Yadavagiri Footpath Destroyed

The Yadavagiri-Bamboo Bazaar Road (Brahmarshi Narayana Guru Road) is part of the Inner Ring Road even though it is quite narrow. The vehicle density on the road is quite high. There are signs which say that heavy vehicles are prohibited, but this restriction is not being enforced. In addition, the road is quite steep and it is a miracle that accidents do not happen more often on this road.

There are no footpaths on the road except on one side of the short stretch in front of Sunanda School. This makes the plight of pedestrians pitiable. Especially since children going to 4-5 schools use the road and there are 3 hostels including one for blind students.

Now someone has dumped debris on the only useful footpath on this road rendering it unusable (See photo). Since some effort has been made to spread the debris, it is possible that MCC itself has dumped the debris here.

Whoever has dumped the debris must have a sadistic bent of mind because they have destroyed the last vestige of a useful footpath on this road. Now God help the children and the blind students.

Dwarkanath Narayan

Sad State of Roads in Mysore

What is obvious in 99% of the roads in Mysore is that the road has no camber (arched surface) and is lower than the shoulders. As a result, rainwater falling not just on the road, but also the shoulders is forced to flow on the road surface itself. This goes against the fundamental principle of road construction which aims at keeping water off the road surface since water is the primary enemy of asphalt. The extra cost involved in giving the road the proper camber and lowering the shoulders can be more than recovered in the increased lifetime of the road. So the Mysore City Corporation and MUDA and PWD should include road camber and trimming of shoulders also in their specifications list.

Added to this, MCC is not cleaning the side drains properly. As a result, the problem of rainwater flowing on the road itself has become even more acute.

C. V. Sreeroopa

Make Tailgating Illegal

Media have reported about an accident which occurred on the Bangalore-Mysore highway on 17-5-14, in which several cars ran into each other. It appears that the cars were travelling close to each other and when the first vehicle applied the brakes, this multiple-car accident occurred.

Driving too close to the car in front (also known as "tailgating") is a major cause of road accidents worldwide. Many western countries have laws against such dangerous driving practice (See for example). In most of these countries, you are expected to leave at least 2 seconds distance between your vehicle and the vehicle in front of you. Violations of this rule are punishable as dangerous driving. But in India, dangerous driving (Secs. 183-184 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988) does not include tailgating.

Many accidents in the city are caused by tailgating, but since the speeds are low, the only damage caused is a dent in the vehicles. But on highways, tailgating poses a serious danger to life and limb. It is imperative that tailgating must also be brought within the ambit of dangerous driving.

Vishwas

Scrap The Property Tax Calculator on MCC Website

Like many other government departments, Mysore City Corporation too has a website. It has a property tax calculator which is supposed to calculate the property tax on your property when you provide it with the details of your property. We find it so user-unfriendly and inaccurate that it is virtually useless. Here are some its problems.

1. A main ingredient of the property tax calculation is the cost of the land. For determining the cost of the land, the city has been divided into hundreds of divisions and the market value of a square foot of land in each of these divisions has been fixed by the district registrar. When you feed the location of your property, the calculator refers to this table of land values and determines the cost of the land.

But the trouble is, it is almost impossible to feed the location of your property to the calculator. The way it is set up, you first feed the ward number and the calculator gives the option of 3-4 blocks. You choose the right block and the calculator shows you all the streets that are in that ward and block and you pick the correct street. This should fix the division into which your property falls.

But the software has mixed up wards, blocks and streets and as a result, if you enter your ward number, the calculator will not display your street name in any of the blocks. Even if you check all ward numbers and all block numbers you might not find your street, because the street names are given as just 2nd Cross or 3rd Main and you can not be sure if it is 3rd Main, V.V. Puram or 3rd Main, Gokulam. To find the land value for my home which is on 6th Cross, V.V.Puram, Ward No. 32, I have to select Ward No. 38, Block No. 2 and 2nd Main which is nowhere near my real address! This I found out after calling the computer section of MCC.

2. In the present property tax system, the value of the property is the value of the building plus the cost of the land covered by the building (the cost of the land around the building is excluded). In the calculator, the cost of the land under each floor is included separately inflating the cost of the land. So the calculator comes out with a much higher figure than the correct amount of property tax.

3. The calculator does several things which it does not explain and so one is left with the uncomfortable impression that it is increasing your tax liability. Some examples are:
i) When it adds the tax on the land and the tax on the building, the sum is 15% higher than it should be. No explanation is given.
ii) According to the calculator, the cost of construction per sq.ft. of an RCC-marble-teak building is Rs. 340 if it is the ground floor, but Rs. 540 if it is on the first floor! Similarly, the cost of construction per sq.ft. of an RCC-mosaic-teak building is Rs. 580 if it is the ground floor, but Rs. 520 if it is on the first floor. Such mistakes make all the calculations suspect.

4. All the text on the calculator is in English while all the dropdown menus are in Kannada! So you need to know both languages to run it. Why MCC is not offering calculators purely in Kannada and purely in English is not known.

5. The calculator (and in fact all MCC records of properties) measures property dimensions in feet. It is amazing that even after 50 years of banning the British units of measurement and adopting metric units, MCC is still not using metres as units! The Standards of Weights and Measures Act, 1956 made the metre the official unit of length in India. The government and the public were given a grace period of 6 years to convert to the metric system. After 1-4-1962, it is illegal to use non-metric units such as feet. In fact, Sec. 80 of the Standards of Weights and Measures Act, 1976 (which replaced the 1956 Act) mandates that non-metric measures should not even be stated in any enactment, notification, rule or order of the government.

6.The calculator can only calculates tax for the current year. People who have not paid last year's tax can not use the calculator since it does not give a printout of last year's tax.

On the whole, the calculator seems very badly designed with no supervision. It appears quite unreliable. MGP had raised many of these issues with MCC three years ago. But MCC has done nothing. If one examines the calculator carefully, it is certain that many more problems will surface. It is better if MCC shuts the calculator off.

Prof. B.S. Shankara

Better Safety System Needed

We had heavy rains the night of 4-5-14 and when I woke up the next morning, I found that the voltage was very low. I called the complaints number of Chamundeshwari Electric Supply Corporation and was told that repair was going on and that normal power supply would resume in 15-20 minutes. But even after 40 minutes, the problem persisted. So I sent an SMS to the concerned engineer after which the power was shut off completely.

This incident highlights the fact that the system does not function as it should. The assertion by the staff that repair work was going on even when the power supply was not completely shut off is shocking to say the least. Four CESC linemen have been killed by electrocution in the last year, the most recent one being a few days ago when the person who was electrocuted was not a lineman at all, but a worker sent up by the lineman. The point is, what is the system for ensuring that there is no voltage on the line before a lineman climbs the pole to attend to a defect?

Till recently, I was a member of the Consumer Grievances Redressal Forum of CESC and when I asked the engineering staff regarding the electrocution deaths of linemen, I was told that linemen are provided with an instrument that detects voltage on the line from below, and they should not climb the pole without using the instrument. This explanation implied that linemen who were electrocuted did not take the necessary precaution. But I could not get an definite statement about a foolproof system which ensures that when the lineman checks that the power is switched off and climbs a pole for repairs, somebody at the switchboard or the transformer does not switch the line on by mistake.

I have personal experience in operating and maintaining an electricity supply system. In the system I was working with, when the time came for line repair, the power was switched off and the key to the substation gate was taken by the line party, and when the defect was repaired, the line party would return and open the substation with the key. This guaranteed that there was no accidental switching on of power when the repair was going on. Some such system is needed here too.

Maj.Gen.(Rtd.) S.G. Vombatkere

Photos from the Grahaka Patrike

(JSS Pharmacy College) 

C.V. Nagaraj of MGP recently conducted a demo of detecting food adulteration at the JSS Pharmacy College NSS Camp at Kalmahalli.

 (Rotary West) 

R. Chandra Prakash, MGP president spoke recently to Rotary West on the consumer movement 

Phone Problems: G.O. Nullifies Supreme Court Order!

Till 2009, telephone problems (defective billing, illegal charging for song downloads, illegal disconnection, etc.) could be taken to consumer courts and justice obtained quickly and inexpensively.  The National Consumer Commission's website makes this explicit: "The provisions of this (Consumer Protection) Act cover 'goods' as well as 'services'....The services are in the nature of transport, telephone, electricity, housing, banking, insurance, medical treatment, etc." But in a decision that shocked the consumers, the Supreme Court bench of Justices Markandey Katju and Ashok Kumar Ganguly ruled on 1-9-2009 (III (2009) CPJ 71(SC)) that consumer courts can not decide disputes relating to telephones. As a consequence of this ruling, almost all consumer courts  started rejecting complaints against deficiency in service by telephone companies. But now, in another surprise, the Government has issued an order to all consumer courts saying that despite the decision of the Supreme Court, consumer courts can take up disputes concerning phone service. In effect, the G.O. overrules the Supreme Court order!

 The Department of Telecommunications has issued a letter to the Department of Consumer Affairs on 24-1-14 (available at the website) asking it to issue letters to all the District Consumer Fora and State Consumer Commissions in the country stating that the Supreme Court order does not apply and that consumer courts are competent to try consumer telephone disputes. Mysore Grahakara Parishat checked with the Karnataka State Consumer Commission and learnt that it had received the letter from the Department of Consumer Affairs and forwarded it to all the district consumer fora in the state. So now, all the consumer courts should be accepting complaints against service deficiency of telecom companies. 

But it is shocking that the government is overruling an order of the Supreme Court through a letter to the consumer courts. In the constitutional setup of India, if the executive does not agree with a decision of the judiciary, it has just two options:appealing the decision or proposing a change in the law and getting it approved by the legislature. If the government thinks that the order of the Supreme Court in the matter of telephone disputes is faulty, it should file a petition and have the order overturned by a larger bench of the Supreme Court. In fact, the DoT letter mentions that the government of West Bengal wanted DoT to file such a Special Leave Petition before the Supreme Court, but DoT turned the request down. If governments start overturning court orders through executive orders, the Constitution itself will be subverted and there will be anarchy.

What makes things even worse is that while there are several excellent reasons  to reverse the Supreme Court order, the reason given in the DoT letter is feeble. The Supreme Court ruling relied on a provision of the Indian Telegraph Act which said that disputes concerning services provided or authorized by the telephone authority have to be decided only by an arbitrator (and hence not by consumer courts). The DoT letter argues that since 2000 when BSNL was hived off, DoT (which is the "telephone authority") does not provide any telecom services and all consumer disputes are with the service providers such as BSNL, Vodafone, Reliance, Tata Telecom, etc. and so the provision of the Telegraph Act relied by the Supreme Court does not apply. This argument is strictly not valid since the Telegraph Act says that even disputes related to services authorized by the "telephone authority" are outside the purview of consumer courts.  Since the telecom services provided by the service providers are also authorized by DoT, one can not say that the Telegraph Act does not apply.

From the consumer point of view, the Supreme Court order should be overturned as it it denies telephone consumers a simple and inexpensive means of solving their problems. But overturning it through a letter to consumer courts is unconstitutional. It is imperative that DoT immediately files an SLP before the Supreme Court to reverse its decision.

Dwarkanath Narayan

Which is worse, the problem or the solution?

About five years ago, on the advice of an "international expert", many pedestrian road crossings in Mysore were converted into road humps. These humps, constructed at enormous expense are about 9" high and topped with interlocking tiles. From the beginning, it was clear that these humps created more problems than solved: