Blogs

There was a report in today's TOI on accidents in India. 125,000 people lost their lives in India in road accidents. India tops the list in road deaths in the world. China has managed to bring DOWN road deaths from 2005 to 2006. In India this has gone up from about 106,000 to 125,000 from 2006 to 2007.

Some of us went and met Lokayukta Justice Hegde today. A long, and very interesting meeting, I am not sure how much of what we heard we will manage to post here. Its one thing to hear stories of corruption (loose talk like X eats money, Y drinks duddu) at parties, and simply another to hear those from people (we heard from Up-Lokayukta and their PR Officer Mr Riaz as well) who deal with such cases and people on daily basis.

We all know about the state of judiciary and its access to our vulnerable sections. In hindsight we all agree that Indian judicial system needs radical reforms in terms delivering the justice in reasonable time period. This is not to put down our judicial system but we all need to be aware of the potential shortcoming the judicial delivery system has.

We the proud citizens of Namma Bengaluru, arguably having a higher Household Income on an average compared to the rest of India cry a lot for infrastructure.

Yet, we do not want to pay property taxes and to add insult to the injury want to pay abysmally low taxes. If we do not pay adequate property taxes, we cannot even have good infrastructure.

A lot of activity goes on behind the scenes here that doesn't show in blogs and forums. Not that members want to keep things private, but things tend to start via emails or conversations between island groups of members, and there is just no time to post everything in detail.

It is good that the BWSSB has finally realised that only about 50% of it's current water supply is metered and billed for. It is equally good to note that it has come down heavily on IBC Knowledge Park (the building hosting Accenture et al) on Bannerghatta Road for water theft.

The primary objective of public transport corporations is to serve the public. However, this does not seem to hold good on many occasions, like on Monday, when BMTC and KSRTC gave a large number of buses in their fleet on casual contract for the JD(S) convention, causing an acute shortage of buses on road and putting the public to hardships.