ZEE FACES CASE OF FORGED CAG DOCUMENTS
Trouble continues to plague Zee News with the Delhi police on Friday registering a case against the channel for allegedly showing a forged annexure of a CAG report on coal block allocation. Zee News, however, dismissed the charge, claiming it was a “figment of the imagination, mala fide and oppressive”. Two senior editors of the channel were earlier arrested for allegedly trying to extort `100 crore from the Jindal group.
On Friday, the crime branch registered a case of cheating and forgery after it found out that the channel allegedly forged a particular section of the CAG report. It was claimed that crime branch sleuths compared the actual CAG report with the screen grab from the show and apparently detected a forgery.
have increasingly killed hundreds of people across the world and injured thousands.
Topping the misery chart in recent times is Japan’s tsunami, which claimed a jaw dropping 15,700 lives. The fear induced globally by such instances of climate change has also gifted developed nations a reason to meet every year and make policies that seem pro-environment but in reality are pro-rich countries and anti-poor nations!
One such global event that is organized under the pretext of addressing global warming is the UN Climate Change Conference.
The latest conference, better known as COP 18 (Conference of Parties; session 18), which concluded in Doha last month is a case in point. Nothing can be more paradoxical!
A summit on protecting
The COP summit, on protecting the environment, was held in a city (and a country) that in all probability is the largest contributor to global warming. What an irony!
the environment was held in a city (and a country) that in all probability is the largest contributor to global warming.
Surprisingly, no renewable sources of energy are used in Doha, which has a per capita annual carbon emission of 50 tonnes that is three times that of US, eight times that of China and 33 times that of India!
Moreover, this so-called Climate Change Conference, year after year, witnesses delegates flying down in their fuel-guzzling private jets from all corners of the world, parades of motorcycles plying through the streets for security checks, water supplied from state-of-the-art power consuming desalination plants (in a country where water is the most scarce resource), exotic food items being mobilized from various regions and delegates commuting in sedans and SUVs that guzzle tonnes of fossil fuel.
For around 17,000 delegates for the last conference, more than 21,000 rooms at 87 hotels and residences were blocked, which additionally wasted monumental energy while providing the most luxurious service.
The amount of environment destruction can be gauged by the fact that a similar conference back in 2009 released around 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent!
The rounds at the Doha conference brought nothing except some rhetoric
and efforts to protect the public opinion in the home turf of concerned countries; and of course, big corporate lobbying drives. And appeals to developed nations during the conference were without any effect. Philippines, for instance, made an earnest plea to developed countries for some positive action 1 the most important being aiding poor nations to implement some tangible deals — but found its appeal falling on deaf ears.
There are a host of island states in Asia Pacific and other parts of the world that are exposed to the vulnerability of rising sea levels. The minimum they demanded was $60 billion on the table for the next three years and commitment to scale the figure up from there till 2020 — but they failed to obtain even this.
At the Copenhagen Summit held in December 2009, developed nations cleared a sum of $30 billion to developing countries as additional funding in 20102012.
However, there is evidence now to prove that the funding commitment has not been kept.
Either the promised funding was simply not disbursed or it was adjusted against loans, thus flouting their clearly written obligation to treat the funding as non-refundable aid.
Everything said and done, climatic changes are becoming a greater cause for worry than anything else and for the survival of the Earth itself, and we desperately need a seriously focussed platform that delivers results.
The much hyped COP 18 doesn’t really seem to be that.
It has, at the most, been latently helping a few nations, besides allowing political leaders to showcase their oratory skills and allowing backdoor lobbying, notwithstanding the fact that the conference brings in a new wave of tourism to Qatar, which of course comes at a cost to the environment. And not to forget, the biggest climate change summit was organized in a country that itself earns around $7,000 million every month from the export of fossil fuel!
Undoubtedly, COP 18 is a failure; it’s time for a serious rethink and action. (The author is a management guru and hony direc
tor of IIPM Think tank)