Malaysia and India have agreed to liberalise air services by boosting flights by 50 percent between major cities and opening up access to secondary airports in India.

Under the pact, aviation authorities will also be allowed to designate as many carriers as they wish to operate on the India-Malaysia route, the Indian government said in a statement issued in Kuala Lumpur.

Designated carriers from both sides can raise the number of flights between Malaysia and six major Indian destinations by 50 percent in the upcoming winter schedule, it said, following last week’s bilateral aviation talks in Kuala Lumpur.

More : in.today.reuters.com

Civil society and the people should take a more meaningful stance to check corruption and mismanagement in the country that has now become a day to-day affair said Wijedasa Rajapakse, MP and Chairman, Parliamentary Committee on Public Enterprises .

He said this while addressing the Key Persons Forum on The Theme COPE Report, Corruption in State Agencies and Impact on Business Sector. organized by the Small and Medium Enterprise Developers (SMED) of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FCCISL) and Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNSt) at the JAIC Hilton Hotel.

He said that the failure to sustain rule of law in the could be the root cause for the escalation of corruption, mismanagement and crimes and said that even this collapse of rule of law has inflicted the ethnic war.

More : asiantribune.com

Congressman Jim Moran, Virginia Democrat, announced today that the House Appropriations Committee has passed its FY08 Financial Services Appropriations bill which contains pay parity (3.5%) for federal employees, requires the GSA to identify all impediments to making federal buildings environmentally friendly and provides $26.4 million for OPM to digitize its retirement records.

Federal employees work along side our military in operations around the world, said Moran. Our battle against terrorism would be crippled without their support. Last month, the Armed Services Committee raised military pay by half a percent. By including an identical raise for civil servants in todays bill, the House Appropriations Committee is keeping in-line with a decade of Congressional support for pay parity which the President included in this years budget.

Source : americanchronicle.com

Towards the end of the First World War, with the rapid development of air techniques, the need to protect the civil population from air attack was felt very seriously. And an Outfit known as A.R.P. (Air Raid Precaution) came into being. The people living in the cities in this part of the sub-continent during the Second World War, can remember that whenever a siren was sounded the people of the cities used to go into trenches for shelters. This Outfit gradually developed into Civil Defence with greater responsibilities during the Second World War and thereafter for taking all necessary measures to reduce the damage caused by various war actions. In the then East Pakistan Civil Defence was organised by the government in 1951 constitutionally by an Act. The following year, to perform those responsibilities, this Department opened Civil Defence Academy and introduced various subjects for study and organised training groups of people drawn from various public and private organisations as well as volunteers from general public. The overall concept of this training was to teach general public to reduce the effects of war on them. For training the methods to be adopted to following Civil Defence measures were considered necessary:

(a) Preventive and Precautionary Measures: Those measures are organised to enable us to take steps before the development of Air Raids to minimise their effects, these include (i) Warning System (ii) Lighting Restrictions (iii) Camouflage (iv) Evacuation and Dispersal (v) Shelters and Structural Protection.

(b) Civil Defence Services Proper: The possibility of an Air Attack and the damage to be caused by it can not be ruled out by adopting Preventive and Precautionary measures only. Therefore the following Civil Defence operational services consisting of paid officers and staff and volunteers are to be organised to minimise the damage to life and property:

More : nation.ittefaq.com

Call them Indias youth exemplifying grace in the face of adversity. Coming from humble backgrounds, five students two each from Maharashtra and Bihar, and one from UP have made it to one of Indias most prestigious clubs, civil services, through the dint of sheer hard work. To be precise, they are well aware of the dictum: There is no shortcut to success. TOI lists them out as success stories.

Govind Jaiswal: Narayan Prasad Jaiswal, who gives out rickshaws on contract, does not know what IAS means. So, when his son Govind Jaiswal qualified for the civil services, coming 48th, his illiterate father thought his son had got a government job. But when he was told his Govinda would become a collector saheb, he could scarce believe it.

The Jaiswal family has been living in a 12×8 sq ft rented room on the first floor of a house at Usmanpura, in one of the narrow lanes of Varanasi, for the past 35 years. Narayan spent a large chunk of his meagre earnings from his rickshaws on the studies of his children. I normally earn Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,000 per month, most of which goes into meeting the education costs of my kids, Narayan said.

More : timesofindia.indiatimes.com

The district administration has made all arrangements for the conduct of Civil Services Preliminary examination in the twin cities on Sunday.

District Collector R.V.Chandra Vadan addressing media persons at the Collectorate here on Saturday said the preliminary examination would be held in 40 centres in the city. The zonal/ supervisory officers and candidates should reach the centres well ahead of the scheduled time.

Examinations were also set up in Barkas, Kanchanbagh in the old city and adequate bandobust at every centre including those in the old city for the peaceful conduct of the exam. The Collector said that supervisorsshould be cautious in distributing questions papers meant for morning and afternoon only during those sessions.Any lapse in this would result in cancellation of the exam at national level.

Source : hindu.com

Top civil services promotion body — the Central Selection Board (CSB) — had never been so confused as it was last week when it considered innumerable cases of promotions but could not recommend even a single promotion for fear of contempt of court.

The meeting was slated for a full day session on last Thursday, however, it continued hardly for a couple of hours. And most of the time was consumed on discussion on how to respond to the superior judiciary’s orders, which sought promotion of certain officers before a set deadline. Sources said that the board did not want to invite displeasure of the courts but at the same time was not willing to do what the judiciary had precisely ordered to the Establishment Division.

The CSB, which is generally represented by the Establishment Division in the court cases, was directed by the superior judiciary to consider promotions cases of certain officers. Headed by a retired general with no experience of civil services, the CSB found itself in a catch-22 situation, as it was clueless how to deal with the situation.

More : thenews.com.pk