SEVEN PILGRIMS KILLED, EIGHT INJURED IN SALYAN JEEP ACCIDENT

SEVEN PILGRIMS KILLED, EIGHT INJURED IN SALYAN
JEEP ACCIDENT

Kathmandu, 30 March; Seven pilgrims from Srinagar, Salyan, died Friday when a jeep Friday fell 300 meters off a highway in the far-West district.
Eight were injured.
The pilgrims were going to Khairavang for puja at a temple from Srinagar, police said.
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TEXTBOOK SHORTAGE LIKELY THIS YEAR AS WELL
Kathmandu, 30 March: The claim made by educational stakeholders that the students of various parts of the country are likely to face textbook shortage even during this year has turned out to be true as the Janak Education Materials Center (JEMC) is yet to print some 5.2 million units of textbooks, Manjima Dhakal writes in The Rising Nepal..
The center has a target to print 19.7 million units of textbooks for this year.
Earlier, the JEMC and the Ministry of Education (MoE) claimed that this year the textbooks would be available in time. However, with just two weeks of the start of new academic session, the center has backtracked from its commitment.
Arjun Bilash Panta, publication department chief of the center, said it has already dispatched textbooks to remote areas and would complete the printing by the third week of Baishak.
It shows clearly that this year also the textbooks will not available in time.
Panta informed that now the center failed to operate its printing press round the clock in the lack of printing paper. Now, it has opened Letter of Credit as per the demand of the printing papers. From Sunday, JEMC will operate its printing press for 24 hours.
The center claimed that now it had been printing around 100,000 textbooks each day to meet its target of 1, 9700000 copies of textbooks.
Some 26 tons of paper is needed to publish 100,000 units of textbooks, production technician said
If printing goes in the current pace the center will only print around 1,500,000 textbooks before the start of the academic session. The textbook crisis will be witnessed this year too.
Sajha Publications, the distributors of JEM textbooks, had failed to dispatch textbooks to several districts just ahead of the start of the academic session.
Suprabhat Bhandari, chairman of the Guardian Association, said the monopoly of JEMC and Sajha Prakashan in the publication and distribution of textbooks is the main reason behind the crisis of textbooks shortage.

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POOR RIGHTS INDEX RECORD FOR NEPAL





Kathmandu, 30 March:
Nepal is ranked 102nd out of 130 countries with a poor score of 4.4 out of 10 in the International Property Rights Index (IPRI) 2012, The Rising Nepal reports.
Nepal has scored 3.2 in Legal and Political Environment (LP), 5.9 in Physical Property Rights (PPR), and 4.1 in Intellectual Property Rights (IPC). With this score, the country lies on the 4th quintile out of the five quintiles, according to the IPRI), a publication of the Property Right Alliance (PRA) based in Washington DC.
Gender equality in property rights is another important aspect of the report which highlights the disparities in property rights between men and women. This is more striking in the developed countries, the report said.
As per the report, in the context of Property Rights and Gender Equality, Nepal ranks 68th this year along with Zambia and Uganda.
Nepal’s IPRI score has improved in the last two years with an increase of 0.4 in score in 2011. The country’s score earlier had been a stagnant 4.0 from 2008 to 2010. LP has had trouble increasing due to decreases in its subcategories of rule of law, political stability and control the corruption, the report said.
Sambriddi, The Prosperity Foundation, is the partner think tank in Nepal for PRA. This has been releasing the IPRI in Nepal since 2011, which is one of the most comprehensive international measurements of property rights around the world.
The IPRI scores and ranks each country based on 11 factors reflecting the state of its Legal and Political Environment (LP), Physical Property Rights (PPR) and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
During the release of the report, economists and business leaders called for ensuring the peoples’ rights to property as legally and politically for the country’s economic development.
Senior economist Dr. Bhola Nath Chalise said that the economic prosperity of the country will not be achieved until the state ensures the people’s rights to property.
The people’s rights to property have not been ensured and protected in the country due to political instability, he said.
He underlined the need for the government to protect the property of the people legally and politically.
Another economist Dr. Chiranjivi Nepal called for ensuring the people’s rights to property as a fundamental right, which alone could play a crucial role for the economic development.
Most of the countries who have become successful in achieving he economic development only through ensuring the people’s rights to property, he said.
He blamed that the State had failed to ensure the people’s rights to property even after the political changes.
Suresh Kumar Basnet, president of Nepal Chambers of Commerce (NCC), said that the investments and economic activities will be affected without protecting the people’s rights to property legally and politically.
He said that ensuring the property rights as fundamental rights is necessary to increase investments and accelerate the process of economic development in the country.
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