Court orders action on child drug abuse
Satyarthi petitions
NEW DELHI, Dec 14, (Agencies): India’s top court on Wednesday ordered the government to come up with a plan to tackle child drug abuse, acting on a petition from Nobel Peace laureate
child rights group. With government figures showing almost one in five addicts in India is under 21, the Supreme Court said more needed to be done to educate young people about the dangers of substance abuse in India.
The court ordered New Delhi to “evolve a national action plan within six months to combat drug abuse amongst school children”.
It said the government should conduct a national survey to determine how widespread the problem was, and include education about drugs in the school curriculum.
“Trafficking and drug abuse, inherently linked to each other, are the most prevalent forms of organised crime in the world,” said Satyarthi in response to the judgement.
“This petition was filed to ensure that children are provided with a better, more healthy childhood,” he said in a statement.
Satyarthi
Filed
Satyarthi’s Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) filed the petition before the Supreme Court in 2014.
It asked the court to order the government to create rehabilitation centres in each district of India, with a special wing for children.
It also urged a national action plan on substance abuse, to include counselling and rehabilitation.
Experts say peer pressure and academic stress are driving children as young as 11 to drugs.
Almost one in five of India’s drug and alcohol addicts are under the age of 21, according to a 2013 report by the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights.
Nearly five percent are aged between 12 and 17 years, the report found.
India arrests central bank official:
Indian investigators arrested a central bank official Tuesday for allegedly illegally exchanging old bills worth some 15 million rupees ($222,000) for new ones as the country faces a cash crisis.
The arrest comes at a time when many Indians are struggling to find the cash to buy food following the government’s shock move last month to withdraw high-denomination 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes from circulation in a bid to tackle tax evasion.
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation arrested K. Michael, an official at the Reserve Bank of India, in the southern city of Bangalore after they found him working with a state bank employee to convert old banknotes without legal documentation.
“K. Michael... has been arrested for his alleged involvement in converting old 500 rupee and 1,000 rupee notes worth 15 million rupees into 100 rupee notes,” a CBI official told AFP on the condition of anonymity.
Investigators also found him hoarding 16 million rupees in new 500 and 2,000 rupee banknotes.
The RBI said Michael was a junior official and had been suspended.
“The concerned employee has been suspended,” SS Mundra, an RBI deputy governor, told reporters.
“We have instituted investigation and due action will be taken once the details are known.”
The CBI has also registered criminal cases of cheating against several public and private bank employees.
Seven middlemen in Bangalore were also arrested for “converting unaccounted cash” and more than nine million rupees were recovered, an official told AFP.
‘Drive’ drags down Nepal’s economy:
India’s scrapping of high-value bank notes last month has dragged down economic growth in neighbouring Nepal with trade, remittances and tourist numbers all down, BMI Research, a group company of the Fitch rating agency, said on Wednesday.
BMI has revised down its forecast for landlocked Nepal’s economy, saying that India’s demonetisation could shave Nepal’s growth down to 2.2 percent for this fiscal year to July 2017, from an earlier estimate of 2.5 percent.
Nepal’s $21 billion economy was already suffering with growth at less than 0.8 percent in the 2015-16 fiscal year after earthquakes in 2015 that killed about 9,000 people.
“The disruption in funds from India is likely to weigh on ongoing reconstruction efforts,” the research agency said in a report, adding that Nepal’s economy was heavily reliant on India for trade, jobs and aid.
Pellets blind hundreds of Kashmiris:
Indian authorities call the shotgun shells filled with hundreds of small metal pellets a “non-lethal” weapon for crowd control, but that does not make them harmless. They’ve inflicted a permanent toll on hundreds of Kashmiris hit by them.
Their faces are scarred. Their eyes are damaged or simply gone, replaced with prosthetics. And their psychological wounds run deeper still.
“What I miss most is being able to read the Holy Quran,” says Firdous Ahmad Dar, 25, a Kashmiri man who lost vision in both eyes after being shot with the pellets during an anti-India protest in the troubled Himalayan region.
The pellets have been in use here since 2010. Soldiers are trained to fire the shotguns below protesters’ waists, causing immense pain but — in theory — no permanent injuries. But a police official acknowledged that the rules are “more or less not followed because of the intensity of stonethrowing protests.” The officer spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with department policy.