Haveri: Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who spotted rainwater leaking into the emergency maternity ward during his visit to the Haveri district hospital on Tuesday, ordered the immediate suspension of Manjunatha Nayak, assistant engineer of the health department.
The leakage was attributed to delays in the completion of construction work on the hospital's top floor.
Before attending the review meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the CM went directly to the district hospital to have a look at the situation there.
Upon witnessing the hospital's deplorable condition, he expressed his strong disapproval to the officials present. He called Additional Chief Secretary (health) Anil Kumar and instructed him to place the Assistant Engineer under suspension without delay.
"How could you proceed with construction on the upper part of the ward without relocating the patients first? Don't you have any common sense?" he questioned the district surgeon and engineer. "Do you lack humanity? Aren't you being paid your salary?" he questioned.
Instructing prompt action, Siddaramaiah demanded that the rain leakage issue be resolved within four days. Furthermore, he asserted that the contractors responsible for the construction delay be blacklisted.
During his visit, he inspected various wards of the district hospital and inquired about the patients' well-being.
Interestingly, a group of women in the corridors of the hospital approached the Chief Minister and pleaded for an end to liquor sales in their villages. They shared their concerns about the detrimental effects of alcohol on families and sought blessings for the betterment of their communities.
The unexpected visit by the Chief Minister garnered overwhelming support from the public, particularly from the women, who applauded his hands-on approach to rectifying the hospital's issues.
FILE—‘WITHDRAWAL OF CASES IN RIOTS UNDER DISCUSSIONS,” SAID CM
FILED BY M B GIRISH
BENGALURU—“Withdrawal of cases in DJ Halli and KG Halli riots of Bengaluru city is under discussion at the State Government level,” said Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
It is said that former minister and Congress MLA Tanveer Sait had written a letter to Minister for Home Dr G. Parameshwar asking him to initiate steps to withdraw cases against the rioters in Devara Jeevanahalli (DJ) and Kadogondanahalli (KG) riots which rocked Bengaluru city in 2020.
It may be recalled here that people went on a rampage over an inflammatory post shared by a relative of then Congress MLA Akhanda Srinivas Murthy and set on fire the house of the Congress MLA besides attacking the police station and also setting on fire several vehicles parked on the roads.
Reacting to the violence and State Government mulling over withdrawal of cases against rioters, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and previous Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai questioned the State Government over its intention to withdraw cases in the violence in DJ Halli and KG Halli and stated that National Investigation Agency (NIA) has taken up the case for investigation and claimed that enough evidences are available on the involvement of functionaries of both Popular Front of India (PFI) and Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).
Bommai cautioned the State Government that the move to withdraw cases against the rioters would be ‘betrayal’ of voters' trust (on Congress party) which elected them to power and asked the State Government not to succumb to pressure and withdraw the cases against the rioters.
The former Chief Minister said to wage a legal battle if cases against rioters are withdrawn and also go to the people’s court in coming days.
Nayyar Azad/Patna
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Wednesday expressed his concern over the condition in Manipur and asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to issue a statement in the Parliament on the situation in the northeastern state.
Talking to reporters on the sidelines of an event in Patna Mr. Kumar said that the opposition’s demand for Prime Minister’s official statement was “justified”.
“There seems to be no sign of an end to the violence in Manipur. In such a scenario it is justified for the opposition to demand Prime Minister’s statement on the issue. He must give a statement in the parliament. People especially the women in the state are suffering due to the violence. The attack on women in Manipur is shocking and disturbing”, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said.
“Can you imagine the brutality faced by women in Manipur? They were paraded naked. Such incidents are highly condemnable. The Prime Minister must issue a statement in the parliament”, Nitish Kumar told reporters in Patna.
After unsuccessfully demanding a statement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Manipur violence, the opposition alliance INDIA on Wednesday brought a no-confidence motion against the central government in Lok Sabha.
Later Rajya Sabha also witnessed unruly scenes with the opposition demanding Prime Minister’s statement on the issue.
While talking to reporters in Patna, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar also took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for comparing the opposition alliance INDIA with banned outfits Indian Mujahedeen and Popular Front of India.
He said that the BJP was “under lots of pressure and scared” after the opposition parties organized two successful meetings recently.
“In the next meeting, we will address other important issues. We also want to sort out seat-sharing issues among the political parties”.
About the recently held NDA meeting in New Delhi, Nitish Kumar said that the BJP was forced to call a meeting after the opposition parties organized a gathering in Patna and Bengaluru recently.
“Do you remember how many meetings of the NDA were held earlier? The BJP organized a meeting in New Delhi recently because they were scared of our unity. Remember, during Atal Behari Vajpayee’s time, NDA was formed. I was with the NDA and attended meetings. But in 2017 when we came to NDA again how many meetings of the NDA were held?”
BJP infighting in Nizamabad plays out at party headquarters
DC CORRESPONDENT
HYDERABAD, JULY 26.
Differences in the BJP’s Nizamabad district unit came to the fore on Wednesday with a group of around 100 party leaders from various mandals of the district holding a flash protest at the party headquarters in Hyderabad and shouting slogans against Nizamabad MP, Arvind Dharmapuri.
The BJP party office was rocked by the noisy protests by party leaders from four Assembly constituencies falling in Nizamabad district. They were demanding action against Arvind alleging that he had his followers appointed as presidents of 13 mandal BJP units by replacing long-time and sincere party workers who were holding the posts. This, they alleged, Arvind did by forcing the district party president B Laxmi Narasaiah to do his bidding.
Arvind, meanwhile in Delhi, said he had nothing to do with the appointments and that it was a party decision taken by the district party leadership.
The protesters who squatted in the entrance lobby of the party office and shouted slogans against Arvind, initially refused to listen to the pleas of party secretary Dr S Prakash Reddy to stop their protest and sloganeering after which they can present their case to the state BJP president G Kishan Reddy who was in the party office. After some heated arguments, the party leaders and workers from Balkonda, Armoor, Bodhan, and Nizamabad Rural Assembly constituencies relented and some of them met with Kishan Reddy to put their side of the story to him.
However, Kishan Reddy gave them a dressing down and made it clear that protests like the one they held will not be tolerated and that any problem or issue party leaders or workers have, can be communicated to the party leadership which will look into the issue and take action as required.
It was on July 24 that Arvind tweeted about the appointment of new BJP presidents for 13 mandals in Nizamabad district, setting off a chain of events that began with local protests that culminated in the demonstration at the party headquarters on Wednesday.
Manipur violence: Fresh clashes at India-Myanmar border town Moreh; abandoned houses of Meiteis torched by mob, buses set on fire
BY MANOJ ANAND
Guwahati, July 26: Amid the ongoing efforts to restore normalcy, fresh incident violence came to light on Wednesday when a large mob of people torched nearly 30 abandoned houses and demolished several others in the India-Myanmar border town of Moreh on Wednesday morning.
Informing that a large mob of nearly 2000 people comprising men and women launched an attack on Moreh Bazar, security sources said that the arson came hours after two buses used by security forces to transport security personnel were set on fire by a mob in Kangpokpi district.
The incident had occurred at Sapormeina when the buses were coming from Dimapur on Tuesday evening. Locals stopped the buses bearing Manipur registration numbers at Sapormeina and insisted that they would check if any member of another community were on board, the officials said. Some of them set the buses on fire.
Indicating that mob that came out in Moreh on Wednesday was backed by armed miscreants security sources said that a combined team of Assam Rifle, Moreh Police, CDO and BSF are engaging in pushing back the mob and cross fire with Kuki militants who are suspected to have been backing the mob.
Top police officials said that the premises and the buildings attacked by the mob were the same that were already targeted in previous attacks. The mob backed by armed miscreants also targeted the forest office building at Moreh, security sources said.
Pointing out that most of the abandoned houses belonged to Meiteis who left the place after the violence in the state broke out on May 3, security sources did not rule out the possibility of people from across the border (Myanmar) being the part of the mob.
The authorities were tight-lipped on the identity of the people engaged in the attack. If local reports are to be believed, several private residences have been burnt down including that of a journalist. Situation continues to be tense.
Informing that security forces resorted to firing to disperse the mob and contain the arson, security sources however claimed that there was no report of casualty. (EOM)
Triple murder of Assam is the case of love jihad: Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma
BY MANOJ ANAND
Guwahati, July 26: Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma here on Wednesday said that sensational triple murder case of Golaghat is a case of love jihad as a 25-year-old mechanical engineer, Nazibur Rahman Bora, identified himself as Hindu on Facebook and befriended Sanghamitra Ghosh in 2020 and later got married and murdered his wife and her parents in Golaghat on Monday.
Mr Sarma who visited the victims' family in Golaghat on Tuesday told reporters that his government has decided to press for capital punishment to the accused who was injecting drug to his wife. Asking all to remain alert against love jihad and not to take a decision of life bsing the information shared on Facebook or other social media, Mr Sarma regretted that the victim woman was converted to Muslim in West Bengal before her marriage.
It is significant that a love story that started during Covid lockdown on Facebook love ended in a gruesome triple murder in Assam's Golaghat district on Monday.
The turbulent relationship between 25-year-old Nazibur Rahman Bora and 24-year-old Sanghamitra Ghosh culminated into the grisly crime this Monday when he murdered her and her parents, before surrendering to police with their nine-month-old baby in his arms.
According to police, Nazibur, a mechanical engineer by qualification, and Sanghamitra became friends on Facebook in June 2020, during the nationwide lockdown to contain the pandemic. Friendship turned to love within months and in October that year, the two eloped to Kolkata. Sanghamitra's parents brought her back home, but she had already married Nazibur in a Kolkata masjid.
The next year, Sanghamitra's parents Sanjeev Ghosh and Junu Ghosh registered a police complaint, accusing her of theft. Sanghamitra was arrested and spent over a month in judicial custody. After getting bail, she returned to her parents' home, police said.
In January 2022, Sanghamitra and Nazibur eloped again, this time to Chennai, where they lived for five months. When the couple returned to Golaghat in August, Sanghamitra was pregnant. They started living at Nazibur's home and had a son in November, police said.
However, four months later, in March this year, Sanghamitra left Nazibur's home with her infant son and went to her parents' home. She accused Nazibur of torturing her and registered a police complaint. A case of attempted murder was registered and Nazibur was arrested. He was released on bail after 28 days.
Once out of the jail, Nazibur wanted to meet his child, but Sanghamitra's family did not let him. In fact, on April 29, Nazibur's brother registered a police complaint, accusing Sanghamitra and her family members of assaulting Nazibur.
On Monday afternoon, as tensions between the two sides reached a breaking point, Nazibur murdered his wife Sanghamitra and her parents. He then fled with his nine-month-old baby. Later, he surrendered before police. "A case of murder and house trespass has been registered against the accused," Assam police chief GP Singh said. The state CID team has been roped in to probe the ghastly murder. (EOM)
FILE—CM ASSURES PROTECTION TO MINORITIES OVER UCC, PIC ATTACHED
FILED BY M B GIRISH
BENGALURU---A delegation of Muslim Personal Law Board met Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in Bengaluru on Wednesday expressing apprehensions over the implementation of Uniform Civil Code (UCC) and the delegation received assurance from the Chief Minister that the interests of Minority communities would be protected and respond to the implementation of Uniform Civil Code (UCC) after publication of draft.
The delegation of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board included former Rajya Sabha member Rehman Khan, Minister for Housing Zameer Amhed Khan, MLA Rizwan Arshad, Political Secretary to Chief Minister Nazir Ahmed, Maulana Syed Mustafa Rafai Nadvi, Maulana Syed Muhammad Tanveer Hashmi, Maulana Shabir Ahmad Hussaini Nadvi and others.
“Our government will never allow suppression of rights of minorities,” said the Chief Minister and termed the decision of the Union Government to implement UCC as creating unnecessary controversy in the wake of forthcoming Lok Sabha elections in 2024.
Earlier, the delegation expressed fears that Muslims rights are under threat over UCC and the previous Law Commission had rejected the Centre’s proposal saying that the proposal to implement UCC was not feasible since the country has diverse cultures. Now, the Centre has again asked the Law Commission to review the implementation of UCC leading to apprehensions among the Muslims.
The delegation also brought to the notice of the Chief Minister that the Law Commission in collecting opinions from the public over UCC and the Muslim Personal Law Board have signatures of more than a crore people against the implementation of UCC and the petitions collected by the Muslim Personal Law Board have been sent to the Law Commission.
EPC Companies Can Bring the Realized Profit at Par with Budgeted Profit
Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) companies engaged in the development of power infrastructure networks often discover that their realized margin by the end of a project is significantly lower than what they were anticipatingduring project initiation. EPCconsultants offer delays in project execution and cost overruns as the main culprits behind this.
No surprise, therefore, when one realizes that EPC companies have put in mammoth efforts to reduce their lead times. Some companies have been successful in this attempt.However, this does not mean the end of all their troubles. They have not been able to realize their budgeted margins totally. While it hovered between 8% and 10% earlier, it now lies between 2% and 5% - a significant erosion still! This is because the gross margins of EPC companies are usually in the range of 5% to 10%.
What can we conclude from this? It is pretty straightforward. No doubt timely completion of projects is quite essential, but that alone will not save EPC companies from going under. The root cause remains to be unearthed if a true solution is to be discovered and implemented.
Material Mismanagement – The Main Culprit behind Margin Leakage
A deeper and closer examination of any EPC project will reveal material management or mismanagement as the main culprit behind this disparity between realized and anticipated margins. The various ways in which material wastage happens are given below:
a) Inventory excess at project end:Unutilized material at project end is, usually, worth up to ~5% of the contract value. This impacts the bottom line for the project, and by extension, the company directly.
b) Sub-contractor in possession of unaccounted material: To compound the problem faced by EPC companies, the EPC construction consultants point out, material worth as much as 0.5% to 1% of the contract value are in the possession of EPC sub-contractors, and this is a significant chunk of material!The last nail in the coffin for EPC companies is stuck when they realize that they have very little chance of getting this material back from their sub-contractors, as this material is often issued without collecting any financial collateral/guarantee from the sub-contractor.
c) High outstanding owing to inter-project transfer of material:Project sites are often plagued by issues of material shortage, and they have very little time at their disposal to procure new materials. They overcome this challenge by transferring material from one project/ client to another. It goes without saying that such transactions must be regularized with both the clients involved (the sending and the receiving entities). If this is not done, it leads to inventory-related anomalies in the books. Moreover, clients will not release the retention amount without the required documentation for this regularization.
d) Operating expenses going through the roof: EPC companies busy trying to complete their projects on time, often, delay this documentation task. These pending documentation tasks related to material management delay the project's financial completion, forcing EPC companies to keep their stores open, resulting in increased operating expenses.
e) Wastages/damage cost:While some sites face material shortage issues, others experience the opposite problem – materials are dumped much earlier than the actual need-by date. As you can imagine, thisresults in damages and wastages to the material owing to multiple handling, inadequate/inappropriatestorage facilities, etc.
Misguided and ineffectual solution approaches
Since they have excess inventory at their disposal, EPC company managers try and negotiate to get additional work from their clients with the view to utilize this material in a productive manner and cut their losses. This is a desperate measure, as there is still no guarantee that all the surplus material will get used up (that is, assuming that the client agrees to increase the work scope). On the other hand, this additional scope might necessitate the EPC companies to procure additional material!
Another way by which EPC companies try to improve their margins is by going after their sub-contractors who are in possession of excess material, and which they refuse to return to the EPC companies, using the legal route. The result? Lengthy legal battles, senior management wasting their time and effort in these futile activities which they could have utilized more fruitfully on more productive and value-adding tasks.
But before we start discussing the solution, let us pause and analyze the dilemma faced by site engineers.
“Shall I focus on executing the project or in reconciling material?”
The dilemma is real, as both tasks are equally important as far as the site engineers are concerned. While the completion of the physical work is a project execution-related task, reconciling the quantity of material issued with the quantum of material consumed is an example of a material reconciliation-related task. And even though both activities are expected to go hand in hand, that does not happen. Getting the project underway is the more critical task during the initial phase of a project, as project progress is what the management wants to see.
It is only towards the end of the project that top management starts to focus on collection through the closure of work fronts. However, closure can occur only when all the open issues are resolved. However, most of the open issues are related to material availability necessary to complete the pending project scope. And, in order to know the amount of material that is needed to complete the pending scope of work, EPC companies must know how much of the procured material has already been used. Hence, the focus shifts to material reconciliation. Unfortunately, by this time, significant damages may have been created already by this delaying of reconciliation tasks.
It is not that Project Managers are unaware of the necessity of completing material reconciliation on time, but the simple truth is that they cannot focus on both tasks simultaneously because of their limited bandwidth.
So, then, what is the way out?
Why do we assume that the same engineer must be involved in both tasks? Make the required information available and ask another engineer to take up the reconciling activity of any entity. EPC companies now have two sets of dedicated teams focusing on both critical tasks. Sounds too simple? Where will the new team of engineers come from? How can EPC companies afford this new team?
Truth of the matter is, EPC companies do not need to hire extra engineers to implement this solution.
If adopted, this model ensures that companies stay focused on a limited number of worksites at a time both for execution and reconciliation, that they undertake 3-way material reconciliation at an entity level, that there is discipline in the way handovers happen, and that there is proactive management focus on resolving execution issues. So, this allows EPC companies to execute projects with shorter lead times and releases significant capacity. So, if there are 100 engineers, 90 can be assigned to the project execution tasks, while 10 engineers can focus on the reconciliation task. True, the total number of engineers focusing on project execution has come down, but this leaner team can achieve more as they are multi-tasking between execution and material reconciliation tasks very infrequently.
Implement these steps and see projects getting completed faster and with little or no material-related margin leakages. Result? The gap between budgeted profit margins and realized profits can be brought down significantly.
Nilesh Riswadkar
Nilesh, a Partner with Vector Consulting Group, is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of rich consulting experience in area of project management. The companies Vector has worked in the area of EPC include Bajaj Electricals (EPC), Godrej E&E, KEI, Tata Bluescopeetc, just to name a few.
Japanese company starts project work
DC Correspondent
Chennai, July 26:
Less than two months after signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in the presence of Chief Minister M K Stalin in Japan, global MedTech leader Omron Healthcare Corporation held a ground-breaking ceremony for its new manufacturing plant on Tuesday.
The plant being developed at an estimated cost of Rs 128 crore by Omron Healthcare Manufacturing India Pvt. Ltd. (a subsidiary of Omron Corporation) is the Japanese firm’s first-ever facility in India.
The plant, coming up at Origins by Mahindra, Ponneri, will manufacture Automatic Blood Pressure Monitors and is expected to begin operations in March 2025.
Takuto Iwanaka, Director, Omron Healthcare Manufacturing India Ltd., said: “The new manufacturing plant will house advanced machinery and cutting-edge technologies to ensure efficient and precise production processes.
He said the company was grateful for the support and encouragement received throughout the planning and execution of the project. ‘The new manufacturing plant will generate employment opportunities and will also contribute to the overall economic development of the region,’ he said.
The company taking quick steps to start the manufacturing unit in the State, reaffirms Tamil Nadu’s position as the ideal investment destination for global companies. Tamil Nadu contributes significantly to the Medical Devices sector in India and is one of the largest medical equipment producing States.
