‘Give me a finger of my son...’: Emotions run high as rescuers toil to reach trapped tunnel workers
With flood waters receding slowly and the height of the slush in power producer NTPC Limited’s tunnel in Tapovan shrinking, rescuers said on Wednesday that they were making steady progress in reaching the 37 men trapped in the tunnel. For families of people believed to be buried in a barrage nearby, hope was rapidly dimming.
As the rescue operation mounted after Sunday’s flash flood in the town in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district entered the fourth day , several families gave up hope of reuniting with their missing kin buried in the barrage and instead pleaded with rescuers to retrieve at least the bodies.
“Give me even a finger of my son and I’ll return to my village to cremate him,” a tearful Ram Daman Singh, father of welder Vijay Singh, feared to be buried in the barrage, begged army officers.
SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft Corp chief executive officer Satya Nadella said social-media services like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube need clearer laws and rules to govern whether controversial accounts, like former US President Donald Trump’s, have a place on their services, rather than being asked to make freespeech decisions themselves.
“Unilateral action by individual companies in democracies like ours is just not long-term stable—we do need to be able to have a framework of laws and norms,” Nadella said in a wideranging interview with Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang. “Depending on any one individual CEO in any one of these companies to make calls that are going to really help us maintain something as sacred and as important as our democracy in the long run is just no way that at least I, as a citizen, would advocate for.”
Microsoft doesn’t currently run a consumer social media service, but it is among cloudcomputing providers that have been pulled into the debate over the deplatforming of certain individual voices, social-media accounts and entire apps, especially following the violent pro
Trump riot at the US Capitol last month. Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit pulled its hosting services from Parler LLC, a social network that touts itself as anticensorship and was popular among conservative and extremist figures. Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google previously had removed Parler from their app stores. The three tech companies’ actions essentially took the service offline. Trump’s account, meantime, was banned from Twitter Inc. and remains suspended on Facebook Inc.
In the past several years, antitrust regulators have ramped up investigations into the market power of large technology companies, just as Microsoft fell under government scrutiny and faced a US antitrust lawsuit more than two decades ago, when Nadella was a rising manager.
The online registration process for admissions to entry-level classes — nursery, KG, and 1 — for the academic session 2021-22 in around 1,700 private schools across the national capital will begin from February 18, the Delhi government announced on Wednesday.
Every year, private schools admit around 200,000 students in these entry-level classes in the non EWS (economically weaker sections) category.
Admission forms will be available on the school websites from February 18 and the last date for submission of forms is March 4. The first list of selected candidates will be uploaded by the school on their websites on March 20. The second list will be released five days after the first one, and the subsequent list, if required, will be released on March 27. The admission process will conclude on March 31.
According to a circular issued by the Directorate of Education (DOE), private schools have also been given autonomy to decide their own criteria for admission and upload them on Doe’s website by February 17, although the directorate warned schools not to include 62 listed criteria that were abolished by the Delhi government in 2016, including parents’ education, profession, income, food habits, and written or oral interviews of both students and parents.
Soon after the DOE notification was released, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal posted a tweet saying, “Congratulations to all parents and children. We will have to bring back the normalcy in our schools by defeating covid-19 pandemic. Our schools are waiting for their students.”
Delhi education minister Manish Sisodia also wished parents and students on Twitter.
DOE has made it mandatory for the schools to charge only ₹25 for the application form.
According to the circular, DOE has fixed an upper age limit of 4, 5, and 6 years as of March 31 for admission to nursery, kindergarten (KG), and Class 1, respectively. The minimum age for admission in these classes is 3, 4, and 5 years as of March 31 respectively.
The schedule for admission released by DOE will cover 75%of so-called general category seats available in private unaided and recognised schools in Delhi.
The schedule for the remaining 25% seats reserved for the economically weaker section (EWS) and disadvantaged (DG) categories will be announced in coming weeks.
The department also warned schools to ensure that the number of entry-level seats on offer is equal to the highest number of seats on offer over the past three years.
The centralised process for admissions to entry-level classes for at least 200,000 seats in around 1,700 private schools, which usually commences in November or December, has been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Even as the admission process is beginning with a delay of over two months this year, it will conclude well on time as in previous years, with the DOE simplifying the application process.
“Although almost all the parents will be ready with required documents for the admission process by now, what would be done in case something else is required while filling the forms. It takes time to get any new document issued. Sometimes we need to get the documents updated as well. It would have been better if the DOE had given us more time for filling the forms,” said Varsha, a parent of four-year-old girl who is due to be admitted in the current session.
Ameeta Mulla Wattal, principal of Springdales School in Pusa road, said, “There is still a window of more than a month between the commencement of the registration process and the release of the first list of selected candidates. The schools will cooperate in case parents have any difficulty filling the forms.”
Tania Joshi, principal of The Indian School, said, “The admission process required basic documents such as birth certificate and resident proof. Parents normally keep all these documents handy.”
In December, officials at the DOE said the department was considering skipping the entrylevel admissions this year in view of Covid-19. However, the proposal was criticised by officials across private schools.
The action committee of unaided private schools — an umbrella body of over 400 schools — welcomed Doe’s notification on Wednesday. “We appreciate DOE for considering the views of the schools and the parent fraternity and issuing notification for the admission process. Private schools will start working on the registration process as per the schedule,” said Bharat Arora, general secretary of the committee.