NGO World forays into Islamic Microfinance with Farz Foundation
Relief and Development Organization ‘NGO World’ has recently entered into an agreement with Shariah certified Islamic microfinance institution ‘Farz Foundation’ to replicate its Islamic Microfinance Methodology in poverty alleviation programs.
Under this partnership, both the organizations will create and raise awareness for Shariah compliant finance products by conducting training sessions, workshops with the poor community.
Farz Foundation will be extending its advisory services and an Islamic Microfinance institutional development facility to The NGO World for the fool proof implementation of Shariah Compliant poverty alleviation system. It will assist The NGO World to establish Farz Methodology livestock project as a poverty reduction tool.
The mutual operations will begin in August 2011 with capacity building sessions and area survey for Islamic Microfinance Branch opening.
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Zulu bitter man - youth NGO
THE Evangelical Youth Alliance has condemned former Solicitor General Sebastian Zulu’s statement that President Banda’s administration is corrupt.
The organisation’s president, Reverend Moses Lungu, said in a statement yesterday it is shameless for Mr Zulu to claim that President Banda has lost the battle against corruption and is not fit to run the country.
Rev Lungu said Mr Zulu knows that President Banda has been spearheading the fight against corruption in many ways, including creating jobs for thousands of unemployed Zambians.
"Mr Zulu must not mislead people by making unsubstantiated statements. We all know that he is fighting his personal battles, and people must not believe that he is talking for the people," he said.
Rev Lungu said fighting corruption is not only prosecuting those suspected to be involved in the vice.
He said giving people the power to buy goods and services, like the current government is doing, is one of the best ways to fight corruption because poverty in most cases is the root cause of corruption.
The clergyman said the MMD government, through former presidents Frederick Chiluba and Levy Mwanawasa, and now President Banda, has redeemed the country.
He described Mr Zulu as a "bitter and disgruntled lawyer" who likes to wage war whenever he is bitter about something.
Rev Lungu said it is well known that from the money that Mr Zulu was earning from the now defunct Task Force on Corruption, he allegedly tried to overthrow Chief Nyamphande of Petauke.
"I come from the same village as Mr Sebastian Zulu, so I am not talking from without. Mr Zulu is capable of saying and doing anything to appease himself," he said.
Rev Zulu urged all youths in Zambia to rally behind the MMD during this year’s elections.
And former MMD information and publicity secretary for Eastern Province Mathias Mbirintengerenji has urged Zambians not to pay attention to Mr Zulu’s rantings.
Mr Mbirintengerenji, who is a founder member of the party in Eastern Province, said President Banda’s fight against corruption is visible and that those who do not want to recognise this fact are deceiving themselves.
He said President Banda’s government has scored a number of successes saying this is the reason why he should be re-elected.
Mr Mbirintengerenji said there is no need to change a government that is working.
He predicted a resounding victory for MMD, saying the party has broken all opposition strongholds.
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NGO proffers solution to electoral violence
A non-governmental organisation, African Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR), has said that the only way of ensuring free and fair elections in West Africa countries is to set up an effective electoral dispute resolution mechanism.
Fielding questions from newsmen in Owerri at the weekend, the Executive Director of the centre, Austin Onuoha, said the body under the partnership of West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), has served as a partner of ECOWAS Earlier Warning Mechanism (ECOWARN) to ensure effective resolution of electoral crisis in the sub-region.
According to him, since the past eight years WANEP has worked closely with stakeholders in West Africa Sub-region to support free and fair elections.
His word; “WANEP has come to realize that electoral dispute mechanisms are sine qua non in the struggle to promote free and fair elections. However, to date no comprehensive, practical handbook exist that offers practitioners guidance on principles, strategies, approaches and tactics.”
According to him, “these are the tools needed to organize and implement coordinated, effective action towards preventing and mitigating electoral conflicts in the sub-region,” adding that “WANEP is organizing a consultative meeting with experts and practitioners across West Africa to develop a Practice Guide that can serve as a practical handbook to inform practitioners in undertaking interventions towards resolving electoral disputes and violence.”
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Govt scan on adoption agency
The state government on Friday promised a probe into the activities of an NGO that had given away children for adoption even after the licence allowing it do so had expired.
Parents of the adopted children had approached the government after failing to secure from Scotlane Poverty Eradication Scheme (Spec), the NGO, documents needed to make the adoptions legal.
According to the Central Adoption Resource Agency rules, a child can be legally sent for pre-adoption foster care — lasting two months — after a clearance from the Child Welfare Committee and filing a petition in the high court.
Spec, giving away children for adoption since 2002, allegedly did neither. Complainant parents said they only had to sign on a stamp paper.
Sumanta and Rina Banerjee of Dum Dum, who had adopted a girl through the agency in January 2009, are still to get her birth certificate.
“Our daughter should be admitted to school now but we cannot do that as we do not have her birth certificate. The NGO has cheated us. Not only did they not follow the procedures of adoption, they charged us Rs 2.35 lakh, much higher than the government prescribed adoption charge of Rs 35,200,” alleged Sumanta, who met women and child welfare minister Sabitri Mitra on Friday.
The agency allegedly duped at least 72 couples like the Banerjees.
The minister said: “We will conduct a thorough probe into the activities of the NGO. This is about the future of these children and we will not allow any foul play.” After the probe, the government will decide whether to “blacklist” Spec.
Manoranjan Chakraborty, the secretary of Spec, said the NGO gave away for adoption children left with it by their biological parents.
“We send the children for the new parents’ foster care and give them away formally only after the court validates the process,” he claimed at Writers’ Buildings on Friday.
“Seventy-two kids are not getting birth certificates as they were given away for adoption by us when we did not have the licence,” he added. He could not explain why the NGO did so.
After its licence had expired in March 2009, Spec was granted a provisional licence by the women and child welfare department that did not allow it to give away children for adoption. Chakraborty denied overcharging the parents but acknowledged that the NGO “accepted payments in cash”.
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Taxing property is “haram” in Islam, claims Salaf NGO
Religious NGO Jamiyyathul Salaf has claimed that imposing taxes on a Muslim’s property without his or her consent is haram (forbidden) in Islam.
“Without doubt, using a person’s property or profiting from the property without the consent of the owner is haram in Islam,” the NGO said today in a press release. “Only the compulsory Zakat (alms for the poor) portion can be taxed from a Muslim’s property.”
Salaf cited Surah 2:188: “And do not consume one another’s wealth unjustly or send it [in bribery] to the rulers in order that [they might aid] you [to] consume a portion of the wealth of the people in sin, while you know [it is unlawful].’’
In addition, the Salaf press statement referred to Prophet Mohamed’s (pbuh) final sermon, in which he said, “O People, just as you regard this month, this day, this city as Sacred, so regard the life and property of every Muslim as a sacred trust. Return the goods entrusted to you to their rightful owners.”
Salaf noted that Islam protected personal property “to an extent that is not found in any other religion.”
The religious NGO contended that “formulating a law and taking people’s property whatever name it is done under is for a certainty haram.”
“Jamiyyathul Salaf would remind the Speaker of Parliament and all MPs that those who formulate such laws and those who assist them will without a doubt have to bear responsibility before Almighty Allah,” the Salaf statement warned.
It adds that there is consensus in the Islamic ummah (community) that “stealing property by compulsion with laws on taxes, duties and pension imposed on a Muslim’s property is definitely haram.”
Salaf warned that those who claimed personal property “for entertainment or as a sport” would face their old age with “no one to care for them.”
If the state believed that there was no other way to manage its finances but to “take taxes and duties from the halal income of Muslim citizens,” Salaf said that it implied “corruption and a failed economic policy” and was the sign of “a philosophy of enslavement.”
Press Secretary for the President Mohamed Zuhair observed that there were many civilised Muslim nations that had introduced direct taxation as well as import duties.
“Salaf should refer to the parliament on this issue, because the parliament cannot make any law against the tenets of Islam,” Zuhair suggested. “I believe that parliamentarians will keep to the tenets of Islam in drafting any law.”
Zuhair added that as Islam was the most modern of the three monotheistic religions, he did not believe taxation could be haram.
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Motorists irked at the lack of traffic policemen
A senior citizen returning home after dropping his grandchildren in Sadar, had a miraculous escape at police headquarters lake T-point, on Monday, after his two-wheeler was hit by a youth on rashly driven motorbike. He was, however, caught some two meters away from the signal, where four traffic cops were nabbing red-light jumpers.
"As he was passing through the T-point junction in green light, a youth on bike, who had jumped signal hit his vehicle," explained eye witnesses. "The accident could have been averted if a cop was deployed at this point, which has become accident prone since the installation of a traffic signal," they added.
While motorists wondered why policemen are standing hidden behind trees, away from junctions to catch traffic violators, a senior cop justified it saying, "We stand away from the junction simply because it is impossible to catch the violator at the place of violation. Speed of the vehicle increases the chance of accidents. We have to flash a message and flag down the violators, at least a hundred metres away."
Police said that cases of red-light jumping has increased manifold in last three-and-half-years. From January 2008 to June 2011, they have caught 2,01,096 motorists and recovered Rs 2,16,61,400.
Vinay Kunte, who has formulated his own fundamentals of safe driving asserted that traffic policemen today are themselves uninterested to regulate traffic. He said, "It is frequently noticed that habitual offenders are not caught by the traffic policeman. Also, these 'munshis' catch people who are poor. I had raised this issue with the police commissioner, Ankush Dhanvijay but he claimed that manpower crunch is the reason why traffic cannot be regulated effectively." He added that a surprise checking should be done at each square to instill the respect and fear of traffic laws in people's minds.
General secretary of Jan Akrosh, a city based NGO, Ravindra Kaskhedikar said that it is no point in passing on the buck to people as policemen are at fault due to their inability to enforce traffic rules. He said, "Nowadays, traffic policemen are not visible at the squares, so citizens find it easy to flout traffic rules. Policemen are only interested in increasing the revenue collection of the government." He further informed that there is a total failure of legislation especially in case of traffic laws due to the high level of incompetence and lethargy.
However, there were different viewpoints too which pointed out that citizens lack self-discipline to follow any rule. Tushar Mandlekar, an advocate said that people should themselves stop flouting rules and adhere to the law, regardless of the presence of traffic policemen.
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Conference reinforces Executive, NGO fight against HIV/AIDS
The executive secretary of ANASO, António Coelho, said in Rome, Italy, that the conference on HIV came once again to strengthen the need for governments to work with civilian NGOs, to mobilise people and fund raising.
António Coelho, who was speaking on the sidelines of the sixth international conference on pathogenesis, treatment and prevention which ended Wednesday, said that it is necessary to empower people with HIV, as taking the lead of the process may easily help to eliminate the stigma and help other new cases.
ANASO, which controls 60,000 people living with HIV, will develop massive campaigns to support the movement to reduce prices of antiretroviral drugs, because if there is no reduction in access to medicines will be compromised.
He added, however, that in Angola, the abandon rate is so high and resistance, because the process of taking drugs is quite long and ally themselves with poor access to them, and can compromise the prevalence rate, which so far is one of the lowest in the region.
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Orissa-based NGO Opposes BPL Survey Census 2011; says Poor will be left out
After the disastrous BPL Survey of 2002, the Government of India is now carrying out yet another anti-poor BPL Survey in 2011. The survey has started already and Odisha will be covered in October. Had the 2002 survey been implemented in Odisha, large numbers of poor households would have been left out.
The faulty identification process would have ensured that in comparison to the poorest district of Koraput, a greater proportion of households in Cuttack would have been selected as BPL. In spite of this, till as late as end of 2009, the Central government kept on pushing the Odisha government to implement this survey. Fortunately the government of Odisha stood its ground and a gross injustice was prevented from taking place. The Right to Food Campaign had gone to the Supreme Court on the 2002 BPL survey and had obtained a stay on it. Ultimately this stay was taken off through discussions between the campaign and the GOI. The GOI had then defended the 2002 survey as one with a robust methodology designed by experts. Ironically, in the opening presentation on the BPL Survey 2011, the government has mentioned that the 2002 survey was full of errors and while many poor households got left out because of that survey, many non-poor were included. Would this have happened if it had taken our comments seriously?
The new survey, which comes after 9 years of the last one, is no less fraught with errors. This is evident from the proposed poverty estimates, and the proposed methodology for identifying the poor. While poor people all over India will be adversely affected by the survey, the poor of Odisha will be even more so. The poor of Odisha will be affected on account of problems with both poverty estimation as well as identification of the poor. The NC Saxena Committee which was formed on the basis of the Supreme Court order on the 2002 BPL Survey, has recommended that at least 84.5% of Orissa’s rural households be identified as BPL. However another committee (The Tendulkar committee that has nothing to do with the SC Order on the 2002 Survey) has recommended that 60.8% of Orissa’s households be recognised as BPL. By accepting the latter, the GOI has planned to push 24% (about 16 lakh households) of Orissa’s rural households out of the proposed BPL List. To add to this injustice, the identification criteria proposed for the survey will leave out the majority of Orissa’s farmers, fishers, weavers and other artisans, petty traders and Dalit Christian households. The Government of Orissa, Political Parties, People’s Organisations and civil society must oppose this.
The 2011 BPL identification process comprises of three steps. First some households will be compulsorily excluded from the BPL List on the parameters of employment, income and asset ownership. From among the rest of the households, those from some highly deprived communities will be automatically included. The rest will be ranked on the basis of their score on 7 deprivation indicators. The cut off score will be determined based on the quota (based on Tendulkar Committee figures) available for BPL list in Orissa.
The exclusion criteria will ensure that a vegetable vendor or a hawker with a second hand moped will be equated to the owner of a motor bus or expensive car and excluded from the BPL list. Under intense and illegal competition from Trawlers, most marine fishers have been forced to motorise their boats (the Government of Orissa gives a subsidy of Rs 10,000 on a motor on a unit cost of Rs 40,000/-). Such fishers will be thrown out of the BPL list. On the other hand someone with 30 acres of land could still join the race for BPL identification if he can claim that the land is not in his name but in the name of his father or grandfather.
Five categories of people, Homeless, Destitute & those living on alms, Manual Scavengers, Primitive Tribal Groups and legally released Bonded Labourers will be automatically included. Such inclusion is surely welcome but Government of Orissa claims that there are neither manual scavengers in Orissa nor bonded labourers. As for the other three categories, they would hardly be 1% of Orissa’s households. On the other hand the recommendations of the Saxena committee to include single women, households headed by persons with disability or by minors have been rejected by the GOI. Such poor and vulnerable households will now have to go through the survey process and definitely many will get rejected from the BPL List.
The scoring system for rest of the households is not really on poverty indicators but on destitution indicators. Almost all the questions in this section are misleading. For instance, if a household has just one kutcha room and as a result one of the members sleeps in the hut for the goats /sheep, it will be considered to have two rooms and deprived of any score on this point. The minimum measurement for a room to be counted as a dwelling room has been fixed as 2 metres long, 1.5 metres wide and 2 metres high, i.e. about 6.5 feet long, 5 feet wide and 6.5 feet high. The lavatories of the people who set these norms must be much larger than this size. Is it not a sad joke played on the poor?
If the head of a household is a minor it should get a point under the 2nd deprivation question. But if that minor is 16 years old then it will get no scores. The minor who has no place in the voting booths, in the NREGA, or in jobs, will be counted as a major only for the purpose of the BPL Survey. This betrays the government’s intention to exclude as many as possible from the BPL list by hook or by crook. If the household is headed by a single woman but the woman has a 16 year old son going to school, it will get no point for being single woman headed. Perhaps the government wants to say “Now you are 16 child! Enough of studying! Now work and support your mother.” A household with a PWD should receive a deprivation point, but if a household is entirely composed of PWD individuals with only one 16 year old school-going girl, it will get no point for disability. A migrant labour household with ½ acre of third quality ceiling surplus land will not be receiving a point under the ‘landless labourer’ criteria although it is deemed landless as per the state government’s ‘1 standard acre’ norm. A weaver, fisher, any artisan, or a woman who has started a small tea shop or petty shop with a loan from an SHG, will get no score on this point even if it is totally landless as it would fail to get classified under ‘casual labour’.
The survey will be done with tablet computers without any paper being used. There is no role for the Gram Sabha in the survey process. It will merely be handed over the print outs of the score sheets after the entire survey is over and a two-three hour meeting will be considered enough to verify and finalise the scores. The villagers who are regularly taken for a ride in the use of EVM in elections (e.g. push the third button to start the machine and then vote whoever you want to), have been asked to give an undertaking that they have read and understood what has been entered in the tablet computer. Ironically the government says that in case the person is illiterate s/he could give the undertaking by affixing her/his thumb impression on it. Forget about the respondents, will even the surveyors (Anganwadi Workers / Asha Karmis ) be able to understand what has been fed in to the Tablet Computer. Will the survey not rest entirely on the data entry operator appointed not by the government but by the Bharat Electronic Limited? In urban areas, Persons living with HIV & AIDS will be asked to reveal their HIV status in the survey and will be asked to sign a document that says that all information other than Caste and Religion can be shared in the public domain. What kind of transparency is this, what accountability?
Almost all government welfare schemes from 2 rupee rice to IAY are restricted to those with BPL Cards. From 2012 this is going to be applied for both kerosene and fertilisers. Government says that too much money is being spent on subsidies, but the reality is that in the last few budgets, the central government has given 4 to 5 lakh crore rupees worth of subsidies to private companies. Then there are the benefits given to the corporate through the lakhs of crores lost to the exchequer on account of corruption like 2G scam or mining scams. The simple fact is that the government does not want to give any support to the poor. That is why it takes recourse to all sorts of statistical jugglery to arrive at lower poverty estimates. That is why the government has accepted the FAO calorie norms for sedentary workers (driving to office in a car and sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned office) as the calorie norms for rural Indians doing backbreaking work.
In the perspective we must:
1. Oppose the anti-poor BPL Survey 2011
2. Oppose the statistical Jugglery on poverty done by pro-corporate economists
3. Create awareness in the grassroots about the anti-poor BPL Survey through meetings and through trial runs.
4. Connect to and Mobilise the groups, such as small farmers, fishers, weavers and other artisans, petty traders, Dalit Christians, single women, persons with disability etc., that are going to be the worst affected in the BPL Survey.
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Salem man arrested in connection with stolen vehicle
A Salem man driving a vehicle reported stolen in Portland two days ago, was arrested early today.
Trung Ngo, 39, came to the attention of a police officer who spotted the vehicle around 2 a.m., traveling in the 3300 block of Market Street NE.
When Ngo saw the officer, he pulled the vehicle into the parking lot of Red Lion Hotel.
A search of the stolen vehicle yielded drugs and drug paraphernalia, said Salem Police Lt. James Aguilar.
Ngo was arrested without incident and placed behind bars in Marion County jail.
He faces charges of unauthorized use of motor vehicle, possession of a stolen vehicle, possession of methamphetamine, and violation of a previous release agreement
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