Tag: representative

UNICEF representative meets UP CM, discusses status of various programmes in state

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Lucknow: UNICEF India representative Cynthia McCaffrey on Tuesday met Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and discussed the status of the ongoing health, education and nutrition programmes being run in collaboration with the UN agency.
McCaffrey, who met Adityanath at his residence, said that UNICEF-India was taking forward many programmes in the field of social health, education, women and child nutrition in Uttar Pradesh with the support of the state government.
UNICEF is also supporting the local administration in aspirational districts, she said, adding the UN agency was ready to provide technical and academic support to the state government for new programmes in the future.

Appreciating the state’s efforts in social health, McCaffrey said there has been a significant decline in the maternal, infant and neonatal mortality rates in the state in the last six years.
Availability of health services increased even in remote villages due to planned efforts while awareness programs are yielding good results, the UNICEF India representative said, adding that this success of Uttar Pradesh is inspiring.
McCaffrey said that Chief Minister Adityanath has adopted a wonderful strategy for the eradication of Japanese Encephalitis.
The state government has succeeded in preventing the disease in 38 districts. This is a great achievement, she said.
Referring to the Covid management in different countries, McCaffrey said the way the Uttar Pradesh administration dealt with the high population density and various social challenges is highly commendable.

Uttar Pradesh has presented the best model of Covid management, she said.
She also praised the efforts being made under the leadership of CM Adityanath in the direction of women’s safety, respect and self-reliance.
While congratulating the UNICEF representative on her arrival in the state, Adityanath praised the cooperation being received from the UN agency in the field of public health, including dealing with encephalitis, water-borne diseases, Covid management and proposed to cooperate even further with the organisation on such programmes.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 12, 2023
The Sharp-Witted Representative Who Opened the Doors of Congress to Young Moms
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What hard-fought success Schroeder got — “It took nine months to deliver each of my children and nine years to deliver FMLA,” she’d later say — came from “her humanity and her persistence and her humor,” says Ellen Bravo, the former director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, one of many national groups that worked for the bill’s passage. Year after year, Schroeder leaned into the absurdity of Washington, deploying a brand of witty straight talk that drew attention to her causes, well before social media and viral memes.
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“She was able to not just withstand obnoxious attacks on her, but to direct withering responses at the people” who went after her, Bravo says. “She handled them in a way that ate right through the veneer of authority.”
Schroeder was the one who declared that Ronald Reagan had a “Teflon-coated presidency” (an idea that reportedly came to her while frying eggs on a nonstick pan) and dubbed George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle members of the “lucky sperm club” because they were able to run for office with the benefit of family wealth.
And she faced her own indignities with humor and theatrics. When she won a seat on the House Armed Services Committee early in her tenure, the chair, a Louisiana Democrat named F. Edward Hébert, was angry that she and Ron Dellums, a Black Democrat from California, had been placed on the committee against Hébert’s wishes. He provided only a single chair for the two of them, so Schroeder and Dellums squeezed into it together — “cheek-to-cheek,” she would later write — and sat that way for two years. “Barney Frank used to always say it’s the only half-assed thing I did when I was in Congress, but I’m not sure that’s true,” she quipped to the House historian years later.
Even as Schroeder grew in influence, eventually launching a short-lived bid for president in 1987, she faced doubts and digs about her demeanor: the time she wore a bunny suit to entertain kids in the U.S. Embassy during a 1987 Armed Services trip to China, the fact that she would sometimes sign her name with a smiley-face in the “P.” Some of the biggest scrutiny came when she dropped out of the presidential race and openly cried at the press conference, launching 1,000 think pieces about gender, politics and public norms.
But Schroeder had never feared wearing her motherhood or womanhood on her sleeve, down to bringing her children — and sometimes a pet bunny named Franklin Delano Rabbit — back and forth with her to Denver and on official international trips. “They’d usually spill at least two Cokes and a glass of milk on me before I got off [the ground],” she told the House historian years later. “I was always sticky … People would just be horrified, but that’s how we were.”
That unapologetic approach to parenthood is less rare today, in many public spheres. But there are still plenty of barriers to women with young children running for office, says Liuba Grechen Shirley, who ran for a New York congressional seat in 2018 with two toddlers at home and went on to form the group Vote Mama, which supports young mothers in politics.
And on the congressional level, at least, the family-friendly policies Schroeder championed at the height of her influence have largely been frozen in time. While the FMLA was game-changing 30 years ago, most of its advocates consider it woefully incomplete. As Grechen Shirley and Bravo point out, the law covers only 60 percent of workers, due to restrictions on eligibility. Many eligible people aren’t able to take advantage of it because they can’t afford to take the time off. (Bravo notes that state laws mandating paid sick leave are gaining momentum — they’ve been passed now in 11 states and the District of Columbia.)
Grechen Shirley attributes the lack of progress to a lack of representation. The 118th Congress has a record number of women and yet that’s still only 153 of 540 voting and nonvoting members, or 28 percent of the body. But it’s not just that there aren’t enough women in Congress, Grechen Shirley contends, echoing what Schroeder discovered 50 years ago. It’s that there aren’t enough mothers.

“It’s because our policies were not made by people who have the lived experience. If we want to change the system, we have to change the system-makers,” she says. “So many women will wait until their children are grown before they consider running, so it’s difficult to build that political power to get tenure, to get those leadership positions.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
March 17, 2023
It is the best time to be a woman in India: Permanent Representative to the UN Ruchira Kamboj

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United Nations: It is the best time to be a woman in India today, the country’s UN envoy Ruchira Kamboj has said, emphasising that the government was fully empowering women at all levels.
The Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations, in partnership with UN Women India, organised a high-level panel discussion this week on ‘Leveraging Public-Private Commitment for Women’s Greater Access to Technology and Education” at the United Nations Headquarters on the margins of the ongoing 67th session of the Commission on Status of Women.
“In India, there has been enormous, enormous growth in the past eight-nine years particularly and today, I think it is perhaps the best time to be a woman in India. I mean that very sincerely,” India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Kamboj said.
In her remarks, Kamboj stressed that in India “we recognise the transformational capacity of technology to provide impetus to women’s empowerment and sustainable development.” “This is a fantastic time to be a woman and the government is fully empowering you at all levels. The Prime Minister has emphasised upon a model of women-led growth and development and it is very much a reality,” Kamboj said.
She highlighted that the Government of India has taken numerous citizen-centric digital initiatives with a greater focus to enable access for women to finance, credit, technology and employment.
These initiatives have focused on providing immediate assistance to women in distress, preventing violence against women, and promoting women’s full and equal participation in every sphere of society, she said.
Kamboj spoke on two major initiatives — the Digital India programme and the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity — that have shown the capacity of technology to provide impetus to women’s empowerment and sustainable development.
She said that during the pandemic, these initiatives had facilitated direct benefit transfer to nearly 200 million women.

Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women Anita Bhatia said that since 2017, successive Commissions on the Status of Women have recognized the important and fundamental role that digitalization plays in closing the gender digital divide.
Highlighting that women have less access than men and boys to technology, Bhatia said “the non-negotiables have to be a recognition that digital rights are also human rights and that women have as much right to digital access as do men and boys.” She pointed to data, which she termed as “pretty shocking” and according to which, globally men are 20 per cent more likely to be online than women, with this percentage as high as 52 in low-income countries as a group.
“There also has to be a recognition of this from the point of view of opportunity, because not investing sufficiently in digitalization means that governments are actually leaving money on the table,” she said.
Bhatia added that in a post-pandemic world, where the fiscal space is constrained, “this is actually a fabulous opportunity to say how can we leapfrog our economies, how can we grow our economies quickly and how can we do so by leveraging both the power, creativity and innovation of women, but also the power of creativity and innovation that is inherent in digitalisation.” Bhatia also noted that the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) field is “uber-masculine” and “we need to make it look less masculine and have more girls and boys involved in this.” Apollo Hospitals Joint Managing Director Dr Sangita Reddy told the discussion that “in a single word, what we are all seeking today – we were striving for equity. We’re looking forward now to ‘Techquity’.” Reddy said it is techquity “which will help us take the position that we’re looking forward to in the years to come.” With technology driving every aspect and field of life now, Reddy said from computing and automation to artificial intelligence, “the world is transforming. As we seek equity in this world, it is important for every woman to be digitally connected, digitally savvy,” Reddy said.
The panel discussion was organised as a part of the ‘India Roundtables’ at the United Nations.
The roundtables, being organised to commemorate India@75, will showcase India’s achievements in various areas of development, including women empowerment, financial inclusion, social development, climate action and many more.
The panel, moderated by Country Representative, UN Women India Susan Ferguson, included Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, LinkedIn Melissa Selcher and Senior Vice President & Human Resources Development Head – India & Americas, Nina Nair.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 15, 2023
Democratic Party representative Ilhan Omar ousted from US Congress panel

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New York: The US House of Representatives has ousted Ilhan Omar, a Democratic Party legislator from the influential Foreign Affairs Committee.
The House voted on Thursday mainly for her bigoted comments against Jews to remove her from the committee that she had used before to campaign against India.
The vote was on party lines, 218 to 211, in the House that was captured in last year’s election by the Republican Party.
The Democratic Party leadership and members were solidly behind her.
Fellow Democrat Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the Progressive Caucus who is also a critic of India, in a voice filled with emotion said that voting her out of the panel was an attempt to silence her “strong and necessary voice” and an act of revenge by the Republicans.
A defiant Omar said, “We didn’t come to Congress to be silent”, and added that despite the ouster, “my voice will get louder and stronger”.
Republican Mike Lawler countered that rhetoric aceleads to harm” and Omar “is being held accountable for her words and her actions”.
The US has seen a rise in attacks against and harassment of Jewish people and the Anti-Defamation League which monitors such incidents said they reached an all-time high with 2,717 incidents recorded in 2021.

Omar is a member of the left-wing wing of the Democratic Party and one of the four in the radical group called the “Squad”.
One of three Muslims in Congress, she represents a constituency in Minnesota with a large number of immigrants from Somalia like her.
Two months after a visit to Pakistan and to the part of Kashmir it occupies, she introduced in June last year a resolution in Congress to condemn India for what she termed “human rights violations and violations of international religious freedom”.
That resolution, which drew the support of 12 Democrats, failed to even come up for a vote.
During her visit to Pakistan, she had gone close to the Line of Control and complained that Kashmir was not “being talked about to the extent it needs to in Congress but also with the administration”.
She met with Prime Minister Shabaz Sharif, whose office said that he valued her “courage of convictions and her political struggle”.
Omar also voted in 2019 against a bill that would have cut for Indians the waiting time for permanent residency or Green Cards that stretches to several decades making the wait futile for many.
In one of the last bid attempts to save her from ouster, an op-ed was published in The New York Times highlighting her opposition to India in what the writer, New York City University Professor Peter Beinart, called an example of her asking “uncomfortable questions”.
In the encounter with Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman at a committee meeting cited in the article, Omar let loose a propaganda salvo likening the democratically elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had ousted a democratically elected government in a military coup and killed thousands and tortured and detained tens of thousands.
She was critical of US policies to forge closer ties with India to counter China.
It was Omar’s record of anti-Semitism – a characteristic often shared by those who are also anti-India – that did her in when the protective mantle of the Democratic majority disappeared in the House.
Among her controversial statements, one said, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel”.
Alluding to supporters of Israel, she spoke of those with “the allegiance to a foreign country”.
She suggested that Jewish people were buying support for Israel in a tweet that said, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby”, which is a reference to $100 notes that carry the picture of Benjamin Franklin and anti-Semites the name to link it to the Biblical Jewish sacred figure.
She has also compared Israel to the Taliban in a statement with other Democrats.
The Democrats set a precedent when held the House majority by removing two Republicans, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, from House committees accusing them of promoting violence.
At that time Kevin McCarthy, who is now the speaker, warned that he would remove Omar and another Democrat, Eric Swalwell from committees when his party controlled the House.
Last week, McCarthy removed from the House Intelligence Committee Swalwell and Adam Schiff, who had been its head when the Democrats controlled the Hous — leading to Jayapal’s accusation of “revenge”.
An alleged Chinese operative Fang Fang had placed an intern in Swalwell’s office and participated in raising funds for his campaign, which was a likely reason for his removal.
McCarthy alleged that Schiff had misused his office while heading the intelligence panel and created misinformation against Trump.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

February 3, 2023