Nepal

Kathmandu, September 23

The government has given a monthultimatum to medical colleges to return the extra fees taken from students.

At a meeting held in the presence of Home Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa, Minister of Education, Science and Technology Giriraj Mani Pokharel, the Ministry of Home Affairs today decided to take action against medical colleges if they failed to return the extra charges taken from students within a month.

The meeting also decided to file a fraud case against medical colleges under the Medical Education Act, said Sunil Khadka, media coordinator at the education ministry.

Institute of Medicine Dean Jagadish Prasad Agrawal, medical college deans, Tribhuvan University Registrar Sudha Tripathi, Vice-chair of Medical Education Commission Shree Krishna Giri, along with other officials, were also present at the meeting.

&We will take stern action against medical colleges. We could go to the extent of scrapping their affiliation and quota for medical seats,& said Giri.

We sat for the meeting as it was necessary to stop the anomalies and irregularities of medical colleges. Some medical colleges are found to be charging exorbitant fees.

The government had put a cap on the amount colleges could take from students. A Cabinet meeting, last year, had capped the fees for MBBS course at Rs 3.85 million in Kathmandu valley and Rs 4.24 million outside the valley. However, colleges are found charging extra money under different headings.

Chitwan Medical College students had staged protest nearly three weeks ago after they were told that those who had not paid extra dues would not be allowed to sit for the examinations. They have ended their protest with the signing of an agreement in the District Administration Office on September 21.

Medical students and activists expressing solidarity with the agitating students had staged a peaceful protest on Saturday in Kathmandu demanding stern action against medical colleges charging exorbitant fees from students.

The post Govt ultimatum to medical colleges to return extra fees appeared first on The Himalayan Times.

Kathmandu, September 22

Conflict victims today submitted a memorandum to Minister of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Bhanu Bhakta Dhakal, suggesting revisions to modality for consultations on Transitional Justice Act amendment.

Organising a preliminary consultation with stakeholders on September 16, Minister Dhakal had presented a modality for holding broad-based consultations in all seven provinces to gather inputs for amendment to the Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act-2014. In the memorandum, Conflict Victims Common Platform suggested holding consultations with victims and other stakeholders, separately. It said putting everybody together might result in victims being overshadowed. Separate consultation with victims should be held for one full day prior to holding discussions with other stakeholders, stated the memorandum.

The modality put forward by the ministry has proposed holding consultation with 80 stakeholders, comprising victims, party representatives, media persons, police and army personnel, in each of the seven provinces. As per the proposal, each discussion will last for five hours from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm.

&Proposed five hours will not be enough to gather inputs from all stakeholders. So separate day-long talks should be held with the victims, a day prior to consultation with other stakeholders,& read the memorandum. The victims have also suggested for clarity in the questionnaire. They suggested developing separate questionnaires in consultation with experts for separate issues related to transitional justice, such as reparation, ascertaining truth, prosecution and special court. The victims said provincial headquarters might not be accessible to all victims for holding consultation, specially those in the most conflict-hit areas. So the venues should be fixed in a way to ensure maximum participation of people from conflict-hit areas.

&Conducive environment should be created toensure that victims of rape and sexual violence put forth their concerns without fear or hesitation,& read the memorandum.

Regarding the ministryproposal to include 20 conflict victims, among 80 participants, in the proposed consultation, the CVCP said the proposal should be clear on the body that selected the participants from among the victims, and that the CVCP be recognised as the main stakeholder.

According to the memorandum, rapporteurs should be designated prior to the consultation programmes, and a report should be made public immediately following the consultations. The victims also said all the processes related to consultations should be monitored by the National Human Rights Commission. Former chairman of the CVCP Suman Adhikari said they proposed such revisions because they could not completely trust the government because of its past activities. &We cautiously welcome the governmentmove,& he said.

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Kathmandu, September 22

On an average, 50 to 60 persons queue up outside a makeshift tent set up on the premises of Metropolitan Police Range, Teku, to register complaints regarding stolen or lost mobile phones.

The MPR, Teku, has deployed three police personnel to record complaints regarding missing or stolen mobile phones.

But inside the make-shift tent there is only one computer. Today alone at least 90 people visited MPR, Teku, to file complaints regarding lost or stolen mobile phones.

Apart from those 90 persons, there were 30 to 40 more people who had visited the police range after a month of registering the complaints with the hope of getting their mobile phones back. According to the data with police, of the total complaints regarding lost/stolen mobile phones, only 10 percent mobile phones are traced by police, on anaverage.

To file a complaint, one has to produce the IMEI number of the missing mobile phone.

After a complaint is registered, police ask complainants to visit Metropolitan Police Range, Teku after a month. But in most cases people do not get any information about their missing mobile phones.

As many as 2,882 complaints were registered in the first two months of the current fiscal. Of them police successfully traced 342 mobile phones.

The success rate was slightly higher in fiscal 2018-19with 2,199 mobile phones retrieved successfully.

A total of 16,019 complaints were registered in fiscal 2018-19. In fiscal 2017-18, less than 10 per cent of such mobile phones were retrieved.

Of the 15,787 lost or stolen mobile phones, police had retrieved total 1,518 mobile phones.

Radhika Basnet, a college student from Kausaltar who was at the MPR, Teku, today said she filed a case suspecting her mobile phone was stolen from a public vehicle a month ago, but today police returned her empty handed.

Senior Superintendent of Police Uttam Raj Subedi, who heads Metropolitan Police Range, Teku, said recovering lost mobiles was a huge challenge.

&Chances of tracing a lost mobile phone are slim if the person who finds the mobile phone removes its SIM card. We can locate lost mobile phones if the people who found it used the same SIM or other SIM cards, but people have become very smart. They don&t use any new SIM card in those mobile phones, and use them on WiFi,& SSP Subedi said.

SSP Subedi said although it was easy to trace the location of mobile phones, police had to go through legal procedures causing delay in retrieving them.

&First we need to get permission from the court to trace missing cell phones on the basis their IMEI numbers, as avoiding the procedure would violate peopleright to privacy. The court takes up to 30 days to grant permission,& said a police personnal deployed to record complaints, adding that after getting permission from the court, they had to request service providers like Nepal Telecom and Ncell to trace the location of the missing mobile phones.

Multiple police sources said majority of stolen mobiles were sold in bordering towns of India. &We suspect that there are people involved in such rackets, but we have not been able to crack down on them yet,& said SSP Subedi.

He added, once the stolen mobile phones reach other countries, it is almost impossible to trace such phones.

The post Retrieving lost, stolen mobile phones hard nut to crack for police appeared first on The Himalayan Times.

Kathmandu, September 22

The Federation of Nepali Journalists today staged a protest demanding that journalists Prakash Bahadur Bam, Chakra Kunwar and Sunita Rawal be reinstated to their posts.

The journalists, who worked at Radio Nepal Regional Transmission Centre, Dipayal of the state-owned radio for years, were dismissed without fulfilling any administrative procedures. FNJ officer-bearers and working journalists staged a protest at Hanumansthan, near the southern gate of Singha Durbar.

Last week, as many asnine journalists were arrested by police for staging sit protest in front of Radio Nepal, which is situated inside the administrative headquarters.

FNJ also demanded that Radio Nepal and other media houses implement the Working Journalists Act and the provision of minimum salary for journalists. The umbrella organisation of journalists has been urging the government to implement the act. It has also been urging the media houses to respect the work of journalists time and again, but to no avail.

It stated that working journalists were entitled to appointment letter, salary and facilities as stipulated in the act.

According to the FNJ, some journalists have been facing problems to obtain press accreditation card as concerned media houses failed to submit information such as designation of journalists and their monthly salary structure to the Department of Information and Broadcasting.

FNJ has also pressurised the DoIB to make it mandatory for all media houses to implement provision of minimum salary determined by the government for working journalists.

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