Friday, January 28, 2011
Transparency and Corruption
India completed 61 years as a republic. The main news in the news papers today is on corruption. It varies from smaller ones to mammoth scales.
Some of the recent news are disturbing.
* Newly elected CVC faces an old corruption charge and Supreme Court is considering if he is eligible for such a post.
* Former Chief Justice of Supreme Court facing grave accusations of corruption and he is currently Chairman of National Human Rights Commission
* The Dust of 2G scam still ongoing and scale of it is mammoth.
* Chief Minister of one state in India may get prosecuted for corruption.
* One state's Chief Information Commissioner suspended being part of corruption (Link Here)
But on the same time we read the news.
*Finance Minister saying Government cannot reveal names of people hoarding black money.(Newslink Here)
And some of the other news are affecting those who fight corruption.
* Dr Amar Nath Pandey, a Right To Information (RTI) activist, was fired at and injured in Uttar Pradesh yesterday Jan 27th (Newslink Here)
* Yeshwant Sonawane, Additional District Collector of Malegaon was burned alive while trying to act against oil mafia.
Think of those who are on the side of poor and afflicted.
* Dr. Binayak Sen sentenced to Life Imprisonment on very flimsy grounds and ignored his impeccable service to the poor in Chattisgarh (News here)
This calls us to be vigilant and to fight more to expose corruption and to work towards bringing more transparency everywhere. I do believe technology coupled with RTI especially websites and Web 2.0 technologies can drive it more.
Let us not forget
* The sacrifice of Manjunath Shanmugam, an upright officer who lost his life in fight against oil mafia in 2005.
* The sacrifice of Satyendra Dubey who paid with his life two years ago when he blew the whistle on corruption in the Bihar stretch of the Golden Quadrilateral project.
Yes, it is time to resolve that, we will be on the side on transparency, truth, poor and against corruption whatever be the cost. Also let us resolve that we will continue expose darkness and light a candle to spread light wherever we are. Be willing to say that we will not pay a bribe whatever be the cost. If you like to involve, I would suggest report cases on bribery or to upload your city/states 'citizen charters' for various departments to 'I Paid a Bribe' website.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
LibreOffice and Republic Day
Happy Republic Day to all of my fellow Indians! As we celebrate freedom and remember the day Constitution of India came to effect, let us remember multiple aspects related to this freedom.
People like Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the father of Indian Constitution who later decided to exercise his freedom to practice any religion of his choice and converted to Buddhism. He reminded us that no one is born in to this world with a religion, but accepts one religion or other when he/she grows.
Selfless service of people like Graham Staines who left his home land to serve poor people of India and cost of such love to a forsaken people.
The Supreme Court of India, which expunged some remarks relating to conversion and Graham Staines work and upheld the essence of constitution
The freedom of religion we have here in this land when many other lands gone through numerous challenges to freedom.
Just a day before we celebrate Republic Day, The document foundation announced LibreOffice 3.3, new fork of popular free OpenOffice.org, thus declaring freedom of choice in matters of software options outside the grip of software corporations.
New features of LibreOffice
LibreOffice 3.3 also incorporates all the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.3, such as new custom properties handling; embedding of standard PDF fonts in PDF documents; new Liberation Narrow font; increased document protection in Writer and Calc; auto decimals digits for ‘General’ format in Calc; 1 million rows in a spreadsheet; new options for CSV import in Calc; insert drawing objects in Charts; hierarchical axis labels for Charts; improved slide layout handling in Impress; new easier to use print interface; more options for Changing case; and colored sheet Tabs in Calc.
Yes friends, let us celebrate freedom in the world of office suites!
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
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