PRESENT GOVT, SHOULD BE GIVEN NATIONAL STATUS SAY GOVT. SUPPORTERS Kathmandu, 20 Dec.: Amid differences between Chairman Prachanda and Vice-chairman and Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai camps in ruling Maoists, a coalition supporting the coalition with five Madeshi parties Thursday Called for turning the coalition into a national government, Prime Minister Bhattarai convened the meeting even as the party chairman supported a successor government led by NC President Sushil Koirala giving an impression of deep differences in the party leading the government. Spokesman Prem Bahadur Singh of the alliance said the incumbent government should e given national unity character. The alliance meets again Saturday when a fresh presidential deadline asking parties to assemble national government ends. PM Bhattarai Wednesday didn’t attend a meeting of party office bearers to discuss the current crisis. Nnnn ALLEGED TAX EVADER ARRESTED Kathmandu, 20 Dec.: Kumar Nath Upreti has been arrested by Central Investigation Bureau of Nepal Police from the capital this week. Upreti is director Rara Construction Pvt Ltd and was convicted fortax evasion. He has been slapped a Rs 13.60 million by concerned authorities. nnnn. COLD WAVE HITS WEST TARAI Kathmandu, 20 Dec.: Normal life has been severely affected in Tarai-based districts in mid-and-far-western regions due to prevalence of cold wave in the region for the past three days, RSS reports fro, Nepalgunj. The snowfall that took place in mountainous and hilly districts here has triggered cold spell in the Tarai belt, said Regional Office of Department of Weather For-cast in Surkhet. With the onset of cold spell, there has been no clear visibility of the sun in the districts and turn-up of service recipients in government offices has sharply decreased. Nepalgunj has witnessed the lowering of temperature to 20 degree, which was 26 three days ago and the cold spell will prevail during more days, said the regional office further said. The flight services to and from Nepalgunj and Surkhet have been disrupted due to incessant snowfall in hilly and mountainous districts. Nnnn UEMC UNLIKELY TO MEET DEMAND FOR TEXTBOOKS Kathmandu, 20 Dec.: Janak Education Material Centre, the government’s sole publisher entrusted with publishing school textbooks is again on the verge of failing to provide textbooks to students at the start of the academic session, The Himalayan Times reports.. JEMC had estimated that it would print 19.5 million textbooks this year, but it has only printed 8.2 million textbooks till date. Currently, JEMC is required to print 123,000 text books per day to meet the target, but it has been printing only 50, 000 each day. According to Sajha Prakashan, JEMC needs to provide sufficient books by the first week of February so that they can supply to the students of Karnali on time, where the academic session begins on February 12. Meanwhile, the government has been aiming to provide free textbooks to community school students across the nation. The latest report of the Department of Education (DoE) said only 54 per cent students had new textbooks in the first week of academic session. The report further said 43 per cent students do not get all sets of books the entire academic year. Suprabhat Bhandari, president of Guardians’ Association Nepal and also a member of Textbooks Distribution Management Central Monitoring Committee said JEMC must share its printing task with other organisations if it is unable to meet the demand by itself. “It’s the right of students to get textbooks on time. So, JEMC should print sufficient textbooks and Sajha Publication should distribute them on time,” he said. Arjun Kunwar, Marketing manager of JEMC claimed, “We will be supplying sufficient textbooks within the given deadline this year as the centre is not facing a crunch of printing papers. Therefore, we will put in all our effort to fulfil the requirements by April-end.” In a shocking statement, Ram Saran Sapkota, deputy director, DoE urged students and their guardians to not depend entirely on textbooks. He said teachers could teach students on the basis of the curriculum. In the 32 districts of the eastern and western regions, private publishers print and publish textbooks, so schools do not face problems. But in the other three regions, students have to rely solely on JEMC’s textbooks, so they suffer every year. Nnnn TRADE UNION MILITANCY HITS NCELL Kathmandu, 20 Dec.: The All Nepal Federation of Revolutionary Trade Unions (ANFRTU) — a trade union affiliated to Mohan Baidya-led Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist — today damaged the Buddhanagar-based tower of Ncell, The Himalayan Times reports.. Blaming the telecom service provider of ignoring the union’s demand to reinstate ousted employees of Hello Mobile, a group today damaged the KAT 208-908 at Buddhanagar, near New Baneshwor. “The mobile connectivity of Ncell at Buddhanagar area was disrupted after our ‘action’,” claimed chairman of Nepal Printing Press and Publications’ Workers Organisation Janma Dev Jaisi, who also informed that the trade union wing will campaign against Hello Nepal in Dang too. “TeliaSonera — a Sweden based telecom giant — has invested in both Ncell and Hello Mobile of Nepal,” he added. Trade union militancy coupled with intra-party rift in the Maoist has hurt not only the private telecom service provider but also subscribers. The company has not yet calculated the loss and the number of subscribers affected. “Vandalism is a police case,” said corporate communications manager at Ncell Sanju Koirala. “ANFRTU has started a campaign to destroy physical infrastructure from Buddhanagar and it will be expanded across the country if our demands are not fulfilled,” Jaisi said, warning the company not to carry out repair work until the issue is settled. Writing to the concerned companies on Sunday, the labour organisation has asked all companies working for Ncell and Hello Nepal to remove their employees from the field. This is not the first instance of the inefficiency of the caretaker government led by Dr Baburam Bhattarai in providing security to the private sector that has been losing confidence in the country, though Bhattarai repeatedly claims of boosting the private sector’s confidence to invest in the country. Claiming that their friends were forcefully terminated by Nepal Satellite Telecom — Hello Nepal — the union had given a seven-day ultimatum to reinstate them in the first week of December. However, Nepal Satellite Telecom said that the workers had left on their own will after a golden handshake. Nnnn RENOWNED SCHOOLS BOYCOTT VACCINATION PROGRAMME Kathmandu, 20 Dec : Some of the renowned schools in the capital have refused to cooperate with the measles-rubella (MR) vaccine campaign launched by the government since last week, Arjun Poudel writes in Republica.. Such schools have barred government sent vaccinators from entering their schools for immunization, officials at Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) said. According to the Child Health Division (CHD), under Department of Health Services (DoHS), schools like Rato Bangla, Little Angles, Galaxy, Daffodil, Florscent, Brihaspati, Chand Bagh etc., have denied entry to the health officials. "They questioned the reliability of the vaccine and did not give permission to our health workers to immunize their students," said Dr Taranath Pokhrel, Chief of CHD. Teachers at Rato Bangla School told the vaccinators only the children of elites study at the school and they don´t need vaccines, Pokhrel said. "No children should be deprived of immunization in the campaign as this is a national campaign," CHD chief Pokhrel said. The CHD has sought help of District Education Office (DEO) to ensure that even the students at those schools receive the vaccine. Officials at CHD said the DEO has assured them that all schools would be persuaded to let the campaign staff do their work. "If the schools do not allow us to do our work even then, we will push for a legal action against them," Pokhrel added. Chief of District Public Health Office (DPHO) Kathmandu, Mahendra Prasad Shrestha said that some of the schools have told the health workers that they would allow them to administer vaccines to their students only after they get formal approval from guardians. "It is not possible to take approval from each and every parent and so we do not seek approval from parents as this is a national program," said Shrestha. He claimed that government does not need approval of parents to immunize children under the campaign. "We have our own rules. We do not allow anyone to enter our school and do whatsoever they wish to do with our children," said Geeta Rana, principal of Galaxy Public School. Rana, however, was forced to relent after parents of the students gave a nod to the campaign. "We can not stand guarantee for vaccines, so we sought approval from the parents," she said later. She said students who were on antibiotic and some others who had already received the vaccine were not immunized. Rubella in pregnant women can cause congenital rubella syndrome, with potentially devastating consequences to babies, according to doctors. They said that children infected with rubella at birth are at risk of several deformities and health complications such as slow growth, mental retardation, malformations of the heart and eyes, deafness and problems related to liver, spleen and bone marrow. It is believed that every year about 1,400 children are born with physical disabilities because of rubella infection. Over 10 percent of pregnant women are under the risk of infection with the rubella virus, reports suggest. The Kathmandu DPHO said out of 416,000 children in the metropolis over 150,000 children have been immunized until Wednesday. DPHO plans to immunize about 658,800 children in the month-long campaign in Kathmandu district alone. About 5.7 million children aged 9 months to 15 years in the Central and Eastern Regions are being immunized with measles and rubella (MR) vaccines in the third phase of the MR Campaign that kicked off on December 14. CHD has requested everybody to cooperate with health officials in immunizing their children. In the first and second phases of the campaign about 4.5 million children in the Western, Mid-Western and Far-Western Regions were vaccinated. MoHP aims to eliminate the diseases by 2015 to meet one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). nnnn