Info panel comes down heavily on Corporation for bad roads
The Hindu
It wants former defence engineers deployed to inspect all 200 wards
The Tamil Nadu Information Commission (TNIC) has come down heavily on the Greater Chennai Corporation for poor quality of roads, rainwater harvesting structures and drainage systems that caused flooding and inconvenience to the residents.
State Information Commissioner S. Muthuraj wrote this, disposing of a petition filed by V. Murugesh, city convener, All India Students Welfare Organisation, Chennai, alleging irregularities in road-laying at Perumalpuram abutting Greenways Road.
In his 2018 petition filed under the Right to Information Act, the petitioner said his area got flooded in the rain because of bad road work and sought details of the same. He alleged that the authorities were reluctant to part with the information sought since Ministers, Madras High Court judges and other senior officials were residing in the area.
Several principals of government and private schools in Delhi on Tuesday said the Directorate of Education (DoE) circular from a day earlier, directing schools to conduct classes in ‘hybrid’ mode, had caused confusion regarding day-to-day operations as they did not know how many students would return to school from Wednesday and how would teachers instruct in two modes — online and in person — at once. The DoE circular on Monday had also stated that the option to “exercise online mode of education, wherever available, shall vest with the students and their guardians”. Several schoolteachers also expressed confusion regarding the DoE order. A government schoolteacher said he was unsure of how to cope with the resumption of physical classes, given that the order directing government offices to ensure that 50% of the employees work from home is still in place. On Monday, the Commission for Air Quality Management in the National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas (CAQM) had, on the orders of the Supreme Court, directed schools in Delhi-NCR to shift classes to the hybrid mode, following which the DoE had issued the circular. The court had urged the Centre’s pollution watchdog to consider restarting physical classes due to many students missing out on the mid-day meals and lacking the necessary means to attend classes online. The CAQM had, on November 20, asked schools in Delhi-NCR to shift to the online mode of teaching.