Monday, 29 February 2016

AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation)

The purpose of AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation) is to
 (i) ensure that every household has access to a tap with assured supply of water and a sewerage connection
 (ii) increase the amenity value of cities by developing greenery and well maintained open spaces (e.g. parks)
 (iii) reduce pollution by switching to public transport or constructing facilities for non-motorized transport (e.g. walking and cycling).
 All these outcomes are valued by citizens, particularly women, and indicators and standards have been prescribed by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) in the form of Service Level
Benchmarks (SLBs).

The scheme was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June 2015 with the focus of the urban renewal projects is to establish infrastructure that could ensure adequate robust sewerage networks and water supply for urban transformation.
Rajasthan was the first state in the country to submit State Annual Action Plan under Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT). The scheme Housing for All by 2022 and Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) were launched on the same day. The scheme is dependent with public private partnership model(PPP) model. If required, various other schemes like Swachh Bharat Mission, Housing for All 2022, along with the local state schemes like that related to water supply and sewerage and other infrastructure related schemes can be linked to AMRUT

The Mission 

Providing basic services (e.g. water supply, sewerage, urban transport) to households and build
amenities in cities which will improve the quality of life for all, especially the poor and the
disadvantaged is a national priority. An estimate of the funds required over a 20 year period, at
2009-10 prices, was made by the High Powered Expert Committee (HPEC) during 2011. The
Committee estimated that Rs. 39.2 lakh crore was required for creation of urban infrastructure,
including Rs. 17.3 lakh crore for urban roads and Rs. 8 lakh crore for services, such as water
supply, sewerage, solid waste management and storm water drains. Moreover, the requirement
for Operation and Maintenance (O&M) was separately estimated to be Rs. 19.9 lakh crore.
Learnings from the earlier Mission have shown that infrastructure creation should have a
direct impact on the real needs of people, such as providing taps and toilet connections to all
households. This means that the focus should be on infrastructure creation that has a direct link
to provision of better services to people and this was explicitly stated by the President of India in
his speeches to the Joint Sessions of the Parliament on 9 June, 2014 and 23 February, 2015.
Therefore, the purpose of Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation
(AMRUT) is to (i) ensure that every household has access to a tap with assured supply of water
and a sewerage connection; (ii) increase the amenity value of cities by developing greenery and
well maintained open spaces (e.g. parks); and (iii) reduce pollution by switching to public
transport or constructing facilities for non-motorized transport (e.g. walking and cycling). All
these outcomes are valued by citizens, particularly women, and indicators and standards have
been prescribed by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) in the form of Service Level
Benchmarks (SLBs).

However, the pursuit of better outcomes will not stop with the provision of taps and
sewerage connections to all (universal coverage). Other benchmarks will be targeted following a
step-by-step process after achieving the benchmark of universal coverage. Such a gradual
process of achieving benchmarks is called “incrementalism”. This does not mean that other SLBs
are less important, but that in the incremental process SLBs are achieved gradually according to
National Priorities. In the case of urban transport the benchmark will be to reduce pollution in
cities while construction and maintenance of storm water drains is expected to reduce, and
ultimately eliminate, flooding in cities, thereby making cities resilient.

Earlier, the MoUD used to give project-by-project sanctions. In the AMRUT this has
been replaced by approval of the State Annual Action Plan once a year by the MoUD and the
States have to give project sanctions and approval at their end. In this way, the AMRUT makes
States equal partners in planning and implementation of projects, thus actualizing the spirit of
cooperative federalism. A sound institutional structure is the foundation to make Missions
successful. Therefore, Capacity Building and a set of Reforms have been included in the
Mission. Reforms will lead to improvement in service delivery, mobilization of resources and
making municipal functioning more transparent and functionaries more accountable, while
Capacity Building will empower municipal functionaries and lead to timely completion of
projects.

Implementation
First Phase Implementation
89 cities in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan have been allocated funds under the first phase of the mission. A huge allocation of fund has been done for them by the Apex Committee of AMRUT under the State Annual Action Plans (SAAP) for these states for period of 2015-16.
At each city level a City Mission Management Units (CMMUs) is proposed to be set up which will assist the Urban Local Body (ULB) in terms of staff and technology.

Later Phase
The flagship program has already invited a huge fund and participation of big companies. In later stage the rest of the cities out of 500 will be finalized and implemented for the next phase.

For more info go to Government approved Smartcities


Thursday, 18 February 2016

FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN CULTURE

WHAT IS CULTURE?
·         Culture is one of the most important and basic concepts of sociology. In sociology, culture has a specific meaning. The anthropologists believe that the behavior, which is meant, is called culture. In other words the behavior which is transmitted to us by someone is called culture. The way of living, eating, wearing, singing, dancing and talking is all parts of a culture.

·         In common, parlance, the word culture, is understood to mean beautiful, refined or interesting. In sociology, we use the word culture to denote acquired behavior, which are shared by and transmitted among the members of the society. In other words, culture is a system of learned behavior shared by and transmitted among the members of a group.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INDIAN CULTURE

SPIRITUALITY AS THE MASTER KEY

"It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light. This must not and will surely not happen; but it cannot be said that the danger is not there."
Sri Aurobindo

Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning, - and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, - that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities. She was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces; she had a keen eye for the importance of the physical sciences; she knew how to organise the arts of ordinary life. But she saw that the physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right relation to the supra-physical; she saw that the complexity of the universe could not be explained in the present terms of man or seen by his superficial sight, that there were other powers behind, other powers within man him- self of which he is normally unaware, that he is conscious only of a small part of himself, that the invisible always surrounds the visible, the suprasensible the sensible, even as infinity always surrounds the finite. She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, - truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence. She saw the myriad gods beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges of life beyond our life, ranges of mind be- yond our present mind and above these she saw the splendours of the spirit. Then with that calm audacity of her intuition which knew no fear or littleness and shrank from no act whether of spiritual or intellectual, ethical or vital courage, she declared that there was none of these things which man could not attain if he trained his will and knowledge; he could conquer these ranges of mind, become the spirit, become a god, become one with God, become the ineffable Brahman. And with the logical practicality and sense of science and organised method which distinguished her mentality, she set forth immediately to find out the way. Hence from long ages of this insight and practice there was ingrained in her spirituality, her powerful psychic tendency, her great yearning to grapple with the infinite and possess it, her ineradicable religious sense, her idealism, her Yoga, the constant turn of her art and her philosophy.
      But this was not and could not be her whole mentality, her entire spirit; spirituality itself does not flourish on earth in the void, even as our mountain-tops do not rise like those of an enchantment of dream out of the clouds without a base. When we look at the past of India, what strikes us next is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least, - it is indeed much longer, - she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly, with an inexhaustible many- sidedness, republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems and all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts worldly, trades, industries, fine crafts, - the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. She creates and creates and is not satisfied and is not tired; she will not have an end of it, seems hardly to need a space for rest, a time for inertia and lying fallow. She expands too outside her borders; her ships cross the ocean and the fine superfluity of her wealth brims over to Judea and Egypt and Rome; her colonies spread her arts and epics and creeds in the Archipelago; her traces are found in the sands of Mesopotamia; her religions conquer China and Japan and spread westward as far as Palestine and Alexandria,- and the figures of the Upanishads and the sayings of the Buddhists are re-echoed on the lips of Christ. Everywhere, as on her soil, so in her works there is the teeming of a super-abundant energy of life. European critics complain that in her ancient architecture, sculpture and art there is no reticence, no holding back of riches, no blank spaces, that she labours to fill every rift with ore, occupy every inch with plenty. Well, but defect or no that is the necessity of her superabundance of life, of the teeming of the infinite within her. She lavishes her riches because she must, as the Infinite fills every inch of space with the stirring of life and energy because it is the Infinite.
 But this supreme spirituality and this prolific abundance of the energy and joy of life and creation do not make all that the spirit of India has been in its past. It is not a confused splendour of tropical vegetation under heavens of a pure sapphire infinity. It is only to eyes unaccustomed to such wealth that there seems to be a confusion in this crowding of space with rich forms of life, a luxurious disorder of excess or a wanton lack of measure, clear balance and design. For the third power of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, at once austere arid rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and curious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and arrangement, but an order founded upon a seeking for the inner law and truth of things and having in view always the possibility of conscientious practice. India has been pre-eminently the land of the Dharma and the Shastra. She searched for the inner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity, its Dharma; that found, she laboured to cast into elaborate form and detailed law of arrangement its application in fact and rule of life. Her first period was luminous with the discovery of the Spirit; her second completed the discovery of the Dharma; her third elaborated into detail the first simpler formulation of the Shastra; but none was exclusive, the three elements are always present.
In this third period the curious elaboration of all life into a science and an art assumes extraordinary proportions. The mere mass of the intellectual production during the period from Asoka well into the Mahomedan epoch is something truly prodigious, as can be seen at once if one studies the account which recent scholarship gives of it, and we must remember that that scholar- ship as yet only deals with a fraction of what is still lying extant and what is extant is only a small percentage of what was once written and known. There is no historical parallel for such an intellectual labour and activity before the invention of printing and the facilities of modem science; yet all that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no better record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf. Nor was all this colossal literature confined to philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences; it embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing, all the sixty-four accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind, even, for instance, to such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants, each of which had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature. In each subject from the largest and most momentous to the smallest and most trivial there was expended the same all-embracing, opulent, minute and thorough intellectuality. On one side there is an insatiable curiosity, the desire of life to know itself in every detail, on the other a spirit of organisation and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonized knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure. Thus an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and gust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence combined of the rational, ethical and aesthetic mind each at a high intensity of action, created the harmony of the ancient Indian culture.
[The Renaissance in India-1; pg 6-10] 


Spiritual Culture of India
…first let us say what we do not mean by this ideal. Clearly it does not signify that we shall regard earthly life as a temporal vanity, try to become all of us as soon as possible monastic ascetics, frame our social life into a preparation for the monastery or cavern or mountain-top or make of it a static life without any great progressive ideals but only some aim which has nothing to do with earth or the collective advance of the human race. That may have been for some time a tendency of the Indian mind, but it was never the whole tendency. Nor does spirituality mean the moulding of the whole type of the national being to suit the limited dogmas, forms, tenets of a particular religion, as was often enough attempted by the old societies, an idea which still persists in many minds by the power of old mental habit and association; clearly such an attempt would be impossible, even if it were desirable, in a country full of the most diverse religious opinions and harbouring too three such distinct general forms as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, to say nothing of the numerous special forms to which each of these has given birth. Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion…
Nor do we mean the exclusion of anything whatsoever from our scope, of any of the great aims of human life, any of the great problems of our modern world, any form of human activity, any general or inherent impulse or characteristic means of the desire of the soul of man for development, expansion, increasing vigour and joy, light, power, perfection…
But still there is a great difference between the spiritual and the purely material and mental view of existence. The spiritual view holds that the mind, life, body are man’s means and not his aims and even that they are not his last and highest means; it sees them as his outer instrumental self and not his whole being. It sees the infinite behind all things finite and it adjudges the value of the finite by higher infinite values of which they are the imperfect translation and towards which, to a truer expression of them, they are always trying to arrive. It sees a greater reality than the apparent not only behind man and the world, but within man and the world, and this soul, self, divine thing in man it holds to be that in him which is of the highest importance, that which everything else in him must try in whatever way to bring out and express, and this soul, self, divine presence in the world it holds to be that which man has ever to try to see and recognize through all appearances, to unite his thought and life with it and in it to find his unity with his fellows. This alters necessarily our whole normal view of things; even in preserving all the aims of human life, it will give them a different sense and direction.
We aim at the health and vigour of the body; but with what object? For its own sake, will be the ordinary reply, because it is worth having; or else that we may have long life and a sound basis for our intellectual, vital, emotional satisfactions. Yes, for its own sake, in a way, but in this sense that the physical too is an expression of the spirit and its perfection is worth having, is part of the dharma of the complete human living; but still more as a basis for all that higher activity which ends in the discovery and expression of the divine self in man. Śarīram khalu dharmasādhanam, runs the old Sanskrit saying, the body too is our means for fulfilling the dharma, the Godward law of our being. The mental, the emotional, the aesthetic parts of us have to be developed, is the ordinary view, so that they may have a greater satisfaction, or because that is man’s finer nature, because so he feels himself more alive and fulfilled. This, but not this only; rather because these things too are the expressions of the spirit, things which are seeking in him for their divine values and by their growth, subtlety, flexibility, power, intensity he is able to come nearer to the divine Reality in the world, to lay hold on it variously, to tune eventually his whole life into unity and conformity with it. Morality is in the ordinary view a well-regulated individual and social conduct which keeps society going and leads towards a better, a more rational, temperate, sympathetic, self-restrained dealing with our fellows. But ethics in the spiritual point of view is much more, it is a means of developing in our action and still more essentially in the character of our being the diviner self in us, a step of our growing into the nature of the Godhead.
So with all our aims and activities; spirituality takes them all and gives them a greater, diviner, more intimate sense. Philosophy is in the Western way of dealing with it a dispassionate enquiry by the light of the reason into the first truths of existence, which we shall get at either by observing the facts science places at our disposal or by a careful dialectical scrutiny of the concepts of the reason or a mixture of the two methods. But from the spiritual view-point truth of existence is to be found by intuition and inner experience and not only by the reason and by scientific observation; the work of philosophy is to arrange the data given by the various means of knowledge, excluding none, and put them into their synthetic relation to the one Truth, the one supreme and universal reality. Eventually, its real value is to prepare a basis for spiritual realisation and the growing of the human being into his divine self and divine nature. Science itself becomes only a knowledge of the world which throws an added light on the spirit of the universe and his way in things. Nor will it confine itself to a physical knowledge and its practical fruits or to the knowledge of life and man and mind based upon the idea of matter or material energy as our starting-point; a spiritualized culture will make room for new fields of research, for new and old psychical sciences and results which start from spirit as the first truth and from the power of mind and of what is greater than mind to act upon life and matter. The primitive aim of art and poetry is to create images of man and Nature which shall satisfy the sense of beauty and embody artistically the ideas of the intelligence about life and the responses of the imagination to it; but in a spiritual culture they become too in their aim a revelation of greater things concealed in man and Nature and of the deepest spiritual and universal beauty. Politics, society, economy are in the first form of human life simply an arrangement by which men collectively can live, produce, satisfy their desires, enjoy, progress in bodily, vital and mental efficiency; but the spiritual aim makes them much more than this, first, a framework of life within which man can seek for and grow into his real self and divinity, secondly, an increasing embodiment of the divine law of being in life, thirdly, a collective advance towards the light, power, peace, unity, harmony of the diviner nature of humanity which the race is trying to evolve. This and nothing more but nothing less, this in all its potentialities, is what we mean by a spiritual culture and the application of spirituality to life.

The Soul of Indian Culture

Philosophy and religion are the soul of Indian culture, inseparable from each other and interpenetrative. The whole objective of Indian philosophy, its entire raison d’être, is the knowledge of the spirit, the experience of it and the right way to a spiritual existence; its single aim coincides with the highest significance of religion. Indian religion draws all its characteristic value from the spiritual philosophy which illumines its supreme aspiration and colours even most of what is drawn from an inferior range of religious experience. (CWSA 20: 110)


Saturday, 13 February 2016

A trip to Devi pindi Katra

Devi Pindi is a religious journey to Devi Maa Temple located at katra near Panthal town of Reasi District in Jammu and Kashmir State of India.
It is 15 km away from katra and situated on katra udhampur road.

Two kilometers away from present Katra town, is a village named Hansali. This picturesque-place surrounded on all sides by trees and brooks, pre­sents a thrilling view of nature.

The journey is very exciting with great Landscape and natural water fountains flowing along the path.The path is cut from Himalayan mountains and all around you there are only mountains with their serene environment.
Himalayan Mountains on the path towards Devi Pindi
As we move up as there is no particular Track laid down so we have to move along a artificial open drain that is carrying the natural fresh water flowing from inside the mountains.
The path to travel

Himalayan Mountains on the path towards Devi Pindi
As we move in the serene environment in between the mountains we see the ultimate peace which everyone discovers in his life.It was so quite that nothing could hinder your inner peace.
                                
A must have visit if you ever visit Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine, so pack your bags and make a trip to this peaceful Devi pindi shrine.
Vegetation along mountains


The whole path is full of ‘elements of surprise’. On each and every turn you may find things which you have never seen. Amazing variety of flora and fauna is another thing that surprises you as you ascend.
Valleys along the path


 Huge peaks and hillocks overpower your existence as you progress in the journey.

The clouds touching the mountains




On way to natural springs for bath

Destination :    Devi Pindian, Katra, Jammu & Kashmir




How to reach : A mini bus ride to Panthal  from Katra and rest of the journey, by foot, on a NOT defined path. Search on Google Maps with the name Devi Pindi Mata Mandir.


Trekking Tips : Keep yourself full with food items. 

Chose monsoon time and feel free to explore.


For maximum enjoyment. NOT for families, as there is no road. 


The most important tip – MIND YOUR STEP. 



Keep the environment clean, as it is, and do not miss the colors of nature.





Request :      Respect nature and try to preserve it.

Enjoy your journey and do comment in the comments section.