Srinagar, Jul 22,2021: The Jammu and Kashmir government has announced that it will issue domicile certificate to the husband of native woman, who are domicile holders in the Union Territory.
Earlier, only a woman marrying to a native of the UT used to be eligible for getting a domicile certificate. However, with the order, the husband of a native woman, who is a domicile holder, will be eligible for a domicile certificate.
‘In exercise of the powers conferred by proviso to Article 309 of the Constitution of India read with Section 15 of the Jammu and Kashmir Civil Service (Decentralisation and recruitment) Act, 2010, the government hereby directs in sub-rule (1) of rule 5 of the Jammu and Kashmir Grant of Domicile Certificate Rules 220, after S.No/Clause 6, the following shall be added,” read a government order dated Tuesday.
The spouse of a domicile certificate holder can get the certificate upon submission of certain documents, as a new clause has been added under the J&K Grant of Domicile Certificate (Procedure) Rules, 2020. The documents include Domicile certificate of the spouse and a valid proof of marriage. The order further states that Tehsildar has been designated as the competent authority for issuance of the domicile certificate.
The Union Cabinet in 2020 approved the Jammu and Kashmir (Adaptation of State Laws) Second Order, 2020 issued under section 96 of Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019.
According to the rules, the J&K domiciles have been defined as those who have been a resident for a period of 15 years in the UT or have studied for a period of seven years and appeared in Class X/XII exam in a registered educational institute in J&K. The domiciles also include children of central government or central government aided organizations, PSU who have served in J&K for a period of 10 years. The migrants registered by the Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner (Migrants) in the UT of J&K are also eligible to obtain a domicile certificate.
New Delhi , July 20,2021: Justice A K Mishra, Chairperson, National Human Rights Commission, India on Tuesday said that the States need to repeal the laws and various provisions, which are discriminating against the leprosy-affected persons.
These need to be replaced by the policies and frameworks that will protect their human rights, read a release by the NHRC.
Justice Mishra was chairing a meeting organised by the Commission to discuss the issues related to the persons affected with leprosy. He said that concerted efforts need to be made to sensitize and create necessary awareness among different stakeholders that leprosy is not a very contagious disease and that the people affected with it can be cured and can be integrated into the main-stream and co-habited with their families.
Expressing serious concern over the poor living conditions of the colonies of leprosy-affected persons, the NHRC Chairperson said that some drastic and concrete measures are required to be taken to ensure that the schemes and the funds meant for the welfare of leprosy-affected persons and their colonies are implemented with all earnest and earmarked funds are utilised properly.
He said that the Civil Society and NGOs also need to work more sincerely to ameliorate the cause of leprosy-affected persons and to integrate their colonies with the mainstream of society. Concerted efforts also need to be made to convince leprosy-affected persons to go back to their homes, the release said.
The meeting was attended by NHRC Members Justice M M Kumar and Rajiv Jain, Secretary-General, Bimbadhar Pradhan, Additional Secretary, R K Khandelwal, experts Vineeta Shanker, former Executive Director of Sasakawa India Leprosy Foundation and Nikita Sarah of Leprosy Mission India, among others.
“During the discussions, it was strongly felt that besides several problems notwithstanding, the COVID-19 pandemic further worsened the condition of leprosy-affected persons, particularly with regards to their food and livelihood,” read the release.
Some of the other important suggestions that emerged during the discussions include States need to conduct a study to know how many leprosy cases are being reported every year to understand whether the disease is declining or increasing in the country.
It also emphasised on the need for States to conduct a study to know the number of colonies of leprosy-affected persons and the number of people living there.
“States need to appoint a nodal welfare officer to act as a bridge between the State machinery and the colonies of leprosy-affected persons to help them get benefits of the Government schemes; Focus on the education and counselling of the children of leprosy affected people to overcome the stigma and help them integrate with the mainstream of the society; Ensure that sanitation, water, electricity and other basic amenities including healthcare, financial assistance is provided to the leprosy-affected people living in the separate colonies; Provide them skills for their socio-economic empowerment to earn sustainable livelihoods with dignity; and States need to set-up a system of monitoring of funds given to NGOs working for the welfare of leprosy-affected persons to ensure proper utilisation of funds,” read the suggestions as per the NHRC release.
New Delhi, Jul 20,2021: Congress and Shiromani Akali Dal have decided against attending the all-party meeting called by the government on Tuesday evening on the COVID-19 situation.
Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said Congress has decided to give the meeting a miss as it wants the government to present the facts about the COVID-19 management on the floor of the House not behind closed doors.
SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal said his party will boycott the meeting over no discussion on farm laws so far in the ongoing session of Parliament.
The meeting will be held at 1800 hrs at the Annexe building of Parliament House. As per the sources, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan will be present at the meeting to clarify the queries raised by the opposition parties.
Mr Modi, in the last all-party meeting held on Sunday, has told the floor leaders of various parties that the government is ready to discuss the COVID-19 situation and will hold another meeting on the issue.
However, Congress and TMC opposed the idea as they wanted the discussion in Parliament.
Imphal (Manipur), July 20,2021: Months ahead of the Manipur assembly elections, state Congress president Govindas Konthoujam has resigned from the post.
Konthoujam was appointed chief of the Manipur unit in December 2020.
Meanwhile, at least eight Congress MLAs are likely to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) today, sources have informed.
The assembly polls in the state are slated to take place next year, where Chief Minister Biren Singh of the BJP will fight to retain power.
Bengaluru (Karnataka) , July 19,2021: All the professional courses including engineering will be taught in Kannada across the state starting from the next academic year, said Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister CN Ashwatha Narayana, who is also the state minister for higher education, on Sunday.
The government has initiated all the respective translation works of the curriculum.
Speaking at a webinar organised by All Languages Faculty Association of Karnataka University on the topic — ‘New Education Policy- Study of Indian Languages’, he said, “Regional language (mother tongue) will be further strengthened after the implementation of National Education Policy and let there be no apprehensions in this regard.”
New Education Policy (NEP) lays emphasis on providing professional education in regional languages and accordingly, governments will encourage measures to realise the ambition of the policy, Narayana opined.
Underscoring that regional language Kannada should also flourish correspondingly as technology and innovation progress and it should exist in all spheres, he said: “The NEP will not allow outsiders to enforce other languages on us. The courses and curriculum will be designed by our own universities and subject experts.”
Professor Timme Gowda, Vice-Chairman, State Higher Education Council, Prof SG Siddaramaiah, Former Chairperson, Kannada Pustaka Pradhikara, Prof TV Kattimani, Member, Draft Committee member of NEP, and others were also present at the webinar.
Patna (Bihar) , July 17,2021: Bihar government has decided to set up three separate universities to regulate the functioning and academic activities of engineering, medical and sports streams.
This was among the 21 policy-related issues discussed and approved by chief minister Nitish Kumar at the Cabinet meeting here on Friday.
In another important decision, the state government has decided to reduce the powers of Block Development Officers (BDO) and District Development Commissioner (DDC). The powers of BDO and DDC have been distributed among executive officers of Panchayati Raj or officers of the rank of deputy secretary level.
New Delhi, July 12,2021: The R-value for COVID-19, which denotes the speed at which the infection is spreading, has gone up for the country, researchers at the Chennai-based Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) have said.
The mathematical representation that acts as an indicator for how fast the infection is spreading shows it has gone from 0.78 on June 30 to 0.88 in the first week of July.
Sitabhra Sinha, Professor of Physics and Dean of Computational Biology at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai led the research team.
Sinha told ANI that the data for this analysis was obtained from a daily updated database.
“If you have a large number of active cases persisting for a long time, chances increase of conditions coming together to create a super-spreader event, which might well lead to a third wave,” he told ANI.
He said R-value saw an increase in February this year when it rose from 0.93 to 1.02. It went further up during the second wave in April and reached a peak of 1.31 on April 26. Since then, it was been declining till the recent increase.
“When the pandemic started in mid-March last year, it had a much faster rate of spread. The R-value, I estimated between March 14 and April 5 was 2.51 +- 0.07. This subsequently reduced to 1.70 +- 0.04 estimated over April 4 to April 16 and then to 1.34 +- 0.01 estimated over April 13 to May 15, most possibly a consequence of the nationwide lockdown,” Sinha said.
‘R’, also called effective reproduction number, suggests the mean number of other people who will catch the infection from a single infected person.
The first wave (defined by R remaining >1 for the entire period) lasted from March till mid-September.
“Again looking at it nationwide, the highest rate of spreading in the second wave occurred between March 9 and April 21, when I estimate R to be 1.37. This is substantially lower than the value close to 2.5 we saw in the initial period of the first wave. However, in individual states, the second wave showed high spread rates, possibly even faster than in the first wave.”
Uttar Pradesh showed an R-value of 2.32 during Mar 27-Apr 18 this year. Bihar also showed very high values over the same period.
R went below 1 on May 9 in the second wave of pandemic.
“After that period, R fell to 0.82 between May 14 and May 30 and then to 0.78 between May 15 and Jun 26. This last value is the lowest R has been since the time the pandemic began. However, this R increased to 0.88 after June 20. Although the increase in R seems all (0.1), going forward this makes a big difference in how many active cases we can expect to have in the near future,” he said.
“If the previous rate of 0.78 had continued we would have expected less than 1.5 lakh active cases by 27th of this month. On the other hand, with the later rate of 0.88, we will see above 3 lakh active cases by the same date (provided R does not change further). This means with a small difference of only 0.1 in R, we will have twice the number of active cases in about two weeks time,” he added.
The researcher said that during the first wave, northeastern states had a low level of infections but not so in the second wave. “Things continue to be grim in Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and possibly Tripura,” he added.
New Delhi , July 12,2021: Despite the worse condition due to COVID-19 which impacted economic growth, the net direct tax collection has doubled to over Rs 2.49 lakh crore so far this fiscal, mainly driven by personal income tax and advance tax mop up, Income Tax department sources told ANI.
The net direct tax collections between April 1 and July 3 stood at Rs 2.49 lakh crore, compared to Rs 1.29 lakh crore over the corresponding period of the preceding year, representing an increase of 91 per cent over the collections of the preceding year. Net Direct Tax collections for the financial year (FY) 2021-22 have grown at a robust pace despite the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy.
The gross collection of Direct Taxes (before adjusting for refunds) for the FY 2021-22 stands at Rs 2.86 lakh crore compared to Rs 1.94 lakh crore in the corresponding period of the preceding year. This includes Corporation Income Tax (CIT), Personal Income Tax (PIT), Security Transaction Tax (STT) and advanced tax. This amount is expected to increase as further information is received from banks.
Commenting on the direct tax collection trends Income Tax department sources said collection figures are encouraging and the department is cautiously optimistic to achieve the Budget target set by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. He added that transparent and fair taxation system gives us the confidence, apart from revival of the economic activity, despite the difficult times, that we will be able to achieve the current target. The target for current fiscal has been set at Rs 11.08 lakh crore.
Commenting on the direct tax collection, Neeru Ahuja, Partner, Deloitte India said, “These are clearly positive outcomes of an economy getting back on track. Business optimism and the many compliance tracking initiatives taken by the tax authorities.”
Earlier Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) in a statement said Income Tax department has issued refunds of over Rs 37,050 crore to more than 17.92 lakh taxpayers between April 1, 2021 to July 5, 2021. Income tax refunds of Rs 10,408 crore have been issued in 16,89,063 cases and corporate tax refunds of Rs 26,642 crore have been issued in 1,03,088 cases.