Your chance to have a business in India

Experienced, Successful Network Marketers who are looking for a Ground Floor Opportunity with a large, debt free, International Company soon to launch into the Sub Continent. This Company is present in 19 countries. Only one product, no warehousing, health beverage. We are looking for 3 leaders.

Must be Ambitious, Hard working, Honest and Teachable. Give me a call. I am 79 years old I am only looking for people who are genuinly seeking 'their Big Chance' in life and are prepared to work hard to get it.

Free sample of product given to all who attend the interview

Call Helen on 0414461673 serious investigation into these other matters from the national security perspective,” the court said.

With over 625,000 villages, rural India still dominates the country’s landscape even as rapid urbanising is throwing up challenges for planners. To train people manage this massive social transformation and fill the critical human resource and knowledge gap, a group of eminent Indians is setting up a university.

One of them, Nandan Nilekani, a cofounder of India’s IT bellwether Infosys who now spearheads the massive exercise of providing billion Indians a unique identification number, and his wife Rohini, have just gifted Rs. 50 crore to the proposed varsity.

Called the Indian Institute of Human Settlement, the institute is coming up near Bangalore and the people behind it are in talks with the government for recognition of its courses.

Besides Nilekani, other leading figures forming the board of directors of the venture are renowned industrialists and academicians like Xerxes Desai, Jamshyd Godrej, Cyrus Guzder, Renana Jhabvala, Vijay Kelkar, Keshub Mahindra, Kishore Mariwala, Rahul Mehrotra, Rakesh Mohan, Nasser Munjee, Deepak Parekh, Shirish Patel, Aromar Revi and Deepak Satwalekar.

The IIHS will offer “globally benchmarked bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in urban practice based on a wide set of disciplines and practice areas central to India’s urban transformation,” Aromar Revi, its director, said in an interview.

The Bachelors in Urban Practice (BUP) programme “will be a four-year course, after the plus-2 level of schooling. The MUP programme will be a two year course,” said Revi, an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and the law and management schools of Delhi University.

The IIHS will begin by offering the masters programme first from July next year, provided the government gives regulatory clearances by that time, he said.

“Discussions are active with the government on getting the appropriate regulatory clearances,” Revi said.

The “tentative fee structure for the MUP is in the range of Rs.300,000 and Rs.400,000 per annum,” he said. The IIHS “is planning to offer up to 50 percent of its students’ scholarships and financial assistance of varying degrees depending on need,” he added.

Revi was confident that students passing out of this institute will have job opportunities since the “most serious constraint facing Indian cities today is not capital but the availability of suitably educated professionals, entrepreneurs and change makers who can act in the common good”.

“We anticipate career opportunities across the public and private sectors as well as civil society and universities and knowledge enterprises. There is a large gap in the supply of urban practitioners and inter-disciplinary professionals as India and its urban areas grow,” he said.

On the gift by the Nilekanis, he said “this is in keeping with their vision of building quality transformative institutions for India and a reinforcement of their past philanthropic commitments. Nandan Nilekani has been deeply involved with the IIHS from its conceptualisation”.

Announcing the gift recently, the Nilekanis said: “IIHS is at the convergence of both our interests in education, urbanisation and sustainability.”

The IIHS is coming up on a 54-acre site in Kengeri, on the outskirts of Bangalore.

“Work on planning the first phase of the 42,000-sq metre campus has started. It will be executed in a phased manner over the next five to seven years,” said Revi.

On what prompted the setting up of this institute, he said there was a need to fill “a critical human resource and knowledge gap in addressing multiple challenges of urbanisation”.

“The IIHS is conceived as an interdisciplinary university born out of the realisation that a single academic programme within a university would not be able to offer the breadth and depth of inter-disciplinary academics and practice that are urgently required to solve the multiple dimensions of urbanisation challenges that the country is confronted with,” he said.

The IIHS has tie-ups with several well-known institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University College London (UCL), and The African Centre for Cities (ACC) of the University of Cape Town (UCT), Revi said.

Pakistani state-terror links have to be broken: Rao

Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao says the terror links of the Pakistani state and military have to be broken, even as she felt Islamabad’s attitude towards the issue had “altered”.

In an interview with CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar, Rao said that India did raise the issue of “linkages” between the Pakistani spy agency and terror groups, which were revealed in a Chicago trial by Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Coleman Headley.

“I did raise that and I said we need to get satisfactory answers on these linkages,” she said.

Rao, whose two-year term ends this month, asserted that it was necessary to break the links between Pakistani state and terror.

“Let me tell you, the aim here, and it is not just the aim of India, I think it applies to the whole global community, the strategic link between the Pakistani state and militancy and terror needs to be broken,” she said, Rao also defended at the resumption of talks with Pakistan, despite the slow progress in the trial of mastermind of 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks.

“From one angle certainly it has not moved an inch. I am not denying that. There has been a very glacial pace to this whole process as far as the 26/11 trials are concerned. But let me tell you what kind of feedback we got from the Pakistanis at this round. And they spoke of the need to discuss all the serious and substantive issues between the two countries and that terrorism was at the forefront of this,” she said.

Rao had met her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir in Islamabad June 23-24, following the end of the first round of resumed dialogue, which had been stalled following the 26/11 attack.

The foreign secretary also fended off criticism over the inclusion of Kashmir in the talks.

“Somehow the impression is being created that we have given away the store by discussing Kashmir. I completely refute that allegation,” she said.

The foreign ministers of the two South Asian neighbours are scheduled to meet in New Delhi in July.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT), a judicial body aimed at expediting environment-related cases and the first in the country, has got scores of cases to be dealt with, an official said. India is only the third country after Australia and New Zealand to have a dedicated green court.

It resumed hearings recently after the summer break.

Launched last October, NGT is headed by L.S. Panta, a retired judge of the Supreme Court.

“The tribunal started functioning in midMay. Cases have been heard earlier. July 4 was the first hearing after the vacation,” Panta said.

According to an environment ministry official, the NGT is an independent body which was launched with the “initial support” of the ministry.

The bench is hearing cases transferred from the National Environment Appellate Authority and from the various courts including the Supreme Court of India. With the launch of the NGT, the appellate authority has ceased to exist.

“Twenty-six cases have been transferred from the appellate authority to the NGT. There are various other cases from courts as well. We don’t have the exact figure,” Panta said, adding that fresh cases are being heard too.

The tribunal deals with cases relating to water pollution, forest conservation, air pollution, environment protection, public liability and biological diversity.

Headquartered in New Delhi, the NGT will have circuit benches in the four regions of the country.

The eastern bench will be at Kolkata, the western at Pune, the central at Bhopal and the southern at Chennai. The Delhi bench then would be called as the principal bench.

The other four benches are yet to begin functioning.

“For now, these benches are not working. It will take a couple of months more for them to start functioning. We need more members and the procedure for their appointment is going on. Till the time, all the cases would be heard here,” said Panta.

He added that the cases of different regions would be transferred as soon as the other benches start operating.

The NGT, apart from Panta, comprises retired high court judges A. Suryanarayana Naidu and C.V. Ramulu. Eaach of them is assisted by an environmental expert.

“Anybody and everybody can approach the NGT for civil damages arising out of nonimplementation of various laws relating to the environment,” Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had said during the launch of the NGT last year.

As Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah continues to post his feelings on various issues on the micro-blogging site Twitter, thousands of his followers are getting to know the lighter side of the country’s youngest chief minister.

Abdullah recently flew to the state’s winter capital Jammu. A tennis fan, the chief minister was disappointed to find that his DTH TV connection had not been recharged.

“I can’t believe NO ONE at home in Jammu remembered to recharge my Tata Sky account. I can’t watch the tennis,” the chief minister posted on Twitter, obviously referring to the Wimbledon finals.

In one of his latest posts, Abdullah said: “My life is jhingalala again.”

Another of his recent posts read: “Unusually for me I don’t have much to say these days.”

Abdullah’s Twitter followers have swelled. He has over 27,000 followers and many locals have started tweeting their problems to the chief minister via the social networking site. Some months back, a student preparing for exams in summer capital Srinagar approached Abdullah complaining of a faulty electric transformer in the area. The chief minister got electricity restored in the area immediately. However, Abdullah has detractors as well.

“He posts his feelings, the pictures of the places he visits, the articles he comes across in newspapers, magazines, etc., and other things. How can he be serious about governance when one finds the chief minister on Twitter every now and then?” asked Ghulam Jeelani, 34, a student.

But Abdullah defended his tweeting right by posting last month: “How much time does it take to post 140 characters on the site? Besides, my following on the site might not be very huge, but it is an important interactive forum.”

Abdullah has often posted his feelings about official matters as well. It was because of this that one of the Bharatiya Janata Party leaders last month asked him to continue tweeting - as Omar Abdullah, not as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir.

“But that would be ridiculous. As long as Omar Abdullah is chief minister, his Twitter post would always be seen as that of the chief minister. Let the detractors say anything. Omar Abdullah is a modern chief minister who cannot be compared to his father or grandfather. If people have no problem with Barack Obama deciding to join the social networking site, why are there any issues with Omar Abdullah?” asked Saba Bhat, 24, a college student here.

The movement for separate statehood to Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh entered a crucial phase recently with the mass resignations of MPs, state ministers and legislators of the Congress and Telugu Desam Party (TDP). As a new crisis loomed, the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) held a another meeting over the issue.

Meanwhile, the Joint Action Committee (JAC) spearheading the statehood movement called for a 48-hour shutdown in Andhra Pradesh on July 5-6.

On a day of fast-paced developments, seven MPs of the Congress party from the region submitted their resignations to Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar while Rajya Sabha member K. Keshava Rao gave his resignation to house Chairman Hamid Ansari. Two other MPs faxed their quit letters.

The CCPA meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was held at his 7, Race Course Road official residence in New Delhi, government sources said.

The confabulation of the senior government functionaries came shortly after 10 Congress members of parliament and 40 Congress legislators, including 11 ministers, 33 TDP and two Praja Rajyam Party legislators from the Telangana region resigned to bring pressure on the central government to announce statehood.

Karimnagar MP Ponnam Prabhakar told reporters that two Lok Sabha members, Madhu Goud Yaskhi and Suresh Shetkar, have faxed their resignations.

Another MP, Sarvey Satyanarayana, has refused to resign saying he would do so only after Union Petroleum Minister S. Jaipal Reddy quits. MP from Secunderabad Anjan Kumar Yadav is also reluctant to resign.

In Hyderabad, 79 members of the assembly, including 11 ministers, submitted their resignations, plunging the state into a crisis.

Four rebel TDP legislators had quit too.

Those who resigned Monday include all 33 of TDP, 40 of Congress and two of Praja Rajyam Party (PRP).

Deputy Chief Minister Damodar Raja Narasimha and three other ministers have not resigned. The ministers who submitted their resignations include Home Minister Sabita Indra Reddy.

While five ministers personally submitted their resignations to deputy speaker Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, six others, including the home minister, sent their papers.

In all, 10 legislators of the Congress party from Telangana are yet to submit their resignations.

Speaker N. Manohar, who is in the US, will take a decision on the resignations after his return. The resignations, if accepted, may reduce the Congress government to minority.

In the 294-member assembly, the Congress has 174 members, including 18 from the PRP, which merged with the ruling party recently.

Telangana accounts for 119 legislators in the 294-member assembly. The Congress has 52 members (including two of PRP), TDP 37 and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) 11.

Senior Minister K. Jana Reddy told reporters that their resignations were not aimed at creating a constitutional or political crisis but to achieve a separate state in tune with the aspirations of the people.

“Today (July 4) is United States’ Independence Day and we hope today will also become Telangana’s Independence Day,” the minister said outside the assembly building.

Jana Reddy, who later left for Delhi for talks with the central leadership, claimed that their fight was for self-rule and self-respect of the Telangana region.

Twelve Congress members of the legislative council and three of TDP have also submitted their resignations to council chairperson K. Chakrapani.

The legislators said the resignations were aimed at pressurising the central government to carve out a separate Telangana state as promised by it on Dec 9, 2009.

The Congress leaders resigned despite the efforts of the central and state leadership of the party over last three days to dissuade them.

Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters in New Delhi that a final decision on the “extremely sensitive and complex” issue was yet to be taken.

“The central government’s view will be made known after the consultation process is over. We have to bring everyone on board. There is a strong view of a large number of people. We are yet to take a final decision,” Chidambaram told reporters.

“This is an extremely sensitive and complex issue. We will try to expedite... One should have understanding and patience. Especially, the media should have understanding and patience,” Chidambaram said.

Chidambaram said the government would convene an all-party meeting immediately after the views of all parties are known.