Srinagar, Jul 13 (GNS): In order to review the arrangements made with regard to various safety arrangements made for Amarnath Yatra, especially Fire safety arrangements, Alok Kumar, ADGP Director Fire & Emergency Services J&K on Thursday made an exclusive visit from Srinagar to Domail via Baltal axis.
During the visit, ADGP as per GNS, visited all yatra camps enroute Srinagar to Baltal including Manigam, Neilgrath, Baltal Base Camp, Baltal Tent City, Domail.
In addition the ADGP also conducted surprise inspection of F&ES Gund and Kangan located on the Srinagar Baltal yatra route.
He interacted and discussed with the officers of Paramilitary, Police and Civil Administration regarding the safety and security arrangements of yatris and appreciated all the officers for their tireless work.
At Neilgrath helipad Campus, he interacted with all the officers including Camp Director, Yatries as well. He gave compassionate hearing to the yatris and passed necessary directions on spot to the officers to resolve their legitimate issues.
The ADGP during the visit enjoined upon all the Officers and Jawans of this Department to keep the close liason with all the stake holders for prompt and efficient response during any emergency during the Yatra.
He had a detailed meeting with SSP’s deployed in Joint PCR at Baltal base camp. He was apprised regarding telecommunication CCTV and Satellite facilities too being provided to the Yatries during their travel/trekking from Baltal to holy cave. He also interacted with representatives of Police, Army, CRPF, SSB, ITBP, NDRF, SDRF and Indian Air Force.
The Director F&ES J&K was accompanied by a team of officers/officials of the Department. (GNS)
At the heart of the threat is what’s called the “alignment problem” — the idea that a powerful computer brain might no longer be aligned with the best interests of human beings. Unlike fairness, or job loss, there aren’t obvious policy solutions to alignment. It’s a highly technical problem that some experts fear may never be solvable. But the government does have a role to play in confronting massive, uncertain problems like this. In fact, it may be the most important role it can play on AI: to fund a research project on the scale it deserves.
There’s a successful precedent for this: The Manhattan Project was one of the most ambitious technological undertakings of the 20th century. At its peak, 129,000 people worked on the project at sites across the United States and Canada. They were trying to solve a problem that was critical to national security, and which nobody was sure could be solved: how to harness nuclear power to build a weapon.
Some eight decades later, the need has arisen for a government research project that matches the original Manhattan Project’s scale and urgency. In some ways the goal is exactly the opposite of the first Manhattan Project, which opened the door to previously unimaginable destruction. This time, the goal must be to prevent unimaginable destruction, as well as merely difficult-to-anticipate destruction.
The threat is real
Don’t just take it from me. Expert opinion only differs over whether the risks from AI are unprecedentedly large or literally existential.
Even the scientists who set the groundwork for today’s AI models are sounding the alarm. Most recently, the “Godfather of AI” himself, Geoffrey Hinton, quit his post at Google to call attention to the risks AI poses to humanity.
That may sound like science fiction, but it’s a reality that is rushing toward us faster than almost anyone anticipated. Today, progress in AI is measured in days and weeks, not months and years.
As little as two years ago, the forecasting platform Metaculus put the likely arrival of “weak” artificial general intelligence — a unified system that can compete with the typical college-educated human on most tasks — sometime around the year 2040.
Now forecasters anticipate AGI will arrive in 2026. “Strong” AGIs with robotic capabilities that match or surpass most humans are forecasted to emerge just five years later. With the ability to automate AI research itself, the next milestone would be a superintelligence with unfathomable power.
Don’t count on the normal channels of government to save us from that.
Policymakers cannot afford a drawn-out interagency process or notice and comment period to prepare for what’s coming. On the contrary, making the most of AI’s tremendous upside while heading off catastrophe will require our government to stop taking a backseat role and act with a nimbleness not seen in generations. Hence the need for a new Manhattan Project.
The research agenda is clear
“A Manhattan Project for X” is one of those clichés of American politics that seldom merits the hype. AI is the rare exception. Ensuring AGI develops safely and for the betterment of humanity will require public investment into focused research, high levels of public and private coordination and a leader with the tenacity of General Leslie Groves — the project’s infamous overseer, whose aggressive, top-down leadership style mirrored that of a modern tech CEO.
I’m not the only person to suggest it: AI thinker Gary Marcus and the legendary computer scientist Judea Pearl recently endorsed the idea as well, at least informally. But what exactly would that look like in practice?
Fortunately, we already know quite a bit about the problem and can sketch out the tools we need to tackle it.
One issue is that large neural networks like GPT-4 — the “generative AIs” that are causing the most concern right now — are mostly a black box, with reasoning processes we can’t yet fully understand or control. But with the right setup, researchers can in principle run experiments that uncover particular circuits hidden within the billions of connections. This is known as “mechanistic interpretability” research, and it’s the closest thing we have to neuroscience for artificial brains.
Unfortunately, the field is still young, and far behind in its understanding of how current models do what they do. The ability to run experiments on large, unrestricted models is mostly reserved for researchers within the major AI companies. The dearth of opportunities in mechanistic interpretability and alignment research is a classic public goods problem. Training large AI models costs millions of dollars in cloud computing services, especially if one iterates through different configurations. The private AI labs are thus hesitant to burn capital on training models with no commercial purpose. Government-funded data centers, in contrast, would be under no obligation to return value to shareholders, and could provide free computing resources to thousands of potential researchers with ideas to contribute.
The government could also ensure research proceeds in relative safety — and provide a central connection for experts to share their knowledge.
With all that in mind, a Manhattan Project for AI safety should have at least 5 core functions:
1. It would serve a coordination role, pulling together the leadership of the top AI companies — OpenAI and its chief competitors, Anthropic and Google DeepMind — to disclose their plans in confidence, develop shared safety protocols and forestall the present arms-race dynamic.
2. It would draw on their talent and expertise to accelerate the construction of government-owned data centers managed under the highest security, including an “air gap,” a deliberate disconnection from outside networks, ensuring that future, more powerful AIs are unable to escape onto the open internet. Such facilities would likely be overseen by the Department of Energy’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office, given its existing mission to accelerate the demonstration of trustworthy AI.
3. It would compel the participating companies to collaborate on safety and alignment research, and require models that pose safety risks to be trained and extensively tested in secure facilities.
4. It would provide public testbeds for academic researchers and other external scientists to study the innards of large models like GPT-4, greatly building on existing initiatives like the National AI Research Resource and helping to grow the nascent field of AI interpretability.
5. And it would provide a cloud platform for training advanced AI models for within-government needs, ensuring the privacy of sensitive government data and serving as a hedge against runaway corporate power.
The only way out is through
The alternative to a massive public effort like this — attempting to kick the can on the AI problem — won’t cut it.
The only other serious proposal right now is a “pause” on new AI development, and even many tech skeptics see that as unrealistic. It may even be counterproductive. Our understanding of how powerful AI systems could go rogue is immature at best, but stands to improve greatly through continued testing, especially of larger models. Air-gapped data centers will thus be essential for experimenting with AI failure modes in a secured setting. This includes pushing models to their limits to explore potentially dangerous emergent behaviors, such as deceptiveness or power-seeking.
The Manhattan Project analogy is not perfect, but it helps to draw a contrast with those who argue that AI safety requires pausing research into more powerful models altogether. The project didn’t seek to decelerate the construction of atomic weaponry, but to master it.
Even if AGIs end up being farther off than most experts expect, a Manhattan Project for AI safety is unlikely to go to waste. Indeed, many less-than-existential AI risks are already upon us, crying out for aggressive research into mitigation and adaptation strategies. So what are we waiting for?
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hyderabad: City police commissioner CV Anand on Saturday held a high-level meeting and discussed the Safe City project with top police officials to make Hyderabad a safer place for women and children.
Additional commissioner of police (Crimes & SIT) AR Srinivas, Additional CP (Traffic) G. Sudheer Babu, and others officers from the Information Technology ( IT) cell and other officials of various government departments were present in the meeting.
Additional Director General of Police Shikha Goel and other commissioners from the state also attended the meeting.
In the meeting, Anand stressed on various works of the project such as making 26 Centers for Development and Empowerment of Women by the end of May and facilitating equipment for forensic Science laboratories. He said that completing it by the due date of August this year. Other issues that were discussed pertained to getting specially trained personnel for managing the helpline ‘ Dail 100’ for women and children in distress and for deploying volunteers to operate pelican signals.
The current status of buildings that would house the new Bharosa centres of tri-commission rates was also reviewed.
The killing of 30-year-old Jordan Neely on the subway earlier this week, however, put the mayor in a difficult position as progressive lawmakers led a growing chorus of outrage and launched a renewed attack on Adams’ approach to public safety.
The stakes are high. Subway crime was a driving force behind a groundswell of support for GOP candidates last year, which lifted a Republican gubernatorial candidate to within six points of winning the general election and helped the right flip several Congressional seats to take over the House. New York Republicans continue hammering Democrats on crime ahead of the upcoming congressional races that include several competitive seats. How New Yorkers ultimately view Neely’s killing and the government’s response could also alter the city’s strategy toward mental health and public safety.
On Monday, Neely was acting erratically aboard an F train when he was placed into a chokehold by a 24-year-old passenger and later died. On Wednesday, the city’s medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Several reports have noted Neely, who did impersonations of Michael Jackson in years’ past, struggled with mental health issues.
Adams has said that the incident demonstrates why his policies have been needed all along.
“This is what highlights what I’ve been saying throughout my administration,” Adams said Thursday during an unrelated press conference, echoing comments he made the night before on national television. “People who are dealing with mental health illness should get the help they need and not live on the train. And I’m going to continue to push on that.”
Prominent progressives, however, have laced into the mayor’s response to the incident and re-upped long standing criticisms of Adams’ approach to mental health and safety.
“This is the inevitable outcome of the dangerous rhetoric of stigmatizing mental health issues, stigmatizing poverty and the continued bloated investment in the carceral system at the expense of funding access to housing, food and health,” Tiffany Cabán, a progressive New York City Council member, said in an interview.
So far, the mayor appears outnumbered by a growing cadre of elected officials who have weighed in. While Adams has characterized the incident as tragic, he has also said he will wait until Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg completes his investigation before making any assessment — a view that is not shared even by those politically aligned with the mayor.
“Racism that continues to permeate throughout our society allows for a level of dehumanization that denies Black people from being recognized as victims when subjected to acts of violence,” New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement, later adding that “the initial response by our legal system to this killing is disturbing and puts on display for the world the double standards that Black people and other people of color continue to face.”
And Maurice Mitchell, head of the national Working Families Party, noted Adams’ policies were in full effect Monday but did not stop Neely from dying.
“Even with hundreds of police in our subways, they failed to prevent this—or even apprehend the killer,” he said in a statement.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
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If there were a silver lining in her son being convicted of high treason, it was that Yelena Gordon would have a rare chance to see him.
But when she tried to enter the courtroom, she was told it was already full. But those packed in weren’t press or his supporters, since the hearing was closed.
“I recognized just one face there, the rest were all strangers,” she later recounted, exasperated, outside the Moscow City Court. “I felt like I had woken up in a Kafka novel.”
Eventually, after copious cajoling, Gordon was able to stand beside Vladimir Kara-Murza, a glass wall between her and her son, as the sentence was delivered.
Kara-Murza was handed 25 years in prison, a sky-high figure previously reserved for major homicide cases, and the highest sentence for an opposition politician to date.
The bulk — 18 years — was given on account of treason, for speeches he gave last year in the United States, Finland and Portugal.
For a man who had lobbied the West for anti-Russia sanctions such as on the Magnitsky Act against human rights abusers — long before Russia invaded Ukraine — those speeches were wholly unremarkable.
But the prosecution cast Kara-Murza’s words as an existential threat to Russia’s safety.
“This is the enemy and he should be punished,” prosecutor Boris Loktionov stated during the trial, according to Kara-Murza’s lawyer.
The judge, whose own name features on the Magnitsky list as a human rights abuser, agreed. And so did Russia’s Foreign Ministry, saying: “Traitors and betrayers, hailed by the West, will get what they deserve.”
Redefining the enemy
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of Russians have received fines or jail sentences of several years under new military censorship laws.
But never before has the nuclear charge of treason been used to convict someone for public statements containing publicly available information.
A screen set up in a hall at Moscow City Court shows the verdict in the case against Vladimir Kara-Murza | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
The verdict came a day after an appeal hearing at the same court for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich who, in a move unseen since the end of the Cold War, is being charged with spying “for the American side.”
Taken together, the two cases set a historic precedent for modern Russia, broadening and formalizing its hunt for internal enemies.
“The state, the [Kremlin], has decided to sharply expand the ‘list of targets’ for charges of treason and espionage,” Andrei Soldatov, an expert in Russia’s security services, told POLITICO.
Up until now, the worst the foreign press corps feared was having their accreditation revoked by Russia’s Foreign Ministry. This is now changing.
For Kremlin critics, the gloves have of course been off for far longer — before his jailing, Kara-Murza survived two poisonings. He had been a close ally of Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015 within sight of the Kremlin.
But such reprisals were reserved for only a handful of prominent dissidents, and enacted by anonymous hitmen and undercover agents.
After Putin last week signed into law extending the punishment for treason from 20 years to life, anyone could be eliminated from public life with the stamp of legitimacy from a judge in robes.
“Broach the topic of political repression over a coffee with a foreigner, and that could already be considered treason,” Oleg Orlov, chair of the disbanded rights group Memorial, said outside the courthouse.
Like many, he saw a parallel with Soviet times, when tens of thousands of “enemies of the state” were accused of spying for foreign governments and sent to far-flung labor camps or simply executed, and foreigners were by definition suspect.
Treason as catch-all
Instead of the usual Investigative Committee, treason cases fall under the remit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, making them uniquely secretive.
In court, hearings are held behind closed doors — sheltered from the public and press — and defense lawyers are all but gagged.
But they used to be relatively rare: Between 2009 and 2013, a total of 25 people were tried for espionage or treason, according to Russian court statistics. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, that number fluctuated from a handful to a maximum of 17.
Former defense journalist Ivan Safronov in court, April 2022 | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Involving academics, Crimean Tatars and military accused of passing on sensitive information to foreign parties, they generally drew little attention.
The jailing of Ivan Safronov — a former defense journalist accused of sharing state secrets with a Czech acquaintance — formed an important exception in 2020. It triggered a massive outcry among his peers and cast a spotlight on the treason law. Apparently, even sharing information gleaned from public sources could result in a conviction.
Combined with an amendment introduced after anti-Kremlin protests in 2012 that labeled any help to a “foreign organization which aimed to undermine Russian security” as treason, it turned the law into a powder keg.
In February 2022, that was set alight.
Angered by the war but too afraid to protest publicly, some Russians sought to support Ukraine in less visible ways such as through donations to aid organizations.
The response was swift: Only three days after Putin announced his special military operation, Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office warned it would check “every case of financial or other help” for signs of treason.
Thousands of Russians were plunged into a legal abyss. “I transferred 100 rubles to a Ukrainian NGO. Is this the end?” read a Q&A card shared on social media by the legal aid group Pervy Otdel.
“The current situation is such that this [treason] article will likely be applied more broadly,” warned Senator Andrei Klimov, head of the defense committee of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament.
Inventing traitors
Last summer, the law was revised once more to define defectors as traitors as well.
Ivan Pavlov, who oversees Pervy Otdel from exile after being forced to flee Russia for defending Safronov, estimates some 70 treason cases have already been launched since the start of the war — twice the maximum in pre-war years. And the tempo seems to be picking up.
Regional media headlines reporting arrests for treason are becoming almost commonplace. Sometimes they include high-octane video footage of FSB teams storming people’s homes and securing supposed confessions on camera.
Yet from what can be gleaned about the cases from media leaks, their evidence is shaky.
Instead of the usual Investigative Committee, treason cases fall under the remit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, making them uniquely secretive | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
In December last year, 21-year-old Savely Frolov became the first to be charged with conspiring to defect. Among the reported incriminating evidence is that he attempted to cross into neighboring Georgia with a pair of camouflage trousers in the trunk of his car.
In early April this year, a married couple was arrested in the industrial city of Nizhny Tagil for supposedly collaborating with Ukrainian intelligence. The two worked at a nearby defense plant, but acquaintances cited by independent Russian media Holod deny they had access to secret information.
“It is a reaction to the war: There’s a demand from up top for traitors. And if they can’t find real ones, they’ll make them up, invent them,” said Pavlov.
Although official statistics are only published with a two-year lag time, he has little doubt a flood of guilty verdicts is coming.
“The first and last time a treason suspect was acquitted in Russia was in 1999.”
No sign of slowing
If precedent is anything to go by, Gershkovich will likely eventually be subject to a prisoner swap.
That is what happened with Brittney Griner, a U.S. basketball star jailed for drug smuggling when she entered Russia carrying hashish vape cartridges.
And it is also what happened with the last foreign journalist detained, in 1986 when the American Nicholas Daniloff was supposedly caught “red-handed” spying, like Gershkovich.
Back then, several others were released with him — among them Yury Orlov, a human rights activist sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet activity.”
Some now harbor hope that a deal involving Gershkovich could also help Kara-Murza, who is well-known in Washington circles and suffers from severe health problems.
For ordinary Russians, any glimmers of hope that the traitor push will slow down are even less tangible.
Those POLITICO spoke to say a Soviet-era mass campaign against traitors is unlikely, if only because the Kremlin has a fine line to walk: arrest too many traitors and it risks shattering the image that Russians unanimously support the war.
Some harbor hope that a deal involving Gershkovich could also help Kara-Murza, who is well-known in Washington circles | Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE
And in the era of modern technology, there are easier ways to convey a message to a large audience. “If Stalin had had a television channel, there would’ve likely not been a need for mass repression,” reflected Pavlov.
Yet the repressive state apparatus does seem to have a momentum of its own, as those involved in investigating and prosecuting treason and espionage cases are rewarded with bonuses and promotions.
In a first, the treason case against Kara-Murza was led by the Investigative Committee, opening the door for the FSB to massively increase its work capacity by offloading work on others, says Soldatov.
“If the FSB can’t handle it, the Investigative Committee will jump in.”
In the public sphere, patriotic officials at all levels are clamoring for an even harder line, going so far as to volunteer the names of apparently unpatriotic political rivals and celebrities to be investigated.
There have been calls for “traitors” to be stripped of their citizenship and to reintroduce the death penalty.
And in a telling sign, Kara-Murza’s veteran lawyer Vadim Prokhorov has fled Russia, fearing he might be targeted next.
Аs Orlov, the dissident who was part of the 1986 swap and who went on to become an early critic of Putin, wrote in the early days of Putin’s reign in 2004: “Russia is flying back in time.”
Nearly two decades on, the question in Moscow nowadays is a simple one: how far back?
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
SRINAGAR: The High Court of JK and Ladakh High while taking serious note of the deaths caused due to electrocution and injuries due to electric shocks, ordered for the constitution of a committee to ensure the implementation of statutory safety measures and regulations enshrined in the Central Electricity Authority (Measures relating to Safety and Electric Supply) Regulations, 2010, in letter and spirit.
The three member panel will be headed by the Commissioner Secretary, State’s Power Development Department (PDD) and will comprise of the Chief Engineers of the Department.
The court has also directed District Magistrates of all districts in Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh to ensure compliance with Regulation 58 of Central Electricity Authority (Measures relating to Safety and Electric Supply) Regulations, 2010 on a war footing, which provides for clearance above ground level of conductors of overhead lines, including electricity service lines.
While awarding compensation of Rs 10 lakh to the family of Jatinder Kumar, a casual labourer, who died while carrying out restoration work on a transformer in Jammu, a bench comprising Justice Wasim Sadiq Nargal observed that that the accident occurred due to non-adherence to safety measures such as local earthings, hand insulating gloves, proper isolation, and other safety measures by the maintenance staff. “The deceased worker’s mother, wife, and daughter will receive the compensation within two months of the court order,” the bench concluded.
“It appears that deaths due to electrocution as well as bodily injuries due to electric shocks are ignored as mere accidents. The colossal loss of human lives and especially children is totally unacceptable, grim and heart rending. Such unfortunate deaths continue to occur flouting statutory measures,” bench observed.
“Article 21 of constitution ensures fundamental rights to each citizen of the country which are inalienable in nature and guarantees citizens right to live and to be treated as an individual of worth,” it added.
Justice Nargal further emphasized that, “any omission in preventing the discharge of high voltage electric energy by anyone engaged in the activity of supplying such electric energy is liable to compensate for the damage caused to a human life because of such energy.”
Researchers with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and University of Florida, who viewed Ladapo’s edits on the study and have followed the issue closely, criticized the surgeon general for making the changes. One said it appears Ladapo altered the study out of political — not scientific — concerns.
“I think it’s a lie,” Matt Hitchings, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, said of Ladapo’s assertion that the Covid-19 vaccine causes cardiac death in young men. “To say this — based on what we’ve seen, and how this analysis was made — it’s a lie.”
The newly released draft of the eight-page study, provided by the Florida Department of Health, indicates that it initially stated that there was no significant risk associated with the Covid-19 vaccines for young men. But “Dr. L’s Edits,” as the document is titled, reveal that Ladapo replaced that language to say that men between 18 and 39 years old are at high risk of heart illness from two Covid vaccines that use mRNA technology.
“Results from the stratified analysis for cardiac related death following vaccination suggests mRNA vaccination may be driving the increased risk in males, especially among males aged 18-39,” Ladapo wrote in the draft. “The risk associated with mRNA vaccination should be weighed against the risk associated with COVID-19 infection.”
In a statement to POLITICO, Ladapo said revisions and refinements are a normal part of assessing surveillance data and that he has the appropriate expertise and training to make those decisions.
“To say that I ‘removed an analysis’ for a particular outcome is an implicit denial of the fact that the public has been the recipient of biased data and interpretations since the beginning of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine campaign,” he said. “I have never been afraid of disagreement with peers or media.”
He also said that he determined the study was worthwhile since “the federal government and Big Pharma continue to misrepresent risks associated with these vaccines.”
The DeSantis administration referred questions to Florida’s Department of Health.
Ladapo, a Harvard-trained doctor who held professorships at UCLA and NYU, specializes in cardiovascular diseases and gained attention nationally during the pandemic after he authored op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today questioning the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and the effectiveness of mask-wearing and lockdowns.
He was also a supporter of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that former President Donald Trump often praised as a treatment for Covid. The FDA later withdrew emergency authorization for its use.
Ladapo was picked by DeSantis in September 2021 to become the state’s surgeon general as DeSantis waged war against President Joe Biden’s Covid-related restrictions and ordered the state to ban mask-wearing requirements in schools and employer-issued vaccine mandates.
Ladapo drew criticism in part because he was affiliated with the conservative America’s Frontline Doctors, a group founded to fight Covid restrictions by anti-vaccine advocate Simone Gold. Ladapo devoted an entire chapter to his friendship with Gold in a memoir he published last year titled “Transcend Fear.”
Yet the researchers who viewed a copy of the edits said Ladapo removed an important analysis that would have contradicted his recommendation. Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, called Ladapo’s changes “really troubling.”
“He took out stuff that didn’t support his position,” Salmon said. “That’s really a problem.”
Hitchings chastised the integrity of Ladapo’s study after it was released last fall but is now much more critical.
“What’s clear from the previous analysis, and even more clear from Dr. L’s edits, is that absolutely there was a political motivation behind the final analysis that was produced,” Hitchings said. “Key information was withheld from the public that would have allowed them or other experts to interpret this in context.”
Ladapo’s edits also shed new light on an anonymous internal complaint he faced last year. The complaint, which the Florida Department of Health’s inspector general investigated, accused Ladapo of “scientific fraud” for allegedly manipulating the final draft of the study.
The inspector general stopped probing the complaint after the anonymous person failed to respond to emails. In a previous interview with POLITICO, Ladapo said the accusations were “factually false.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
SRINAGAR: People should be aware of fire safety measures and follow those in letter and spirit to control situations during fire incidents, said Towseef Hussain, Assistant Director of Fire and Emergency Services Budgam.
Talking on the sidelines of an event marking the culmination of the Fire Service Week, the officer said, “To control the situation and minimise losses during fire incidents, the most important thing is educating people about fire safety precautions. They should also strictly adhere to the instructions.”
The programme was aimed at raising awareness among the public regarding fire safety measures. Students and employees also participated in the event which included various competitions.
The J&K Fire and Emergency Department organised Fire Safety Week, which began on April 14, to commemorate the firefighters who lost their lives in the line of duty.
In the programme AGNI (Awareness in Fire Safety for Growth of National Infrastructure), students from various schools across Budgam participated in essay writing and lecture competitions. The top three winners received cash prizes and certificates, while all participants received medals and appreciation for their participation.
Senior officers facilitated the employees of the Fire & Emergency Department who were present at the event. (KNO)
Hyderabad: Chief Secretary Santhi Kumari directed the officials to formulate a strategy to create awareness among the public about fire safety.
She emphasised the need for continuous engagement of the people through social advocacy groups and other methods. CS held a meeting on fire accidents and deliberated about the various safety measures to be taken to prevent fire mishaps, a press note informed.
GHMC Commissioner Lokesh Kumar informed that GHMC has taken up an intensive drive to inspect the shopping complexes, cinema halls etc to see whether the emergency exit is functioning or not. “The residential welfare societies are also being contacted to create awareness about fire safety measures. All the vulnerable buildings in the city have been identified and notices were also served to them to install fire safety equipment,” he said.
Chief Secretary asked the GHMC and Fire department officials to prepare an action plan to get fire safety equipment installed and checked in all shopping complexes, multiplexes, hospitals and other commercial establishments in a time-bound manner and ensure that all these establishments install the fire safety equipment in their premises and fully operationalize them.
She also underlined the need to identify red-category establishments which are functioning in residential zones and work out measures to shift them.
Special Chief Secretary MAUD Arvind Kumar, DG Fire Services Nagi Reddy, CCP Devender Reddy and other officials attended the meeting.
