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Gangtok, July 13: General secretary of Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) Dawa T. Lepcha, who has been on hunger strike for the past 23 days, was shifted to hospital this morning after his pressure dropped drastically.

Lepcha, who is also a documentary film-maker, has been admitted to Sir Thutob Namgyal Memorial Hospital. Twenty-year-old Tenzing Gyatso Lepcha, an ACT member, was admitted to the same hospital five days ago with high fever and low pressure. Both the activists said they would continue fasting at the hospital. Thirteen other ACT members are fasting at B.L. House on Sonam Gyatso Marg here.

The ACT members are on hunger strike to demand the immediate scrapping of all the mega hydel power projects in the Lepcha reserve of Dzongu in North Sikkim.

A saline channel attached to his right hand, Tenzing, told The Telegraph that he was not willing to give up so soon. “I have already come this far and I think there is no stopping until a positive decision is reached. I am ready to give up my life in the course of this protest,” said Tenzing who has recently taken his final-year examinations at Sikkim Government College. (more…)

Siliguri, July 10: A police officer has been accused of assaulting a man whose Chevrolet Tavera had been stolen for allegedly “misleading forces”.

Additional superintendent of police Humayun Kabir denied thrashing businessman Gautam Sen. “He came to my office in Kalimpong with a woman tantrik and insisted that she knew where the stolen vehicle was. We set up checkpoints at various places, but in vain,” Kabir said.

Sen’s car went missing last Wednesday. His driver, Rajen Naser, was found dead the day after. “On Sunday, my brother took a Maruti van and went to the Dooars in search of his car and spotted it. Five persons were inside,” Sen’s brother said. Sen called Kabir but the vehicle apparently sped away before the police arrived. Kabir apparently called Sen to his office after that.

“I was asked to sing We Shall Overcome, while he beat me up for misleading his forces,” he said from hospital.

The police admitted he lost consciousness in the police station, but the hospital said no injury marks were found on him.

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Kalimpong, July 9: The movement against NHPC’s Teesta Low Dam Projects here has received a shot in the arm by the protests in Sikkim against the mega hydel power projects coming up in the Lepcha reserve of Dzongu.

Rong Ong Prongzom, the Kalimpong-based organisation of Lepcha youths, today announced that it would block NH 31A on Wednesday to express their solidarity with the Sikkim protesters.

The Siliguri-based North Eastern Society for Preservation of Nature, on the other hand, has decided to organise village meetings to get the community’s opinion on the Teesta low dams, which are in various stages of implementation. The Society believes that it is important to ask people about the projects now when their adverse effects on the environment have become evident.

“We can show the people how scientific studies were bypassed by NHPC,” said Society secretary Saumitra Ghosh.

The Society is in touch with Affected Citizens of Teesta, which is leading the Dzongu protests, as well as the Kalimpong-based NH 31A Bachao Committee.

A sustained campaign by the Committee has recently resulted in the Union surface transport ministry asking the Geological Survey of India to investigate the landslides on NH 31A, which many believe are caused by the NHPC projects.

Gangtok, July 8: Representatives of the Sikkim government, led by local MLA Sonam Gyatso Lepcha, held a public hearing in Dzongu today to win the support of landowners for the mega hydroelectric projects coming up in the Lepcha reserve.

Around 200 people gathered at Namprikdang in North Sikkim, many of them arriving in vehicles sporting the flag of the ruling Sikkim Democratic Front (SDF). The legislator has been defending the hydel power projects in the area even as protests against the plants gain momentum in Sikkim.

Even today, many landowners from Dzongu stayed away from the SDF show of strength at Namprikdang and were instead seen at B.L. House in Gangtok, where the indefinite hunger strike begun by Affected Citizens of Teesta entered its 18th day. ACT wants the state government to scrap all the projects coming up in Dzongu and review the ones planned for other parts of the state.

Two meetings between members of the organisation and the government have ended in a stalemate.

One of the protesters, 20-year-old Tenzing Gyatso Lepcha, had to be admitted to Sir Thutob Namgyal Memorial Hospital this morning after his blood pressure dropped. Tenzing, along with ACT general secretary Dawa Lepcha, had been admitted to the hospital once before but both had refused food even there.

Another member of ACT, Chimi Lepcha, is still in hospital.

Some 12 others are also on fast. Many landowners have also been participating in a relay hunger strike, which is also being held at B.L. House.

Yesterday, the members of ACT wrote to chief secretary N.D. Chingapa to say they were willing to end the indefinite hunger strike if the state government agreed in writing to certain conditions.

The organisation is being supported by Concerned Lepchas of North Sikkim and the Sangha (the monks’ body) of Dzongu. Lepchas of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong have also decided to form a joint action committee to back the cause.

ACT already has many opposition parties and certain organisations within the state on its side.

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Kalimpong, July 6: A man died in an accident on NH 31A last night, hours after a driver was found murdered on the same highway a short distance away.

Sunil Chandra Prakash, the administrator of Rockvale Academy here, died when the car he was driving — a Honda City — missed a curve and fell into a 400-foot gorge near Birikdara on NH 31A last night.

Prakash was returning to Kalimpong from Siliguri when the mishap occurred. “When he last spoke to his wife over the phone around 10pm, he was still in Siliguri,” said a family member.

The administrator had gone to Siliguri to buy construction material as he had been extending a part of his house to build a room for his son Samit, said Akay Lee, a friend of Prakash. “I rang him on his cellphone around 8.30 last night and he said he was in Siliguri,” Lee recalled.

“I asked him to come back before it got too late. I told him to be careful as it was raining hard in Kalimpong, That was the last time I spoke to him,” added Lee, who had known Prakash for 20 years.

The accident came to light this morning when some residents of the area discovered the car in the gorge. They immediately informed police, who took the help of a crane to recover the body.

A distance of about 15 feet separated the body and the car.

Prakash, who was in his early fifties, is survived by his wife, Sarala, and son Samit, who is studying to be a doctor in Pokhara, Nepal.

Humayun Kabir, the additional superintendent of police of Kalimpong, said there was no suspicion of foul play in the death of Prakash and it was being treated as a case of accident.

However, a little distance away from Birikdara, some unidentified persons slit the throat of Rajen Tamang, a driver from Sukna near Siliguri, on Wednesday night and dumped his body on the Teesta riverbed below.

The body was found between Geilkhola and 27th Mile yesterday afternoon.

The police said a person had hired Tamang’s pick-up van in Siliguri on Wednesday and they left for Gangtok through NH 31A. According to records available at the Sikkim Police’s Rangpo checkpoint, the van passed the place on its way back from Gangtok at 9.45pm.

“We believe Tamang was murdered sometime between Wednesday midnight and 1am. There must have been more than one person involved in the incident,” said a police source.

The post-mortems on both the bodies were conducted at the Kalimpong subdivisional hospital today.

Siliguri/Kalimpong, July 5: A team of nine Swedes drove two Volvo ambulances to Kalimpong today, having traversed 16,000km through 12 countries on their way from Strangnas on the east coast of the Scandinavian country.

Both the ambulances will be run by local organisations on a non-profit basis, giving free service to poor patients. While one will remain in Kalimpong, the other will return to Siliguri.

Ambulance Expedition 2007 follows similar overland expedition-donations to Ethiopia in 2003, Nepal in 2004, and Morocco in 2005, said the leader of the Swedish team Kjell Borneland. Apart from the 65-year-old general manager of Swed-Asia Travels, the team includes volunteers from various fields.

“We started from Sweden on June 9, crossing Europe, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan before entering India,” recounted Borneland.

“There was a bit of tension in Turkey,” said Kenneth Ingemarsson, who was in charge of the team’s safety. “Then, we got stuck in Lahore for a whole day as the streets were waterlogged after heavy rain. But I’m glad we reached safely.”

The plan to donate ambulances to this region can be traced back to the friendship Borneland shares with Mahesh Muktan, who runs an NGO, Himalayan Organisation for People’s Education (HOPE), in Kalimpong. The two had first met in Nepal, where they set up an organisation to serve the poor.

The ambulances, which cost Rs 80 lakh each, are fitted with special suspensions, stretchers, oxygen and other medical equipment. Both, however, are left hand drive.

Asked if the vehicles will be allowed to run on Indian roads, an official of the regional transport authority said his department would have no objection if the customs had cleared it.

The ambulance in Siliguri will be operated by the Umasuresh Memorial Charitable Trust, while the one in Kalimpong will be run by the municipality there. The Swedish team has also donated a van to the hill town, which will be operated by the Parimita Charitable Trust, which runs, among other things, the Jamgon Kongtrul Eye Centre at 8th Mile, Kalimpong.

Kalimpong, July 4: The Union surface transport ministry has asked the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) to get the Geological Survey of India (GSI) to study all landslides on NH31A.

Confirming this, BRO sources said they have already approached the GSI authorities in Gangtok, who, however, have set certain preconditions.

“They are saying that they will take up one landslide every year for study. They are also quoting a very high price for the job,” the sources added.

The central directive has come after a sustained campaign by a Kalimpong-based pressure group, NH31A Bachao Committee, which was formed last year following a landslide at 27th Mile on the highway.

The landslide was allegedly triggered by the construction of a dam on the Teesta river by the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation Ltd (NHPC) as part of its Teesta low dam project. But, the NHPC attributed the calamity to incessant rainfall.

Environmentalists are, however, unanimous that the slide, which disrupted the traffic on NH31A for weeks together, posed a huge problem for the seven-lakh people of Himalayan state and Kalimpong subdivision. The national highway is the link between Sikkim and the rest of the country.

The issue was also raised by Darjeeling MP Dawa Narbula in Parliament last year.

In a statement at the House, Narbula had expressed apprehensions about the adverse impact of the dam construction and had demanded an “immediate investigation into the two NHPC projects (Reang and Kalijhora) and their impact on the environment”. The MP had also called for a “transparent” review of the projects.

Welcoming the central directive on the GSI study, the committee hopes that the recommendations would be given due importance in preparing the environment impact assessment report and environment monitoring programmes that were conducted for the Reang and Kalijhora projects.

“In the case of the Kalijhora project, we have brought to the notice of the NHPC authorities in Delhi the violation of various forest laws since the Kali river forms the boundary of the Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary,” said P. T. Bhutia, the convener of the committee.

Among the six hydel projects NHPC is currently implementing, four are in Sikkim along the Teesta basin.

Some of these projects have drawn flak from environmentalists in that state. The indigenous Lepcha community of Sikkim and Kalimpong also express strong protests over the projects as they fear implementing one of the hydel plants will lead to the loss of their reserved area Dzongu in North Sikkim.

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Kalimpong, July 2: The introduction of core banking solutions (CBS) in the Kalimpong branch of the State Bank of India (SBI) has become a cause of harassment for its customers.

The explanation offered by senior bank officials is that the staff members are taking time to get a hang of the Internet-based system. But customers are in no mood to buy the argument.

“The transition from manual to core banking could have been much smoother, had the bank gone about it in a planned manner,” said Tsering Topgyal, the owner of an advertising agency. Topgyal has not been able to get his passbook updated despite many visits to the bank in the last 10 days.

The branch shifted to CBS on June 14. “Initially there will be some teething problems. It happens everywhere,” said P.K. Singh, the assistant general manager of SBI’s Region II in Siliguri.

However, bank employees admitted that the system has been introduced in a slipshod manner. “Only four or five of us were sent for training, that too for two or three days. Internet connectivity is a major problem as links fail repeatedly,” said a staff member here on condition of anonymity. (more…)

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Gangtok, July 2: Protesters under the banner of Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) will complete two weeks of hunger strike tomorrow.

The fasting ACT members are demanding that all mega hydroelectricity projects, coming up in the Lepcha reserve of Dzongu in North Sikkim, be scrapped and the government review all other projects in the state.

Despite several appeals by the government and two meeting with senior functionaries, the fasting youths are not willing to give up so soon until their goals are fulfilled. They hope to hold out for a few more days and let Sikkim chief minister Pawan Chamling return from his tour before taking a decision.

Those on the fast have been bolstered by support not only from within their community in Dzongu, but from across the country.

Yesterday, 20-year-old Tenzing Lepcha and Chimi Lepcha were admitted to Sir Thutob Namgyal Memorial Hospital here on the recommendations of doctors who have been checking them everyday. ACT president Dawa Lepcha, who was also admitted to the hospital but carried on his fast there, has since then returned to B.L. House on Sonam Gyatso Marg, the venue of the hunger strike to continue his protest. Today ACT member Nimkit Lepcha joined the fast replacing Renjyong Lepcha, who had been fasting for several days.

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Kalimpong, July 2: About 60 taekwondo referees from Bengal and Sikkim will participate in the National Referee Seminar to be held here from July 6 to 8.

To be hosted by the Gorkha Hill Taekwondo Association under the aegis of the Taekwondo Federation of India, the referees of will undergo a refresher course to be conducted by first class national referee L. Shokun Singh during the seminar. The meet will be held at the gymnasium of Scottish University Mission Institution here.

Addressing a news conference here today, association secretary Pravin Pradhan said the programme was originally scheduled to be held in Calcutta, but due to some unforeseen circumstances the venue had to be shifted here.

“A state-level taekwondo championship will also be held here in August to select players who will represent Bengal in future national-level tournaments,” said Pradhan.

Among the major tournaments coming up in the next few months, he said, are the senior nationals in Nagaland in September, junior nationals at Margao in Goa from November 16 to 18 and the sub-junior nationals at Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh in December.

The members of the association said though players from the hills have huge potential, they have not been able to translate that into results at the national level for various reasons.

“There is potential, but we have not been able to tap them primarily due to lack of funds,” said Paul Simmick, a referee from the hills.

According to the association’s records, there are only about 300 active players in the three hill subdivisions, though the sport was introduced in the hills way back in 1976.

Simmick said the association was committed to correcting the problem provided it receives help from all quarters.

“It will help if our players are allowed to compete in the Northeast games,” said Pradhan.