Questions over student IDs
Dear Sir,
The Cambridge School in Doha this year introduced tracking-device-mounted student identification cards, costing around QR1,200 each. The management has not given any justification for introducing such a high-tech card for students that entails such a high expense for parents. The payment of the card has been linked with purchase of books and uniforms.
Parents would be happy to receive answers to the following questions:
1) What is the need to introduce such an expensive and high-tech ID card?
2) Are they safe for students, healthwise?
3) Has the school taken permission from the Supreme Education Council (SEC) to issue this card?
Parents are already striving hard to meet their children’s high education expenses but measures like these add to their financial burden.
 
M Khursheed Uddin  
601/I4, Barwa City
Doha


Senseless killing of an innocent
Dear Sir,
A 50-year-old Muslim man was killed by a Hindu mob in a village near the Indian capital New Delhi, after rumours spread in the area that the man’s family had consumed and stored beef at their home. It was a senseless killing of an innocent man.
The mob, in Bisara village in northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, attacked Mohamed Akhlaq on September 28. His 22-year-old son was also injured in the mob attack and remains in a critical condition at a government hospital.
It is almost a week after the incident and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who tweets almost on everything under the sun, remains silent while his culture minister, Mahesh Sharma, who represents this area, which includes Bisara village, in the Indian Parliament, goes so far as to tell a newspaper that Ikhlaq’s death “should be considered as an accident.”
Modi has, time and again for purposes known only to him, failed to rein in hardcore extremists within and outside his party.
He had the time to tweet on the death of Asha Bhosle’s son but had no time to even think of an old man being brutally beaten to death. The world should take cognisance of such events.

Leslie Mascrenhas
(e-mail address supplied)