SRINAGAR: An Army officer of the rank of lieutenant colonel shot himself dead with his service weapon at the Khonmoh depot on the outskirts of Srinagar on Wednesday. Sources said a group of soldiers heard gunshots and ran inside to find Lt Col Sudeep Bhagat lying in a pool of blood. He was declared dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. It wasn’t immediately known why the officer took his own life. Lt Col Bhagat’s death coincided with an SSB jawan attempting suicide by shooting himself with a rifle in Srinagar’s Bemina locality. He escaped with a minor injury as the bullet grazed the left side of his neck. In Jammu’s Rajouri district, a sepoy was found dead with multiple bullet injuries in a camp of the Army’s Ace of Spades division. The deceased is suspected to have shot himself. “The body has been sent for post-mortem and other medico-legal formalities,” he said.
The search for Subhan Ali, a 27-year-old Border Roads Organisation officer posted in Kargil, just got longer. The Indian Engineering Services (IES) officer is believed to have fallen into the Dras river in June last year, a month before he was going to get married. While his driver’s body was found, his never was. Now, a fortnight after defence minister Rajnath Singh said the DNA tests to confirm his identity are “in queue,” his family says they are caught in a limbo — they have been “informally” told that the DNA samples have not matched but to get a death certificate, they’d have to wait over six years. And his salary dues remain stuck. “He was going to get married in July. We were busy preparing. In fact, the wedding date had to be moved twice. He and I ran an IAS coaching centre for several years. He got into IIT (Delhi) and left that. He got a job with the DDA in Delhi in 2018 after that and, the following year, cleared the IES exam,” his brother Sahban told TOI. After clearing the IES, Ali was posted as an assistant engineer with the 81 RCC, General Reserve Engineering Force (GREF), and was on duty when his car met with an accident on June 22. “The Army and Kargil officials had deployed excavators, a divers’ team, combat engineers and armed force specialist drivers who used heavy duty cranes to locate the vehicle. Then, helicopters were sent out. But the body could not be found in the fast-flowing Dras river,” an Army official told TOI. Five days later, Pakistan alerted India that an unidentified body had been found near their side of the LoC. Indian authorities from Kargil then met their counterparts in Pakistan and collected DNA samples from the body, to be matched with Ali’s parents. Samples from his father, a tailor at Balrampur in Uttar Pradesh, and mother were taken in October. After months of no progress, Amroha MP Danish Ali wrote to the defence ministry about the delay. In response, defence minister Rajnath Singh wrote on February 11, “The DNA samples (of the body in Pakistan) have been received by Kargil Police at Tangdhar on August 22, 2020. DNA samples of his parents were also collected in October 2020. It is learnt DNA matching analysis at FSL (Forensic Science Laboratory) in Chandigarh is in queue and it may have 3-6 months before report is finalised.” His family said they have been unofficially told the samples did not match. “We have been told informally by the Kargil administration that the DNA samples did not match but calls to his seniors at BRO did not get much of a response. We have spent Rs 2-3 lakh on trips and search operations. I hope we get a final and respectful closure,” Sahban said. Section 108 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 stipulates a seven-year period for which a person has to be missing before being presumed dead: “[Provided that when] the question is whether a man is alive or dead, and it is proved that he has not been heard of for seven years by those who would naturally have heard of him if he had been alive, the burden of proving that he is alive is [shifted to] the person who affirms it.” In a letter to the Kargil administration on February 12, a copy of which is with TOI, Sahban sought assistance to get a death certificate for his brother. “Please provide us (with) … the death certificate required by the GREF (BRO) for the (financial) assistance, as there is enough evidence that my brother Subhan Ali was in the … Gypsy (that fell into the Dras). Kindly help us. We won’t be able to survive the pain,” he wrote. A Kargil Police official said, “We are trying our best to help the family with the search and with the procedure to get their dues.” However, he added, the case could not be closed this soon because of the seven-year wait before a missing person can be “lawfully” declared dead.
The Indian Newspaper Society (INS) on Thursday asked Google to compensate Indian newspapers for using their content and insisted that the global search giant increase the publisher share of advertising revenue to 85 percent. In a letter to Google, INS president L Adimoolam said publishers are also facing a very opaque advertising system, as they are unable to get details of Google”s advertising value chain.
“The Society insisted that Google should increase the publisher share of advertising revenue to 85 percent, and also ensure more transparency in the revenue reports provided to publishers by Google,” the INS said in a statement. It noted that, over the past year publishers across the world have been raising the issue of fair payment for content and of proper sharing of advertising revenue with Google. It is also noted that Google has recently agreed to better compensate and pay publishers in France, the European Union and notably in Australia.
In a letter addressed to Google India’s country manager Sanjay Gupta, the INS president demanded that Google should pay for news generated by the newspapers which employ thousands of journalists on the ground, at considerable expense, for gathering and verifying information. “Since, the content which is generated and published by newspapers at considerable expense is proprietary, the Society pointed out that it is this credible content which has given Google the authenticity in India ever since its inception,” the INS said.
It pointed out that publishers have been providing complete access to “quality journalism with credible news, current affairs, analysis, information and entertainment”, and “there is a huge distinction between the editorial content from quality publications and fake news that is spreading on other information platforms”.
Further, it was also pointed out that advertising has been the financial backbone of the news industry. However, newspaper publishers are seeing their share of the advertising pie shrinking in the digital space, even as Google is taking a “giant share of advertising spends”, leaving publishers with a small share, it said. The INS also raised the issue of giving greater prominence to editorial content from Registered News Publishers to tackle fake news, as Google picks up content from several sites that are not credible, thus “amplifying misinformation and propagation of fake news”.
Pointing out that the Society is engaged in discussions with Google on these vital issues, the letter also reiterated that “Indian print media is the most credible source of news and information in the country, and newspapers play a vital role in nation building. However, the pandemic and the current digital business model have been unfair to publishers, making it unviable for the print media industry. We invest heavily on journalism, the core of our news operations, because newspapers play a vital role in society.”
