Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi had an hour long session with the ladies organisation of an industries chamber on the women’s empowerment issue recently. All through the session, Mr Modi praised his state for implementing many schemes for empowering women including making it mandatory in school admission forms to have the mother’s name. Later, one of the participants, after appreciating the initiatives taken by the Modi

government, asked the Gujarat chief minister, “I am sure it would be impossible for other states to fully implement these schemes. But what is possible is that we come to Gujarat to get these benefits. So how can we do that?” To this Mr Modi smiled and replied, “You can come by train, by flight and if you can, then even by buses. We have good services,” bringing peals of laughter in the hall.

Ministers’ meet proves a hit
Ever since the GoM on media has been established, the flow of information from the government’s side has been perennial. The top most ministers in the Manmohan Singh government meet almost every day to discuss the important issues at hand.
The meeting of the top ministers, which includes Home Minister P. Chidambaram, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, Law Minister Salman Khurshid and I&B Minister Ambika Soni, is hosted by the I&B Ministry. The entire team of officials deputed by the ministry seem to work like a well-oiled machine day after day to ensure the success of the meeting. The process begins from entry of these ministers to Shastri Bhawan, securing an elevator for these ministers and ensuring that they are served proper refreshments, while important topics are discussed.
With so many high profile ministers rubbing shoulders each day, the system put in place seems to be working fine till now.

In corridors of power, ‘M’ stands for misery
The political class in our country is considered to be very superstitious when it comes to their profession and well-being.
Several cabinet members were jolted after finding that two of their colleagues had submitted their resignations during the past few days. And the common denominator in both the ministers who resigned was the alphabet M. The talk among the cabinet colleagues is that if something is not done soon about the ongoing problems with the government ,it may take down another minister with the common denominator — the letter M.

Railways gets back on track
Now that the railways has finally got a cabinet-rank minister after a gap of nearly two months with Dinesh Trivedi of the Trinamul being sworn in to head the ministry, the derailed department should hopefully get back on track. The ministry, for instance, has not had a member (traffic), railway board for more than a year now. Mr Trivedi’s party leader, Mamata Banerjee who headed the ministry for two years did precious little to improve this important infrastastructure ministry. A sharp man, who is known to be tech-savvy — during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections that he won, he closely monitored his campaign through his BlackBerry — Mr Trivedi will have an onerous task before him to improve the world’s largest rail network, particularly its safety record. And if Mr Trivedi is able to go beyond the Bengal-centric approach his party leader adopted, he shall win the appreciation of millions of Indians who travel by train.