BJP and Shiv Sena corporators opposed a proposal to construct an abattoir at a cost of Rs 20 crore in Bhiwandi in Maharashtra’s Thane district.
A delegation of leaders from the BJP, Sena and other organisations Thursday met Bhiwandi-Nizampur City Municipal Corporation Commissioner Manohar Hire and submitted a memorandum opposing the move.
Commissioner Hire assured the delegation that the issue would be kept in abeyance till consensus is reached among all parties on how to move forward.
Bhiwandi, a powerloom town, has been a communally sensitive area with an almost equal proportion of Hindus and Muslims.
In late 1983, plans by a private firm to construct an abattoir near Sawande village in the township were met with large scale protests, resulting in widespread rioting and arson.
Subsequent police firing led to the death of four persons.
The Bombay High Court on Friday permitted a surrogate mother to terminate her 24-week pregnancy after it was found that the foetus has multiple cardiac abnormalities.
A vacation bench of Justice Bharati Dangre was hearing a petition filed by a Pune-based woman seeking permission to terminate her 24-week pregnancy.
According to the petition, the woman had entered into an agreement with a Pune-based couple to conceive their baby through the Assisted Reproductive Technology.
The baby was conceived but later, during a routine check-up, it was learnt that the foetus had multiple cardiac abnormalities.
The woman along with the parents then approached the high court seeking permission to terminate the pregnancy as it had gone beyond the 20-week period.
The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act prohibits abortion of pregnancy beyond the 20-week period unless a direction to that effect is given by a high court after considering report from an expert medical team of any state-run hospital.
Last week, the woman was examined by a medical team of the B J Medical College and Sassoon General Hospital in Pune which submitted a report noting that clinical examination revealed multiple cardiac abnormalities in the foetus.
The report further noted that if the baby is born then it would require multiple surgeries with high morbidity and mortality.
“The medical team has therefore opined that the pregnancy may be terminated,” the court said in its order.
On Wednesday, when the petition was heard, Justice Dangre said that the present case was “peculiar” in nature as the petitioner is a surrogate mother and that the baby was conceived by applying the Assisted Reproductive Technology.
The court then directed for the intended parents to appear before it to accord consent.
“As directed, the intended father appeared before the court on Friday and gave his consent to the abortion procedure. The court recorded the same and granted permission,” said woman’s advocate Meenaz Kakalia.
The Bombay High Court has come down heavily on the Maharashtra government and the CBI over their “failure” to implement a list of orders passed by several benches of the court in the 2014 case of sexual assault and alleged custodial death of Agnelo Valdaris.
In an order passed earlier this month, a bench of Justices B P Dharmadhikari and Sarang Kotwal noted that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the state and police authorities were yet to implement the court’s directions while conducting a further probe into the case, and were also yet to implement a slew of security measures at police stations, including installation of CCTV cameras.
The bench, accordingly, directed the government, the CBI and the city police to file their respective affidavits explaining “why action should not be taken against them” for their failure to implement the previous orders of the high court in the case.
Valdaris, who was 25-years-old at the time of his death, had been arrested on April 15, 2014 by the Government Railway Police in Wadala over charges of theft.
A subsequent probe by the CBI revealed that three others, including a minor, had been arrested along with Valdaris, and over the next three days in custody, all four were allegedly stripped, tortured, beaten up and forced to perform sexual acts with each other.
While Valdaris died on April 18 that year, the remaining three were granted bail subsequently. The Wadala police claimed that Valdaris had fled from custody and was killed by a passing train.
Following a litigation initiated in the Bombay High Court by Valdaris’ father Leonard, the CBI took over the probe and in 2016, it booked seven policemen and one woman official from the Wadala railway police station on charges of criminal conspiracy and causing grievous hurt.
In March 2017, the CBI added the charge of sexual assault under section 377 against the eight police personnel booked in the case.
The hearings had prompted the high court to direct further probe into the case to check if the charge of murder could be invoked against the accused.
The HC had also directed the state and the police to implement a slew of measures, including installation of CCTV cameras inside police stations, keeping in mind the safety of those in police custody.
On a previous hearing, another bench of the court had noted that it could not accept the CBI’s statement that Valdaris’ death was accidental in nature, and directed the agency to conduct further probe.
In December last year, the CBI submitted that the statements of witnesses had led it to believe that the charge of murder under section 302 of the IPC could not be invoked against the accused.
The submission, however, was disputed by Leonard’s lawyer Yug Chaudhary.
The court had at the time directed the CBI to grant access to the said statements to Chaudhary to help him make his arguments.
However, in the last hearing earlier this month, Chaudhary informed the bench that he was yet to receive the copies of the said statements.
The state also informed the court that it was yet to install CCTV cameras within the premises of all police stations across the city.
At this, the bench sought an explanation from the authorities for their inaction and warned that if they failed to file their affidavits by the first week of January 2019, their senior representative will have to remain present in court.
“We direct the respondents through their Heads of Department to file a responsible affidavit explaining why suitable action for not implementing court order should not be initiated against them,” it added.
Expressing distress over the falling prices of onions in Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena on Friday asked why farmers cannot be given their due if the state government can implement the 7th Pay Commission.
The Sena, in an editorial in party mouthpiece ‘Saamana’, pointed out that onion farmers in Aurangabad’s Vaijapur Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) were getting as little as 20 paise per kilogram for their produce.
“These onions could become bombs and explode,” the Sena editorial warned.
It said the true picture of the condition of farmers cultivating onions, cotton and tomatoes was yet to come before the government, adding that the government would not have “thrown assurances” at them if it knew their plight.
The Sena said all that the farmers were demanding was money to cover the cost of production.
“But the government distances itself from the demands citing lack of funds and other technical problems. The government borrows Rs 5 billion from Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust in Shirdi for its pending projects. It also can spare two to five hundred crore for the bullet train project,” it said.
The Uddhav Thackeray-led party said it was happy that the government had formally agreed to implement the 7th Pay Commission from January 1 and claimed it was the right of government employees.
“Similarly, onion farmers should also get their dues. Are they not citizens of Maharashtra? Are they not humans?” it asked.
The Sena said a large amount of onions lying in APMCs are perishing because of lack of takers and said they would finally have to be discarded.
The Maharashtra government Thursday approved the implementation of 7th Pay Commission recommendations from January 1, a move that will benefit more than 2 million employees and pensioners.
The cabinet approval to the pay hike of government employees, which will cost the state exchequer Rs 386.55 billion, comes just months ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. The state will face Assembly polls in the second half of 2019.
The Sena is a constituent of the BJP-led governments in Maharashtra and at the Centre.
Five people, including four senior citizens, were killed and two others injured in a major fire that broke out in a high-rise residential building on Friday midnight, a civic official said.
The 16-storey building is located in suburban Tilak Nagar, where search and rescue operation by the Mumbai Fire Brigade is underway, said the official from the Disaster Management Unit of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).
“Our fire brigade control room got information about the incident at 7.51 pm after which our fire-fighting team along with an ambulance rushed to the spot,” he added.
“The blaze started on the 10th floor of the building, Sargam Society (G+16), located near Ganesh Garden in Tilak Nagar,” he said.
The fire brigade team rescued six people from the floor and admitted them to the nearby Rajawadi Hospital, he said.
According to a senior doctor at the civic-run hospital, five of them succumbed to burn injuries.
The two injured, including a fireman, were admitted to a hospital, where their condition is stable, the doctor said.
The civic official identified the deceased as Sunita Joshi ,72, Bhalchandra Joshi ,72, Suman Shrinivas Joshi ,83, Sarla Suresh Gangar ,52, and Lakshmiben Premji Gangar, 83.
Sunita Joshi is the mother of Sanjay Joshi, in-charge of the Vikhroli police station, he said.
The injured were identified as Shrinivas Joshi,86, and Chagan Singh, 28, the fireman, the official said.
The fire has been brought under control, but its cause will be known only after an inquiry, he added.
Fire brigade personnel are searching the building to ascertain if there are more casualties, he said.
Local residents said indiscriminate parking of vehicles in the area delayed the arrival of fire brigade tankers and equipment.
A 33-year-old woman was arrested in Maharashtra’s Thane district for allegedly being involved in three house-breaking thefts here, a senior police official said Friday.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Deepak Deoraj Friday said the accused, identified as Shirin Noor Ali Shaikh, had broken into three houses in Ulhasnagar and Ambernath in the district and looted cash, gold and silver totalling Rs 13 lakh.
He said that 38 ‘tola’ (a tola is around 10 grams) of gold and over 58 grams of silver had been recovered from her.
“She moved around in a burkha and surveyed locked houses. She then carried out house-breaking thefts mostly between 12 noon and 3pm,” the official said.
She was nabbed by Unit IV of the Thane Crime Branch from the Wimco Naka area in Ambernath, he informed.
The government has approved amendments to the POCSO Act and introduced stringent measures to check circulation of child pornography and administration of hormones to children to attain early sexual maturity.
Briefing reporters, Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said children should be protected from sexual offences and the Cabinet has approved amendments to various sections of The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
“This is a wholesome initiative whereby the entire POCSO architecture is not only strengthened but also enlarged so that artificial medicines or hormones could not be abused to kill the childliness of a child,” he said.
An unfortunate thing was going on in the country – that children were being administered hormones to make them artificially majors, he said.
The related provision of the POCSO Act — Section 9 — has been made more stringent, the minister said.
Mumbai police has filed a voluminous charge sheet in the National Spot Exchange (NSEL) default case against 63 accused, including 27 individuals, and 36 companies. The names include brokers for the first time, especially those whose executives were arrested in the past in this case.
NSEL, a spot trading exchange promoted by Financial Technologies (now 63 Moons Technologies), defaulted about Rs 56 billion in 2013 due to the non-payment of money by 24 clients on the exchange floor, hurting 13,000 investors.
The Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of Mumbai Police investigating the case said on Thursday that till now 32 persons have been arrested in the case.
However, three charge sheets were filed against only seven accused in 2014.
The EOW has covered all of them in the fresh charge sheet on Thursday. Officials said the charge sheet includes statements from 520 witnesses, and details of 509 bank accounts, 22 gigabytes (GB) of data, and 28,337 pages.
EOW had arrested executives from three brokerages — Anand Rathi Commodities, India Infoline Commodities and Geojit Commodities in 2015. Their names also figure in the charge sheet filed on late Thursday evening.
An NSEL spokerperson said, “The NSEL compliments the EOW of the Mumbai Police (EOW-Mumbai) for filing the charge sheet in the matter, involving counter party defaults at the NSEL platform in August 2013. In fact, in August 2018, the exchange had filed a writ petition in the Bombay High Court praying the final charge sheet be filed at the earliest, in the interest of truth and justice. The next hearing in the matter is scheduled on January 7. We request the EOW-Mumbai to file the final charge sheet in the matter as early as possible so that the trial can commence, and the real culprits are brought to the book.”
Last week, the Bombay HC had ordered the EOW to also look at the aspect of attaching properties of the brokers accused in the case, from which the police has stayed away so far.
Thursday’s charge sheet, according to an EOW official, is based on the forensic and digital forensic audit reports from forensic auditors and digital forensic auditors appointed by the Maharashtra government.
Sources said the charge sheet has been filed against some leading brokers, the NSEL, its executives, several defaulters and their companies, the defunct spot exchange’s subsidiary Indian Bullion Market Association, among others.
In several cases, the EOW has found fresh evidence, including against Jignesh Shah, whose name also figure in charge sheet, added the source. He was chargesheeted earlier too.
Mumbai Police in a major crackdown seized 100 kilograms of Fentanyl, a banned drug, from the possession of four people in Mumbai’s Santacruz area. The total worth of the seizure amounts to Rs 1000 crore.
The accused have been identified as Salim Dola, Ghanshyam Saroj, Chandramani Tiwari and Sandeep Tiwari, all of them were residents of Mumbai.
“We have recovered 100 kgs of fentanyl drug worth Rs 1,000 crore, after a tip-off. It was meant to be exported to foreign countries especially Mexico. Four people have been arrested in connection with the case,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Anti Narcotics Cell) Shivdeep Lande.
Following a tip-off, the Narcotics Cell laid a trap and the four drug peddlers were arrested. A case has been registered under Section 8 (C) read with 21 (C) and 29 of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985, the police said.
One Activa scooter and one four-wheeler have also been recovered from their possession.
The Arunachal Pradesh Government has constituted the state women commission and appointed Radhilu Chai (Techi) as the new chairperson, officials said Friday.
Governor Brig (Retd) Dr B D Mishra constituted the women panel on December 26, chief secretary Satya Gopal said in an official order.
Heyomai Towsik has been appointed as vice chairperson, the other members of the commission are Hoksum Ori, Raknu Konya, Likha Joya and Techi Hunmai.
The Bombay High Court on Friday permitted a surrogate mother to terminate her 24-week pregnancy after it was found that the foetus has multiple cardiac abnormalities.
Expressing distress over the falling prices of onions in Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena on Friday asked why farmers cannot be given their due if the state government can implement the 7th Pay Commission.
The government has approved amendments to the POCSO Act and introduced stringent measures to check circulation of child pornography and administration of hormones to children to attain early sexual maturity.
The Arunachal Pradesh Government has constituted the state women commission and appointed Radhilu Chai (Techi) as the new chairperson, officials said Friday.