Religion row: Decision on expert panel deferred

Mangaluru, Feb 6: A 40-day old child with cardiac condition was shifted to Bengaluru’s Jayadev Hospital from Father Muller Hospital in Mangaluru through a green corridor traffic.

Hospital sources said the ambulance carrying the 40-day old patient was provided Green Corridor by police department throughout the way.

Saiful Azhman, who is just 40-days old has been diagnosed with heart-related ailment. Doctors at FMMC hospital provided basic treatment to Saiful and advised that he be taken to Jayadeva hospital for advanced treatment.

Bengaluru, Feb 24: Census authorities in Karnataka have requested deputy commissioners in the state’s districts to hold outreach and awareness campaigns about the National Population Register (NPR), as they fear misgivings about the exercise could hurt the forthcoming enumeration of population.

The house-listing phase of the Census and updating of NPR will be rolled out simultaneously by mid-April in the BJP-ruled state.

About 1,50,000 enumerators will handle the massive exercise.

Officials believe widespread awareness will help address concerns about the NPR data-gathering process and make people cooperate with enumerators when they visit houses for both NPR and census work.

“Sensing the kind of questions that enumerators may face when they do house visits, in all video conferences with deputy commissioners of districts, we have requested to establish contact with local representatives,” SB Vijay Kumar, director of Census Operations in Karnataka told news agency. “We have asked them to organise outreach programmes to ensure that people’s doubts are resolved before the information gathering work begins,” he added.

Census operations are handled by the Union home ministry. Several district officials are said to have raised concerns about the possibility of people refusing to share information when the work on the census and NPR begins in two months. This would affect the quality of the census work, making the exercise incomplete.

news channel earlier reported that people in parts of Karnataka had declined to share personal information with officials visiting households in connection with government programmes, suspecting them of gathering data for the yet-to-be unveiled National Register of Citizens, following enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) recently.

Kumar said district authorities will train and sensitise enumerators to tread carefully while gathering information. Enumerators will be told not to demand information but seek it gently.

“We will tell enumerators to proactively engage with people. For instance, if an old man in a village does not know his exact date or place of birth, the enumerator may engage in a conversation with the person that may elicit some anecdotes and roughly establish the year and the place of birth,” the census director said.

As of now, the NPR questionnaire has 21queries, but officials say it has not yet been finalised.

With most of the census and NPR data gathering and storage happening digitally this time, the challenge before census officials is to convince people that the data would remain safe.

“Individual data is sealed and all that we can see is collective data. The information is consolidated and tailor-made. We are telling district officials to create awareness about data safety as well,” Kumar said.

Udupi, Jul 18: Noted multi-lingual scholar Dr Uliyar Padmanabha Upadhyaya passed away last night at a private hospital in Manipal. The 88-year-old was survived by a son and a daughter.

His wife Susheela Uadhyaya, who was also a multi-lingual scholar, had passed away in January 2014 at the age of 77. The duo had compiled the six-volume Tulu Lexicon. Its first volume was published in 1988 and the last volume in 1997.

Son of Sitaram Upadhyaya, who was a scholar in the court of the Raja of Travancore, Dr Padmanabha was born on April 10, 1932 at Uliyar in Majur Village near Kaup in Udupi district. 

The Upadhyaya couple had conducted serious research work in linguistics and folk culture and produced a number of books-some of them jointly, some individually and some in collaboration with others. 

Dr Padmanabha had acquired three Master of Arts degrees in Sanskrit, Kannada and Linguistics from Madras, Kerala and Pune Universities, Vidwan in Hindi and PhD in Linguistics from the Pune University for his thesis titled “A Comparative Study of Kannada Dialects”.

He was a visiting Professor at the Universities of London and Paris. He knew Hindi, Kannada, Tulu, Malayalam, Tamil, English, French and Olof, the language of Senegal in Africa.

His works include Nanjanagudu Kannada (Vokkaliga Dialect), Coorg Kannada, Kuruba - A Dravidian Language, Kannada - A Phonetic Language, Malayalam Language and Literature (with Ms. Susheela), Effect of Bilingualism on Bidar Kannada, Coimbatore Tamil, Kannada as Spoken by Different Population Groups in Mysore City, Dravidian and Negro African: Ethno Linguistic Study (with Ms. Susheela), Conversational Kannada, Coastal Karnataka and Bhuta Worship: Aspects of a Ritualistic Theatre (with Ms. Susheela).

Also Read: Eminent linguist Dr Susheela P Upadhyaya no more