Guwahati, Aug 26 :
The Northeast’s contribution to raw silk produced in the country is
projected to reach 15 per cent by the end of the Twelfth Plan — up from
14 per cent clocked at the end of the last five-year plan.
The region’s contribution has been
steadily increasing since the Ninth Plan, during which it contributed
nine per cent of the country’s total production.
“We have been providing all support and
this will continue through the entire plan period. We expect to see the
share of the Northeast going up to 15 per cent by the end of this
period. It could be even more,” Central Silk Board joint secretary Sarat
Deori said. “The Northeast’s contribution in the vanya (wild) silk sector of the country is significant.”
Four varieties of silk are produced in the region — mulberry, eri, muga and oak tussar.
Sericulture is practised in 81 of the 84 districts in the eight states
(including Sikkim) of the region. The region produced 100 per cent of
the muga, 99 per cent eri and 100 per cent oak tussar silk in the Eleventh Plan.
A board official said the region’s
advantage was that most silk farmers were traditional weavers — a
strength when it comes to value addition and additional income
generation. Altogether 3,37,106 families are involved in sericulture in
the region.
The financial allocation for the region
has also been showing a rising curve since the Ninth Plan when it got 19
per cent of the central funds. During the Eleventh Plan, the silk
board, under the ministry of textiles, had released Rs 229.05 crore and
the tentative allocation for the Twelfth Plan is Rs 266 crore — 30 per
cent of the country’s total allocation.
While Meghalaya was the second largest
contributor from the region after Assam during the last five-year plan,
Manipur is expected to bag second position in the current plan period
because of its ambitious mulberry silk production target.
Moreover, the share of mulberry silk
production of the region is expected to double, reaching two per cent of
the country’s total production by the end of the current plan.
The region’s targeted production in the
Twelfth Plan is 4,836 metric tonnes, of which Assam’s target
contribution is 2,630 metric tonnes, followed by Manipur at 750 metric
tonnes. In the Eleventh Plan, the region produced 3,305 metric tonnes
and Assam 2,112 metric tonnes with the BTAD contributing 374MT.
The contribution of the Bodo belt towards
Assam’s silk production was roughly 30 per cent in the last plan, and a
number of steps are being taken to increase this share. Four new model
farms for silk production are being set up in in the BTAD.
The cockroaches fled the facility in Dafeng, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, for surrounding cornfields earlier this month after an "unknown perpetrator" destroyed the plastic greenhouse where they were raised, the Modern Express newspaper said.
Disease control authorities have sent five investigators to the area to come up with a plan to stamp out the insects.
Farm owner Wang Pengsheng invested more than 100,000 yuan ($16,000) in 102 kilograms of Periplaneta americana eggs after spending six months developing a business plan, the report Friday said.
The cockroach is generally considered a pest, but believers in traditional Chinese medicine—which uses both plants and animals, including endangered species—say extracts from it can treat diseases including cancer, reduce inflammation and improve immunity.
By the time the greenhouse was damaged, more than 1.5 million cockroaches had hatched and were being fed food including "fruits and biscuits" every day, Wang was quoted as saying.
He had expected to make around 1,000 yuan profit for every kilogram of cockroaches sold, according to the report, but was now facing losses of hundreds of thousands of yuan.
One of our favorite questions from readers for
Economics in Plain English was deceptively simple: What, after all, is
money? And what sets it apart from something that's simply valuable? A
big abstract idea like this called for a hands-on experiment.
In this episode, business editor Derek Thompson pays a visit to a
branch of EagleBank in Arlington, VA, to bother the world's friendliest
bank teller with a series of dumb requests. As goofy as it seems, this
little experiment is a helpful way to illustrate three essential
functions of money: a store of value, a unit of account, and a medium of
exchange. But you'll have to watch to see why.
It
isn’t easy being the Little Mermaid, who on Friday turned 100 years
old. In fact, since the early 1960s, she’s had an exhausting life as the
target of countless, often violent, vandalisms and other “happenings.”
Thanks in no small part to her authority as a symbol of Denmark, the
mermaid has over the years become the go-to spokeswoman for the agendas
of different groups who use the statue as an ironic mouthpiece to talk
about affairs both domestic and global, lighthearted and grave.
The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Panoramic Images/Getty)
It
started in 1961, when students painted a white bikini on the statue.
Shockingly, in 1964, the statue was beheaded in what should be
interpreted as a political assassination. “She had to die,” Cecelia
Zwick Nash, daughter of the late Situationist artist Jørgen Nash, who
confessed to “killing” the mermaid, says. “She was too naïve.” The
statue’s demise made headlines on the front-page of newspapers as far as
Tokyo and Moscow; a Madrid editorial called the headless mermaid “a
symbol of a world that has lost its head.” In the next decades, the
statue has sported everything from Islamic chador to KKK robes, masks of
the faces of Danish politicians, to Pussy Riot-style balaclava. Dozens
of times she has been sloshed with paint, was beheaded a second time in
1998, and was dynamited off her rocky roost on the 2003 anniversary of
9/11. Every injury is necessarily repaired by her “doctors” at the Royal
Bronzery. “But she has strong muscles,” Jesper Vind Jensen, a critic
for the Danish paper Weekendadvisen, says, adding that he and many of
his fellow citizens “are grateful for the statue.”
The
bronze statue by sculptor Edvard Eriksen was originally, and quietly,
erected on a pile of boulders at the lip of Copenhagen Harbor in 1913,
in honor of a prima ballerina named Ellen Price de Plane who had danced
the title role in an adaptation of native son Hans Christian Andersen’s
fairytale “The Little Mermaid,” about the sea princess who traded her
voice for legs because she loved an earthling prince, but mostly, and
most importantly, because she wanted a human soul.
And
while 1 million tourists come to visit her every year, arguably no one
loves her more than the Chinese. Their love of the Little Mermaid began
with Mandarin translations in 1918 of the H.C. Andersen story;
generations of Chinese have grown up with his tales, and Andersen
resonates with them as a real proletariat: a poverty-stricken,
hard-working man from the slums who persevered to achieve ultimate
success. So popular is Andersen in China that next year a $13-million
theme park based on his fairytales will open in Shanghai.
So popular is Andersen in China that next year a $13-million theme park based on his fairytales will open in Shanghai.
In
recent years, the piscine darling has helped secure the Scandinavian
country favorable trade and tourism agreements with China. When former
Chinese president Hu Jintao embarked on a state visit to Denmark last
year, he wanted to meet the Little Mermaid in person. In response, the
Danish Foreign Office constructed a wooden observation deck on the
esplanade specifically for Juntao’s brief visit, complete with a red
carpet. In 2010, in an historic and unprecedented move, the Danish
Ministry of Culture decided to loan the mermaid for the World EXPO in
Shanghai. Called “a business trip” by Danes, the act had the symbolism
of a small, aspiring country marrying their beautiful daughter to a
superpower.
And
the statue continues to serve in a diplomatic capacity to the People’s
Republic of China. Denmark has long had a relationship with China,
having established diplomatic ties in 1950—the first European nation to
do so. The Chinese government, however, broke that relationship off in
early 2009, after Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen received
the Dalai Lama in Copenhagen. Already opposed to the statue’s trip,
which they called “grotesque,” the right-wing Danish People’s Party
threatened to block the Little Mermaid trip to the EXPO as punishment.
Nevertheless, she went and was received in China as a VIP. The Danish
pavilion, where the mermaid was housed in a blue lagoon, was second in
popularity only to that of the Chinese pavilion, and during the course
of her March-to-November stay, some 5.5 million people visited the
little fish-girl there.
“She
did such a good job,” former Danish Ambassador to China Christopher Bo
Bramsen told me at the time. Indeed, since then, Chinese tourists have
been flocking to Copenhagen. Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
reports that an unprecedented 80,000 Chinese traveled to the country in
2011, the year after Shanghai’s “year of the mermaid,” and the numbers
have been ever record-breaking. In 2012, Scandinavian Airlines
inaugurated two daily, direct routes: from Beijing and Shanghai to
Copenhagen.
On
Friday, the little lady’s big birthday, Wonderful Copenhagen
live-blogged reports of the celebration in Mandarin. Additionally, a new
informational sign was revealed, telling just a little of the Little
Mermaid’s life story in Danish, English, and Mandarin. And, all day long
Copenhagen buses that run routes to Carlsberg brewery and the mermaid
at Langelinie Quay flew celebratory Danish flags. “Usually that is
reserved for royalty,” says Signe Hedemann Mikkelsen, Wonderful
Copenhagen’s Project Leader for the statue’s centennial. “But she is
royalty.”
By Tejesh Kumar Bongaigaon, Aug 25 : Seven youths from Mizoram were arrested last night with 68 packets of pseudoephedrine and cetrizine tablets at New Bongaigaon railway station.
The group, which comprised five boys and two girls including three minors, were coming from New Delhi on the Rajdhani Express and reached New Bongaigaon yesterday afternoon.
Police said the youths have confessed that they were supposed to hand over the consignment to peddlers in Guwahati. All mail and express trains halt for 10 to 15 minutes at the station.
An elderly person, according to the statement of the two girls, had arranged railway tickets, paid Rs 10,000 to each of them and gave the packets to be taken to Guwahati. But the girls did not reveal the name of the person.
Those arrested, excluding the juveniles, have been identified as Elixer Mpa, 21, Lalnuntluanga, 28, Lalrinomi, 19 and Zoram Mawii, 19.
The police had arrested another group, including two Mizo girls and four Mayanmarese youths, with 367 packets of narcotics at New Bongaigaon station on July 26.
Aizawl, Aug 25 : Despite several steps taken by the Mizoram government, human trafficking is very much active in the state, revealed a latest study conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Human traffickers, the report says, employ agents in rural areas of Mizoram to lure Myanmarese nationals living near the border into India through the porous boundary.
The UNODC report, while praising the efforts of the Mizoram government on the issue of human trafficking, said the traffickers have accomplices in villages and lured in rural folks from Myanmar by promising them lucrative jobs outside the state.
The traffickers also have agents inside Myanmar, especially those near the Mizoram border, to help people cross the 404-km-long porous international border, the report said.
The report added that many Myanmarese nationals trafficked via Mizoram are either forced to work as unpaid domestic helps or sex workers.
Mizoram is the first state in the northeast to formulate a 'Victims of Crime Compensation Scheme', the UNODC report said. It added that the scheme was formulated in 2011 to ensure that the victims of human trafficking were rehabilitated.
The burden of financial assistance for the victims of human trafficking is shared by the Centre and the state government.
The government also constituted anti-human trafficking units, which organize workshops and trainings to create awareness on the issue. The officials of these units have rescued several victims of human trafficking from different places including Goa, Mumbai, Haryana and Delhi.
Aizawl, Aug 23 : There were 592 fresh tuberculosis cases in Mizoram since January till June this year and 43 people have died of the disease in the state during the same period, state health department officials today said.
Participants in the TB Review meeting held in Aizawl were informed that 91 per cent of those infected with TB were cured during the same period.
The increase in the TB infection was found to be disturbing, the officials said, adding that there were only 79 infections during last year.
Doctor Gautam Borgohain, Consultant of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that Mizoram would be given CB-NAAT machine costing over Rs 35 lakh so that the doctors in the state could impart better treatment to the TB patients.
