FBI to investigate shooting of Indian techie as a hate crime

The FBI said on Tuesday it was investigating the killing of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian aviation engineer, in Kansas last week as a hate crime, which gave the federal agency a lead role in the case and meant the threat extended to the larger community.

“Based upon the initial investigative activity, the FBI, in conjunction with the US attorney’s office and the Department of Justice civil rights division, is investigating this incident as a hate crime,” an FBI spokeswoman said in a statement.

“The FBI will continue to work jointly with Olathe Police Department and our state and local partners regarding this ongoing investigation.”

The White House, which had been slow to condemn the killing, had followed up shortly, with a spokeswoman calling it a “racially motived killing”.

President Donald Trump issued a comprehensive condemnation in his first speech to US congress later in the day.

Adam Purinton, a US navy veteran has been charged with fatally shooting Kuchibhotla on February 22 at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, and wounding a friend, Alok Madasani, and Ian Grillot, a patron, who had tried to intervene.

Purinton had thought the Indians were from Iran, one of the seven Muslim-majority countries in Trump’s controversial travel ban that has been put on hold by court and which might be replaced by a new order any day now.

The shooter was heard telling Kuchibhotla and Madasani to “get out of my country”.

The two men hailing from Andhra Pradesh worked at Garmin, a GPS technology major, and had been to that bar several times before, and were well known to others.

This was not the first time Indians were targeted mistaken for Middle-easterners.

Balbir Singh Sandhu, a Sikh, became a the first victim of the backlash against the September 9, 2001, terror attacks when he was shot dead just four days after by a man in Messa, Arizona, who thought he was from the Middleeast because of his turban.

The FBI has been treating such attacks against Sikhs — the worst was in 2013 when a white supremacist killed six men and women at a gurudwara in Wisconsin — and Hindus as hate-crimes, as threats to the larger community. And it works with advocacy groups such as the Sikh Coalition and the Hindu American Foundation to address the problem.

The official said while this is not a norm necessitated by the acts governing Maharashtra’s municipal corporation, and is more of a guideline by the state government, this kind of a directive was issued once in the past, too. The state government has asked all municipal commissioners to bring this directive to the municipal corporations’ notice and take appropriate action. The 10 municipal corporations to which the guidelines apply are Mumbai, Pune, Pimpri-chinchwad, Nagpur, Nashik, Akola, Amravati, Thane, Ulhasnagar and Solapur. After the recently concluded elections, the BJP will significantly have more say across all these corporations, except Thane. In Pune, Pimpri-chinchwad, Nashik, Solapur, Amravati and Ulhasnagar, the party wrested the majority from other parties. It also retained its hold on Nagpur and Akola, and almost trebled its strength in Mumbai to 82 from 31, in a close contest with the Sena.

The standing committee of the BMC has 27 corporators, a majority of whom are currently from the Sena, the majority party in the civic body. The committee is the most significant in the BMC’S executive as all policy decisions, tenders, work orders and new initiatives have to pass through the standing committee. As such, all its decisions directly or indirectly involve the corporation’s finances.

Sena’s Yashodhar Phanse, standing committee chairman of the BMC, said, “It is wrong to issue such guidelines in a democratic set up. After all, we are empowered to take decisions till March 8, when the current general body’s tenure ends. However, it won’t impact us much as we just have one last meeting scheduled now on March 6, but there is nothing on the agenda besides taking a group picture of the current committee.”

Incidentally, the BMC’S standing committee had a meeting on Tuesday, the day the state government issued its resolution. The committee approved a few routine maintenance works related to roads and drainage. planned in the city, the state government will fund the projects with loans from multilateral funding agencies.

The two elevated corridors will have interchanges with existing, under-construction metro corridors and also with the suburban railway network in the city. According to the DRP, authorities are expecting a daily ridership of 2.293 lakh on Metro-5 corridor in 2021 and a daily ridership of 6.5 lakh on Metro-6 corridor in the same year.

The civil construction of the city’s three Metro corridor — Metro 2A (Dahisar-dn Nagar corridor), Metro-7 (Dahisar eastandheri east) corridor and Metro-3 (Colaba-bandra-seepz) corridor — is currently underway. While the civil construction of Metro 2B (DN Nagarbkc-mankhurd) corridor and Metro-4 (Wadala-ghatkoparthane-kasarvadavali) corridor is expected to start by October. Altogether, the Fadnavis-led government has planned 172km of metro network in city.

The state has not yet formalised loan agreements for any of these projects with civil work being undertaken using MMRDA funds.

-Other

The judges felt the need for a separate and effective grievance redressal mechanism, although the state government has already proposed a 24x7 helpline, primarily after noticing that no immediate police assistance would be provided through it. The bench said Maharashtra Motor Vehicle Rules, 1989, require cab and auto drivers to behave in a civil and orderly manner with passengers and also to stick to the shortest and fittest route to reach the destination.

“If the driver behaves rudely with the passenger or does not stick to the route, no purpose will be served by the passenger lodging a complaint after the journey is over,” said the bench, while stressing the need for immediate police assistance in emergencies. The bench directed the grievance redressal mechanism be so connected with the police machinery that authorities can immediately track the vehicle and intervene to assist the passenger.

The bench further observed that appropriate action of cancellation of permits of auto own- ers and badges of drivers was also required to be taken wherever they are found to have committed breach of the conditions of permit or badge or violated provisions of the Maharashtra Motor Vehicle Rules, which impose a number of duties on cab and auto drivers. The duties imposed by the rules include behaving in a civil and orderly manner with passengers, not to turn down passengers, maintain vehicles in fit and proper condition, keep the vehicle clean, wear khaki uniform with a nameplate and the badge, shall in case of accident take the injured passenger to hospital, etc.

The court was hearing a bunch of petitions filed by associations of autorickshaw owners and drivers from Bhiwandi and Mira-bhayander areas challenging validity of a condition imposed by state government on applicants for new auto-rickshaw permits to have working knowledge of Marathi and knowledge of topography of the area for which permit is sought.

experts say the government was aware of the woeful condition of most training centers and hence slashed the number of certified institutes from 12,181 in PMKVY-1 to just 1,400 in the second. “It shows that majority of training providers either lacked infrastructure or didn’t have good trainers which overall resulted in poor training in PMKVY – I. Otherwise, why will NSDC reduce the number of training companies in the second phase of PMKVY?” says Colonel (Retd) NB Saxena, a construction skills consultant. “We just enhanced the infrastructural requirement in PMKVY – II and till now only 1,400 centres have been able to fulfill the requirement,” said Jayant Krishna, chief operating officer, NSDC.

PM Narendra Modi launched the scheme on July 15,2015 with a corpus of Rs 1,500 crore and an aim to train 2.4 million youth. But the first phase saw just 5% placement, that too mostly in low-skill blue-collar jobs. Despite the problems, the government upped its allocation under the skills training programme in this year’s budget with two new schemes and Rs 6,000 crore. The NSDC disbursed Rs 1,000 crore out of the total budget of Rs 1500 crore till December 2016.

NSDC data accessed by HT under RTI Act showed an incredi ble 420,513 candidates – a fifth of the total -- were trained by the top 10 institutes – four of them in the national capital region alone.

The fifth-largest of them, Soft dot Institute, refused to answer how it managed to train more than 30,000 candidates in a year HT found Softdot has five centers across the city. But another Del hi-based institute — Possit Skil Organisation that claimed to have trained 12,955 candidates — provided some answers.

Possit ran an aviation acad emy in Delhi’s posh South Exten sion but a receptionist told HT that the centre ran no pro gramme under the PMKVY scheme. “For skilling, we have only three centres in Saharanpur Road, Loni; Jaitpur Raod, Badar pur and Jamia Nagar in Okhla,” she added.

HT visited the three centres all inside crumbling buildings on narrow bylanes. The centre at Badarpur had three rooms.

In an RTI reply, the NSDC said it had no role in the arrangements and didn’t maintain a database “The data of training undertaken by franchises is available with concerned training partners,” said the body. Trainers refuse to share franchise details with HT

But Krishna gave a conflicting response, saying NSDC main tained “complete data” of “train ing centers and training part ners” but refused to share it.

Saxena said this was an indica tion that the process manual had been flouted. “Each training pro vider gets a unique user id and password to access SDMS and upload student details. But train ing providers shared id and pass word with multiple franchises that use the same details to upload candidate particulars,” he added. The other irregularity was found in uploading Aadhaar details of candidates. Under the scheme, a grant of an average Rs 8,000 is directly transferred to the student’s account through the Aadhaar details and bank accounts uploaded by the train ing providers on the NSDC’S server. NSDC data showed only 1.4 million people were assessed and awarded certificate while the Aadhaar numbers of 571,880 couldn’t be validated. Arora said every training provider was aware that a candidate’s Aadhaar number was mandatory to get the grant. Krishna told HT that under PMKVY- II, the Aadhaar ID of all trainees were validated at the time of batch creation to pre vent any bogus enrolments.