Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury IT IS not every day that a chairman of a parliamentary committee takes the panel to his hometown. On Saturday, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) will begin a five-day trip of West Bengal, holding meetings in Kolkata as well as Chairman Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury’s constituency Baharampur. The panel members will meet jute farmers and mill owners, primarily from Murshidabad region, to understand their problems in the presence of senior state government officials. They will then have meetings related to rural drinking water scheme, Ganga rejuvenation, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, flood control, BSNL and the IRCTC. Significantly, the heads of Indian Oil Corporation, HPCL and BPCL are expected to be in Bengal to attend the meeting related to the Ujjwala Yojana.
The Heartburn
THE REJIG in the BJP organisation has created a lot of heartburn among some leaders and the RSS top leadership is now flooded with complaints. The RSS leadership was already upset over the dropping of two senior leaders – Ram Madhav and P Muralidhar Rao – who had been loaned from the Sangh to the BJP from its national team. Sources said another leader, Sunil Deodhar, had a long meeting with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in the last week of December and he too complained about being sidelined by the party. Deodhar who had been given charge of Tripura, had contributed to the victory for the party in the state. However, instead of giving him charge of a full state, he is now been given co-charge of Andhra Pradesh.
Tech Glitches
WITH THE number of complaints rising about glitches in the working of the video conferencing software used by the Supreme Court, officials said the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is now looking into it. They said the system had stabilised by December last year but addition of some new updates was creating problems. The apex court uses the VIDYO platform hosted on the servers of NIC’s National Data Centre for virtual hearings. Earlier this week, a three-judge bench expressed its exasperation with the technical errors and asked the court’s Secretary General to look into the matter. Subsequently, Attorney General K K Venugopal too called for necessary upgrades. Meanwhile, a tender for outsourcing the video conferencing is in its “final stages”, officials said.