“No Baywatch here please” — is the first reaction of the residents of the ancient port town of Mandvi in southern Kutch — to the state government’s announcement of turning the Mandvi beach into the state’s first beach-based entertainment zone. The zone will allow private investors to set up bars at the beach to attract tourists.

State vice-president of the Nationalist Congress Party, Jaykumar Sanghavi, said, “If the entertainment zone would like the ones in Goa, where entertainment starts from wine and ends at women, then we do not want live Baywatch in our courtyard. We too are for development of tourism here, but not like this. We will oppose this move through public demonstrations and also write protest letters to the government.”

Sanghavi further said that that his party had held an informal meeting this morning to condemn “the ugly and uncivilised move of the Modi government to freely allow use of liquor in the public. The party had decided to meet again shortly to decide on new measures to stop this development.

Vasant Doshi, founder president of the Mandvi Chamber of Commerce and Industries said, “We want the development of Mandvi beach sans liquor-based entertainment zone. We oppose this decision.”

Journalist and social worker Dhirubhai Shah said that the vices like drinking, gambling, prostitution, which were already rampant in the port-town, would become official if the entertainment zone comes up. He added that recently, a dance bar was found at Mandvi.

Even local BJP leaders are not happy with the idea of an entertainment zone. “We are opposed to such move by the government. But we cannot air our anti-government sentiments as per the latest instructions received from the party. If I say anything, I will be suspended,” a top BJP leader of Mandvi said.

Ajit Sadhu, president of three-decade-old cultural organisation Yuva Kranti Dal, said that the latest move from the Modi government was to attract votes from the youths. He also said that crores of rupees have been wasted in the name of tourism in Mandvi.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com

A top Republican Congressman has slammed the H1B visa programme, saying that there was no mechanism to find out if anyone, whose time has expired, has left the country and there was little penal action against those overstaying the visa.

Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo, who is also a Presidential candidate has argued that even though Congress had authorised the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to put in place an entry-exit system, which should have been operational since January this year, it is Fox News on the subject of the H1B visas in the context of the role of doctors in England in the bombings.

"The H-1B has been really a problem for a long time. The fraud inside that particular visa programme is enormous and I have come out in opposition to it long before the events in London," he said.

Tancredo was critical of the rationale behind the visa programme.

"The reason is that the programme itself was set up in order to bring in people with unique skills – unique – we cannot find them anywhere else in the United States, and there's one or two individuals throughout the world that may have it. And so that's why we have an H-1B programme, unique skills," Tancredo said in response to a question.

"What has happened is that it has been simply used as a way of getting cheap labour into the US for higher-echelon jobs, for white-collar jobs. We have never, ever, not one person has ever been prosecuted here for overstaying that visa," he added.


Courtesy : Expressindia.com