congress and the BJP have since given the ticket in these elections to either criminals or to their family members as proxies. This, sadly, concedes the “winnability” factor over “clean” politics.

Surely the time is finally here for all political parties to jointly agree to step away from sponsoring criminal candidates. It would be in their long-term interest to do so, because now some ground realities have changed, for upon conviction such candidates would have to resign anyway and make way for by-elections. In the short-term, they may win an election, but in the longer term they will, once again, strike a blow to the development of a healthy, wholesome and robust democracy that our freedom fighters fought for, and our constitutional framers had envisaged.

TOPPERS STORY

Shuchita Kishore, IAS Topper 2010: You are all alone at some point during the struggle

Young woman from Lucknow, Shuchita Kishore, who got 39th position in the Civil Services Exam 2010, spoke to Gulshan Sharma of jagranjosh.com

Shuchita’s is the story of an ordinary but determined girl. Drawing her inspiration from the interviews of IAS toppers and closely following their advice, this young woman from Lucknow finally realised her dream of becoming a civil servant in her third attempt. Shuchita means pure, simple and honest. That’s exactly how this slim and tall young woman of 27 comes across as she makes an effort to smile in front of the camera. Thoughtful and composed in her Salwar Kurta, the 39th ranker in the UPSC Civil Services exam 2010 opines that diplomacy must precede military action as she hopes to become an IFS officer.

One of the four daughters of retired UP government official Mr RK Srivastava, Shuchita could not clear the Prelims in her first attempt at the UPSC due to lack of proper guidance. The second attempt was encouraging as she managed to reach the interview stage. Finally in 2011, Shuchita’s efforts paid off as she secured 39th rank in the Civil Services exam 2010. The hard work clearly reflects in her eyes as she recalls, “It was not that easy to go in for three consecutive attempts but I derived strength from my belief in God.”

As she pursues her PhD in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Shuchita takes pride in showing the copies of IAS interviews that she read way back in 2004 in Jagran Josh. The young diplomat in the making first decided to be a civil servant when she was in class 7 and considers 1996 UPSC topper Mr Iqbal Singh Dhaliwal and 2005 UPSC topper Mona Pruthi her role models. Shuchita loves reading literature and quizzing is her favourite hobby.

Education
Shuchita Kishore went through schooling in Lucknow where she scored 89% and 86% in her class 10 and 12 exams. She then joined Lucknow University from where she completed her BA in Political Science and English Literature with 67%. On graduating from the Lucknow University, she moved to New Delhi to do her Masters in English Literature from JNU. She is currently pursuing her PhD from the JNU itself, the library of which is popularly known as the UPSC hall. Shuchita recognises the importance of educational institutions known for excellence but does not shy away from saying, “It’s not the institutions that make individuals. It’s the people who make institutions.”

Advice to IAS aspirants

Quoting Rig-Veda, Shuchita says, “Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides.” She also identifies with Gandhi’s talisman as she understands the importance of a civil servant whose decisions can affect the entire nation in some way or the other. Shuchita has a word of advice for IAS aspirants as she suggests, “Think about the nation. Try to develop a vision. Never lose hope and with strong determination and hard work, there is nothing that will stop you from succeeding in UPSC exam and life.” She further adds, “You could well be the first person from your school or college to crack the Civil Services exam.”
If you find this Story Inspirational then please share it with Others
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Samveg-ias-academy/531180886905120

samveg IAS

SAMVEG IAS DEHRADUN

HAPPY DIWALI TO ALL DEAR FRIENDS AND STUDENTS