Innholdsfortegnelse for 24 October 2022 i India Today

Bangalored. Coined sometime in the early years of the 21st century, the word used to mark out a unique Indian success. At the height of the outsourcing boom, an American would use the word to convey defeat in a long-distance economic competition. Bangalore, to take the old and familiar anglicised form of the name, was our own Silicon Valley. It was our sunrise city, our El Dorado. The world was its oyster. What possibly could go wrong with this script? Well, trust India to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That American word has been turned inside out. Now it just as likely conveys an instrument of self-torture. The city may have renamed itself as Bengaluru in 2005 to suit rising nativist sentiments, but it has been ‘Bangalored’—and has…

In the 1960s, the Congress was a political monolith and the opposition just an idea in a few heads separated by space, time and ideology. The stranglehold the socially and economically privileged had in Uttar Pradesh was such that cracking the ceiling was well nigh impossible, especially since history had not left the subaltern combatants with either the sophistication or the organisation for it. For the Mulayams then growing up in Saifai, even an ordinary act like going to school meant breaking unimaginable barriers. But looking back at his life, Mulayam Singh, the Yadav patriarch, must have felt he had achieved a whole lot more than he set out to do. Wrestling taught him the importance of subjugating the opponent outright for a victory. He started out alone but soon…

When a police inspector was transferred out of Indore a few months ago, a powerful cabinet colleague close to the official told Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan not to expect any cooperation if the inspector was not brought back. Chouhan capitulated, but then suspended the official on October 8, reportedly on complaints by Indore BJP MP Shankar Lalwani, who accused the inspector of indulging in extortion. The Opposition is asking why the officer was brought back in the first place.…

Sevagram in Nava Raipur is being constructed using natural materials like clay, lime, stone. This project will also inspire people to remember and learn Gandhian Philosophy, and would also keep alive the memories of freedom moment. Centers of Gandhian principles, rural arts and crafts will be developed in Sevagram. Where guidance will be given by guest subject experts. Along with this, old age homes and schools for the underprivileged will also be established there. Sevagram will be decorated with various artistic items using bell metal, iron, terracotta, stone, cloth and bamboo from Bastar, Raigarh and other districts. Sevagram will be a place where visitors can learn about local arts and crafts, local cuisine and share their experiences and experiences. Sevagram will also an open theater where cultural programs will be…

↘ All yatris spend the night in makeshift containers built on trucks ↘ 65 containers—60 residential, five for services such as a hospital, conference room, washrooms and electrical unit ↘ The containers halt at different locations every day—need an area of two acres to park these, erect makeshift dining hall ↘ Daily breakfast and dinner prepared for 300 people and served in the dining hall ↘ During the day, temporary camps are set up for permanent yatris and common people to rest and have lunch; three sets of tents keep moving to set up camps well in advance ↘ Rahul Gandhi rests in a specially designed container van during the day ↘ Around 40,000 vegetarian lunch meals prepared a day ↘ 75,000-100,000 packaged water bottles—branded specially for Bharat Jodo—are used…

In March this year, Saanvi Jain, 33, was planning to bring her father back home to Gurugram after a successful gall bladder operation, when he contracted a blood infection in the ICU at Max Hospital in Saket, Delhi. The doctors were concerned, but reassured her that the strong antibiotics they had put him on should see him through. But they didn’t. Saanvi’s father developed sepsis, and within no time was gone. Even powerful drugs such as Colistin and carbapenems, which are considered ‘last resort’ ICU drugs in the medical community, could not save him. “Doctors suspected antibiotic resistance and asked me whether he had ever taken these medicines before. He had. Only a year ago, he had been given these antibiotics when he was hospitalised for Covid-19. The doctors [at…

1.27 MILLION The number of deaths caused directly by antimicrobial resistance in 2019 across the world, according to The Lancet 10 MILLION The number of deaths per year that the WHO estimates AMR will cause by 2050 73.3 PER CENT of blood infections and 53.1 per cent of UTIs were found to be antibiotic-resistant in a study conducted across 120 ICUs in the country by HAI-Surveillance India. Of these, 38.1 per cent of blood infection and 27.9 per cent of UTI cases had fatal outcomes within 14 days (HAIs, however, were a risk factor, not a direct cause)…

Savita Punia says she remembers the moment hockey became her mission. Born in Sirsa, Haryana, she was nudged into the sport by her grandfather, Ranjeet Punia. She didn’t instantly fall in love with it. She spent the first few years protesting. Having to lug the heavy goalkeeper’s kit on rickety state buses, she dreaded the journey to and from the sports hostel. Punia, however, quickly rose through the ranks and in 2008, aged 18, she made the India squad. “At that time, there were seven goalkeepers in the team. I never thought I could beat them to the playing XI spot,” she says. “They carried an interview with me in the newspaper after I was selected and I showed it to my grandfather. There had been a few tragedies at…

Q. The role of the owl in this book is fascinating. Readers may remember your poem ‘The Owl’. Could you tell us more about the bird’s role here? I have a soft corner for owls. In The Enchanted Cottage, I felt that the owl and the crow would be a good way to get into the story. Of course, there’s a lot of superstition around owls, but they’re useful, they keep the rat population down. On the one hand, the owl is considered wise in folklore but in India, we also often call a foolish person ‘ullu’. Q. About the character David Fennimore, there’s this sense that for the hill people, he represents every plains-dweller who comes up for a vacation, screws up their lives and hightails it out of…

THE BIG STORY Why Asaduddin Owaisi disagrees with Mohan Bhagwat’s ‘population imbalance’ remark By Amarnath K. Menon The AIMIM chief claims Indian Muslims are showing the way in family planning https://bit.ly/3CvGROy FROM THE STATES Why Assam is sceptical about Shah’s promise to make the state flood-free in five years By Kaushik Deka Assurances on tackling the problem, made by the BJP governments in the state since 2016, have remained on paper https://bit.ly/3yAmuip FROM THE INDIA TODAY ARCHIVES (1993): MULAYAM SINGH YADAV How Mulayam Singh Yadav built the Third Force in UP By Dilip Awasthi A rewind to post-Babri Masjid demolition Uttar Pradesh when Mulayam Singh Yadav was out to finish off his loathed enemy BJP and fill the vacuum left by other parties https://bit.ly/3MrsS19 SPOTLIGHT: BLACK MAGIC How police cracked…

Anti-incumbency is an unpredictable phenomenon—it can afflict governments when they are least expecting it. Three years after the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM)-led government came to power—itself riding on the back of anti-incumbency against former chief minister Pawan Kumar Chamling’s 25-year government—it’s already beset by a lack of public confidence in it. In 2019, the tedium of status quo and the SKM’s slogan of parivartan enthused the youth and gave it a narrow victory in the assembly polls. The SKM was only six years old, but its leader P.S. Golay, an old aide of Chamling, appeared a viable alternative. Besides, their manifesto was bountiful: jobs or monthly allowances for the unemployed, support prices for ginger, orange, cardamom crops, allowances for women and so forth. In the assembly polls, the SKM won…

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has often projected himself as a Hanuman bhakt. However, on a recent visit to poll-bound Gujarat, the Aam Aadmi Party convenor invoked Lord Krishna, Gujarat being the state where the deity’s kingdom, Dwarka, lay, and which is one of the chardhams of the Hindu pilgrimage circuit today. Kejriwal said he had a natural right to take on the evil king Kansa—read BJP—being born on the day Janmashtami was celebrated that year. A miffed BJP googled the date—August 16, 1968—and claimed Janmashtami that year fell a day before Kejriwal’s DoB. Fact-checkers say both sides are correct—the celestial positions for Janmashtami straddled August 15-16 in 1968. Scores even for now.…

As K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) revealed his national ambition by renaming his Telangana Rashtra Samithi the Bharat Rashtra Samithi, BJP leader and Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman claimed that the Telangana chief minister had fallen prey to tantric advice. The state BJP alleged that he had been “undertaking occult practices using a black cat at his farmhouse”, where he spends at least two days a week. KCR has been silent, but his nephew, the state’s finance and health minister T. Harish Rao, has said that unlike the BJP, which started a course in Bhoot Vidya at BHU, the TRS relies on Loktantra vidya, not tantra.…

IT’S A GIANT, MOVING JAMBOREE AND IN the middle of it, the cynosure of all eyes, is Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. Born to one of India’s most powerful political families but at a complicated distance from power himself, the Gandhi scion has been following an unusual routine since September 7. He has been walking some 20-25 km a day, with the media recording his progress diligently: 255 km by the 12th day, 511 by the 21st, 700+ by the end of his first month on the road. He spends his nights in a container—17 feet long, 6 feet wide and 8 feet high—mounted on a Tata truck. Equipped with an AC, freezer, bed, sofa, table and an attached bathroom, the container is part of a mobile caravanserai of sorts. There…

CENTRAL PLANNING COMMITTEE MEMBERS OF TASK FORCE 2024 P. Chidambaram, Mukul Wasnik, Jairam Ramesh, K.C. Venugopal, Ajay Maken, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Randeep Singh Surjewala, Sunil Kanugolu plus heads of all frontal organisations THE MAN IN CHARGE…

V. Ravichandar calls himself a ‘civic evangelist’. He has been on most major committees set up to improve Bengaluru in the past two decades, and attributes the recent floods to “nature’s fury over city planners violating natural drainage that ensured that water flowed from higher areas to lower ones”. Originally, much of the city was on the crest of a ridge and rainwater run-off was channelled to the valleys below through drains called rajakaluves, which fed multiple mini-lakes. In the past two decades, however, much of the growth has been in the valleys below the ridge. This includes the 17-km arc that hugs the Outer Ring Road and is the hub of its electronic and cyber cities. As companies built vast campuses with multi-storeyed buildings, no one paid heed to…

You can’t find a more quintessential Bangalorean than T.V. Mohandas Pai. The former Infosys CFO and angel investor went to school and college in the city. He is now the chairperson of Manipal Global Education and is also the co-founder of Akshaya Patra, which runs the world’s largest mid-day meal programme. Pai is enraged that the Bengaluru he grew up in has gone to seed. “The city’s municipal corporation has become too big, it has one commissioner who administers 800 sq. km with 12 million people.” Pai suggests implementing a pending law to break up the municipality into five corporations. However, he knows that the current government won’t do it because “city MLAs don’t want to give up their power”. He speaks about the “deep corruption” in most civic bodies,…

There is a huge irony in the fact that India, the world’s second largest arms importer, also happens to possess one of the world’s largest defence technology and industrial bases (DTIBs), comprising the vast Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), with its network of 50 laboratories, backed by 16 Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSUs), including 41 ordnance factories recently ‘corporatised’ into seven DPSUs. Over the years, this complex has delivered an array of military hardware—warships, submarines, fighters, tanks, and aero-engines, two ‘cherries on the cake’ being the recent delivery of a 42,000-tonne aircraft carrier and a light combat helicopter, both designed and built in India. What should temper national pride in all these platforms and systems, declared as ‘indigenous’, is the fact that major components, such as engines (whether diesel,…

↘ Transduction: Resistant genes may get transferred via phages, that is, viruses that specifically infect bacteria and can carry some DNA with them ↘ Conjugation: When bacteria come in direct contact with one another ↘ Transformation: Genes released from nearby germs may be picked up by another living bacteria DEFENCE TACTICS ↘ Bacteria employ five major types of ‘resistance mechanisms ↘ Changing or destroying antibiotics by secreting certain enzymes or proteins ↘ Restricting the entry of antibiotics into their cells by developing a protective covering ↘ Pumping out antibiotics that enter the cells ↘ Changing an antibiotic’s target so that the drug can’t find the bacteria ↘ Altering themselves to avoid using the cell process that the drug targets STAYING SAFE ↘ Washing hands regularly, consuming fully-cooked meats, having water…

The national party congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which being convened on October 16 in Beijing, will be closely watched across the world. Its proceedings will convey important indicators of Chinese domestic and foreign policies in a more significantly altered geopolitical landscape and a more challenging political and economic situation at home. Globally, every country is grappling with heightened uncertainty and rapid, relentless change. China is no exception. How is it setting the stage for formulating and articulating an appropriate strategy for a more challenging environment? China’s top party and state leader, Xi Jinping, is likely to receive endorsement of the congress for continuance in these positions at least for another five-year term. Although he is already the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, the rhetoric…

It’s rare for a party president, especially in a disciplined unit like the BJP, to criticise bureaucratic reshuffle, a chief ministerial prerogative. So, when Gujarat BJP president C.R. Patil recently said that IAS officer Banchhanidhi Pani, who was transferred from Surat, should have been made municipal commissioner of Ahmedabad instead of Vadodara, it created a stir. It came as an endorsement of Pani’s public displeasure at his posting. But then Pani is no ordinary babu. When Vijay Rupani was CM, he was the Rajkot municipal commissioner and his wife’s camaraderie with Rupani’s wife Anjali was the talk of the town. Kaushik Deka with Kiran D. Tare. Jumana Shah, Rahul Noronha, Amarnath K. Menon and Prashant Srivastava…

The Congress is attempting to get its act together in Uttar Pradesh. Except that it has ended up creating more confusion. The party has appointed one state president and six working ones for the six zones it has divided the state into. These zones, in turn, each have an in-charge, who reports directly to general secretary Priyanka Gandhi. Party functionaries now do not know which of the 13 bosses to report to—the president, the working presidents or the zonal in-charges. Every boss has his own coterie. While the exercise intended to change the fortunes of the party, it seems to have caused further divide among the ranks. As a senior state functionary said, “We are doing too many experiments but gaining nothing.” Too much of a good thing is not…

ROADS & LAKES Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) The city corporation, it is headed by the Bengaluru mayor Mandate: Municipal governance; maintenance of roads, drains and lakes; construction of flyovers MASTERPLAN Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) Created in 1976, BDA is an autonomous body Mandate: Preparing city masterplan, including infrastructure projects DRINKING WATER Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) Autonomous body formed in 1964 Mandate: Supplying adequate drinking water to meet demand in Bengaluru city MINISTRY OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT METRO RAIL Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) A JV between GoI and the Karnataka govt (metro project was cleared in 2006) Mandate: Builds and operates metro rail services SOLID WASTE Bengaluru Solid Waste Management Limited (BSWML) Newly established entity Mandate: Collect, transport and process waste in the city ELECTRICITY Bangalore…

Anjali Karol Mohan has been working on master plans for Bengaluru ever since she shifted to the city in 1994. An urban and regional planner, she points to several infirmities. For one, the city is operating on an outdated master plan that was relevant only till 2015. The new plan was withdrawn four years earlier by the state government, seeking modifications, and is yet to be finalised. Mohan says that even if the plan is approved, the statutory framework is archaic and requires a complete overhaul to be in with the times. Among other problems, there is what she calls “an elite capture of public policy”. A capitalist consumerist culture has compromised the city’s ecology and has impacted the vulnerable. Mohan believes there are no short-cuts. Setting up a task…

America continues to heckle India to reduce defence and energy relations with Russia, while simultaneously cosying up to Pakistan. Meanwhile, Germany wants Kashmir raked up at the UN. The fallout of the Ukraine conflict on India’s military preparedness remains in discussion, with the US ‘using’ Ukraine to battle Russia and not wanting the conflict to end till Russia’s war-waging potential is reduced to its liking. Indo-Russian defence relations have remained steadfast over the decades. In December 2021, both countries inked a 10-year defence cooperation pact and signed 28 agreements. Some 70 per cent of Indian armed forces equipment is of Russian origin including some under licensed production, the majority of which is held by the army followed by the air force and navy. Russia is exporting the S-400 missile system…

The National Games are a perfect platform for both new heroes to make their mark and old warhorses to stage a comeback The National Games were last organised way back in 2015. In that year, swimmers Sajan Prakash and Aakanksha Vora had picked up the best male and female athlete award, respectively. Prakash was unstoppable in the pool with a haul of six gold and three silver medals, while Vora landed five gold and a silver. Over the next few years, Prakash went on to represent India at two Olympic Games, while Vora turned out for the Harvard University swimming team and is now pursuing a corporate career in the US. Clearly, a lot can happen over seven years. Though there has always been a cloud of uncertainty hovering over…