MEDIA FREE ONLINE TRAINING ON PRECEPTS AND TRADE-31
ON MORALITY
THE WAY OF CULTIVATION
Morality is something that should be culyivated and is the one thing that sets humans apart from animala. Morality is what ensures that there will be law and order in a nation. If the people of a national loose their moral standards, then government officials will be corrupt, using public office for private gain; businesspeople will steal and deceive; among friends, doubt and jealousy will arise, leading to harma nd slander; among neighours there will be discord, deception, and lying; and society will be rife with foolishness and fallacy. Everywhere there will be people who struggle with oneanother for their own benefit, profiting at the expence of others, and having no sense of shame. This being the case, only with a sense of morality and by leading moral life will society be harmonious, families will be happy, friends keep promises, and will be able to help one another.
Doing business not so easy in Bangalore
World
Bank report ranks city 13th among 17 select cities
Starting a business is fastest in Mumbai
and Noida
In Bangalore, 13 procedures have to be completed to register a firm
BANGALORE: Doing business is not so easy in Bangalore and it takes at least 40 days to complete procedures and register a firm.
A World Bank Report on βDoing Business in India -2009β ranked
Bangalore 13th among 17 select cities. Doing business was easier in
Ludhiana, Hyderabad, and Bhubaneswar and these cities respectively
ranked first, second and third.
It was difficult to start the business in Bangalore (13th), Patna (14th), Chennai (15th), Kochi (16th), and Kolkata (17th).
βStarting a business is fastest in Mumbai and Noida, at 30 days, while it takes 41 in Kochi.β
In Bangalore, 13 procedures have to be completed to register a firm
and it takes 40 days while it was 33 days in Hyderabad with 12
procedures.
The number of procedures to formally open a business ranges from 11
to 13, of which eight are national in nature and similar in all cities.
The time required to start a business varied among cities due to
different local practices and different performance levels of the local
branches of national agencies, it said.
In Patna, Kolkata, and Bhubaneswar, entrepreneurs spend less than 40
per cent of income per capita to open a business; for those in
Bangalore (64.7) and Mumbai (70.9), the cost is double because of local
government fees and taxes, the bank said.
The report compared business regulations in the 17 cities, focussing
on local regulations that affect seven stages in the life of a small or
mid-sized domestic enterprise β starting a business, dealing with
construction permits, registering property, paying taxes, trading
across borders, enforcing contracts, and closing a business.
The selected cities are Ludhiana Mumbai, Hyderabad, Indore,
Bhubaneshwar, Noida, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Patna, New Delhi,
Chennai, Jaipur, Kochi, Guwahati, Kolkata and Ranchi.
Construction
The process to obtain construction-related permits and clearances
was easiest in Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad, where 15 procedures
are required, but more cumbersome in Kolkata and Mumbai, where more
than 30 procedures were needed.
Entrepreneurs pay 15 per cent of income per capita in Bangalore to
register under the Shops and Establishments Act, but pay nothing in
Chennai.
Registration
Cities in India do well on the number of procedures required to
register property β on average, only five procedures are needed, the
report said this performance ranked the average Indian city at 47th out
of 181 economies.
The Jaipur city takes least number of days (24) to register a property.
The number of days required for registration of property in
Bangalore is 28 days, Hyderabad 37, Chennai 48 and Bhubaneshwar 126
days, the report said.
The number of procedures required to register the property in
Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kolkata, Mumbai, New
Delhi, Noida, Patna, and Ranchi is five while Chennai required highest
number (seven), the report said.
βReforms that cut red tape, clarify property rights, and streamline
regulatory compliance, can yield big payoff for firms and workers,β the
study said which was conducted in collaboration with the Union Commerce
Ministry and Confederation of Indian Industry.
2020 Project, Training Indian novices in Thailand
From: Ken and Visakha KawasakiSubject: 2020 Project, Training Indian novices in Thailand
To:
Date: Thursday, 9 July, 2009, 9:07 PM
Buddhist
Relief Mission has long been interested in the revival of Buddhism in
India, which in recent years has depended greatly on the movement among
the Dalits, the downtrodden castes, which began with the conversion of
Dr. Ambedkar in 1956. One of the main hindrances to the growth of
Buddhism in the land of its birth has been the severe lack of trained
monks. There have been several attempts to establish bhikkhu training
centers and to educate monks abroad, but these programs have not
produced enough monks. A few years ago, a new program was begun. This
program, called 2020, hopes to train as many as 2000 monks in Thailand
by the year 2020. Two groups, totaling about 40 novices have already
Here are
recent photos of the latest batch of novices at Bodhisukha Monastery, Kolkata, before they left for Thailand.
Buddhist
Relief Mission strongly supports this endeavor. We invite all those who
are interested to join our effort. Details are available at:
< http://www.brelief.org/metta-2020/metta-2020.html>
Thank you for your interest and your support.
With metta,
Ken and Visakha Kawasaki
Buddhist Relief Mission
PS. Please let us know if you wish to be taken off our mailing list. A brief e-mail will do.
Buddhist Relief Mission: http://www.brelief.org/
Sri Lanka reports: http://www.brelief.org/reports/
http://www.washingt onpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/ article/2009/ 07/02/AR20090702 01864.html
Obama says court still allows for racial diversity
By MARK SHERMAN
The Associated Press
Thursday, July 2, 2009; 3:25 PM
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama cast this week’s Supreme Court
decision in favor of white firefighters as a narrow case that
nevertheless allows employers and educators to take race into account
in hiring, promotions and admissions.
Obama, a former constitutional law professor, said the court was
“moving the ball” on affirmative action by telling public and private
employers they could not easily discard promotion exams just because
the results left no African-Americans likely to be promoted.
“This was a very narrow case, so it’s hard to gauge where they will
take it,” Obama said in an interview Thursday with The Associated
Press. He did not criticize the court’s ruling, even though the
justices voted 5-4 to reverse a decision that his own high court
nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, endorsed as an appeals court judge.
As a senator, Obama voted against confirming two justices in the
majority in the firefighters case: Chief Justice John Roberts and
Justice Samuel Alito, the two nominees of President George W. Bush.
The president was critical of the clumsy process that New Haven,
Conn., used to administer promotion exams, then tossed them aside
because of the racially skewed results.
He said the city might have prevailed if it “had thought through how
it was going to approach the issue ahead of time and said, ‘We think
merit and highly qualified firefighters are absolutely important. That
doesn’t contradict our desire to make sure that there is diversity in
a city that’s 60 percent black and Hispanic. Let’s design promotion
approaches that reconcile those two things.’”
Instead, Obama said, “I think what people instinctively, probably,
reacted to on that particular case had more to do with the fact that
the people that studied for those tests already had a set of
expectations that were thwarted.”
Critics of racial preferences have argued that Obama’s election
demonstrates that affirmative action is no longer necessary. But the
president noted that “the Supreme Court didn’t close the door to
affirmative action, if properly structured.”
He said such programs have not been nearly as helpful to minorities or
damaging to whites as they have been portrayed.
“Crude quotas” are unnecessary and constitutionally impermissible, he
said. But, “I do think that there are still circumstances in which on
a college admissions or on a hiring decision, taking into account
issues of past discrimination or taking into account issues of
diversity of a workforce or a student body can still be appropriate, “
the president said.