Innholdsfortegnelse for Monday, May 15, 2023 i India Today

Amillennium-old connec tion was revived rec ently when Saurashtra Tamils visited the old homeland they had migrated from centuries ago, and took in its wonders. Kicked off in mid-April by defence minister Rajnath Singh in the temple town of Somnath, some 5,000 visitors, who still hold on to their customs and even speak a version of Gujarati called Saurashtri, visited the state as part of the Saurashtra-Tamil Sangamam, a quasi-political programme organised by the Gujarat government, between April 17-27. The genesis of the ‘sangamam’ event is an important slice of forgotten history. Between 1000 and 1024 AD, Turkish invader Mahmud of Ghazni plundered the temple town Somnath 17 times. To escape the violence, several local communities migrated from Prabhas-Patan in the coastal peninsula of Saurashtra, which comprises 13 districts. These…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi made another whirlwind trip to Kerala in the last week of April where he flagged off two pathbreaking projects, the state’s first Vande Bharat semi-high speed express train and the inland Water Metro. The latter is an integrated ferry transport system which will cater to the Greater Kochi region. The business capital of Kerala is the first city in India to get this unique traffic commuter facility. Some 10 islands on the outer reaches of its coastal archipelago, slung along a complicated map of estuaries and backwaters and hence a logistical headache in terms of road commute, will be connected. Doing the honours will be a fleet of 78 batteryoperated electric hybrid boats, flitting to and fro between 38 terminals with intelligent navigation systems, on 15…

New Delhi is doing a fine job of walking the diplomatic tightrope on the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war. Even in the face of a sanctions threat from the US, it continues to do business as usual with Russia—indeed, rather more than usual, if you add burgeoning oil imports to the old military trade. For all that, Indo-US relations are going swimmingly well too. PM Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden will meet at least five times in 2023. First, on the sidelines of the G7 summit at Hiroshima in the third week of May, then at the India-Pacific Island Cooperation Summit in Papua New Guinea on May 22. Two days later, a bilateral is slated after the Quad meet in Sydney. In June, Modi has an official trip to the…

The pressure from the Hindu priest lobby is clearly showing up on the BJP’s governments in Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh. While Pushkar Singh Dhami’s regime was pushed to remove the cap on the number of vehicles and pilgrims in the Char Dham Yatra, Shivraj Singh Chouhan is moving closer to conceding the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s long-standing demand of freeing up temples from government control. For now, he has empowered priests as the deciding authority for temple land auctions. Dhami’s relaxations have raised eyebrows, as excessive footfalls may put more pressure on the ecologically fragile Joshimath area. But the governments seem to know that the way to the EVM passes through temples!…

In an era where sustainability and energy efficiency are of paramount importance, the air conditioning industry has been working diligently to develop innovative technologies that address environmental concerns. In the first half of this article, we will delve into the sustainability aspect of modern air conditioning systems, while the latter half will focus on the cutting-edge technologies that have emerged in recent years. Sustainability in Air Conditioning The impact of air conditioning on the environment cannot be ignored, as traditional AC systems consume significant amounts of energy and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. With increasing awareness about climate change and the need for eco-friendly solutions, manufacturers have been prioritizing the development of sustainable air conditioning systems that minimize environmental impacts while maintaining comfort and convenience for users. One of the…

EVERY EVENING, AT SEVEN SHARP, A SIREN ATOP THE BHAIRAVNATH TEMPLE IN Mohityanche Vadgaon, a village in Maharashtra’s Sangli district around 350 km from state capital Mumbai, blares for a full 45 seconds. The sound of sirens is nothing unusual here in the state’s sugar mill belt, where they signal the start of the work shift or its end every day. But the 7 pm temple siren comes bearing a different cue for Mohityanche Vadgaon’s residents. Earlier, when they needed to wind down after a hard day’s work, they would scroll through social media, watching the latest prime-time show or daily soap operas on the TV. Not anymore. Now, as the evening siren goes off, the villagers, mostly farmers or sugar mill workers, have to get off their screens, be…

After a gap of almost four years, a major Maoist attack took place in Dantewada in South Chhattisgarh, where left-wing extremists triggered an improvised explosive device (IED) on April 26, killing 10 security personnel and their civilian driver. While bigger and deadlier incidents have rocked Chhattisgarh in the past, the April 26 incident corresponded with claims by the security establishment—perhaps resulting from a lull in violence—that Maoism was on its last legs in the state. What really happened on April 26? From their Dantewada district headquarters, a party of District Reserve Guard (DRG)—a state force raised for anti-Maoist operations—and Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) personnel left for Aranpur in the intervening night of April 25 and 26 after receiving specific inputs on Maoist presence. Around 6.30 a.m., an engagement took place…

In what is seen as a battle of wits with nephew Ajit Pawar, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar dropped a bombshell on May 2, saying he intends to quit as party president. The announcement, at the launch of an updated edition of his biography, comes at a time when Ajit is said to be in talks with the BJP, leading to a flux within the NCP. Though Ajit vehemently denies the reports, sources say things could pick up pace after the Karnataka assembly election and the Supreme Court verdict on the cases regarding the June 2022 change of guard in Mah arashtra, where Eknath Shinde and his band of rebels toppled the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition of which the NCP was a part. An NCP group feeling…

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE ● Lakshadweep and Budgam district in J&K declared TB-free in 2021 ● Nine districts from various states achieve 60 per cent reduction in cases between 2015 and 2021 ● 75,000 people and organisations under Ni-kshay Mitra have adopted 1 mn patients, helping them not just with funds, but also community support ● Increased access to faster, more accurate TB diagnosis. The number of CBNAAT/TrueNAT facilities in the country has gone up to 5,090 from a mere 40 in 2014 ● In 2021, as many as 34 states/UTs conducted door-to-door campaigns, screening over 223 mn people. This resulted in a 19 per cent rise in the number of new cases diagnosed that year ● Engagement with the private sector has yielded results—compared to 106,000 cases in 2014,…

THE GOAL SOUNDS FAR-FETCHED, even a pipe dream one could say, but Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) supremo K. Chandrashekar Rao would have you believe that it’s within his sights. “In the coming 2024 parliamentary polls, the next government is ours, ours and ours,” KCR, as he is popularly known, declared after inaugurating a 125-foot-tall statue of Dr B.R. Ambedkar in Hyderabad on April 14. Having already rechristened the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), which catapulted him to power, the BRS in October last year, the Telangana chief minister is beginning to act on his ambitious ‘Double 100’ plan for a pan-India presence. The goal is for the BRS to first win 100 of the 119 seats in the state assembly election due in November this year, and then corner 100 of…

THE THRIVING POPULATION OF ASIATIC LIONS IN GIR HAS BEEN A WILDLIFE SUCCESS STORY for several years now. Ironically, this very triumph of conservation has now become somewhat of a liability. The number of Asiatic lions has steadily risen over the past five decades in the last abode of the species. They increased from 284 in 1990 to 674 as per the 2020 census. But human population, industrialisation and urbanisation have also risen in tandem, leading to an inevitable man-lion conflict that is proving to be increasingly detrimental both to the lions and the humans. The lions have also fallen prey to deadly diseases such as the canine distemper virus by virtue of being cooped up in a single geographical region. To deal with this compound set of problems, several…

He’s one of the top electronic dance music artists in the world, but for many Indian hip-hop fans, he’s the man behind one of the most anticipated albums of 2023. Indian-American DJ-producer KSHMR (pronounced Kashmir), a.k.a. Niles Hollowell-Dhar, has been putting up pictures of himself recording with desi MCs on his social media for almost a year now, and their fans have been waiting to hear the results ever since. KSHMR, a first-generation immigrant whose performance name pays tribute to his ancestral home, says we can expect the collection to be out in the third quarter. Titled Karam, it’s a concept album based around a doomed protagonist whose story is told through a series of interludes that link the 13 tracks. It will feature, among others, rappers HanuMankind, King, MC…

In 1842, Meheribai, a widow, enrolled her daughter in Mrs Ward’s Seminary in Bombay. The decision—coming as it did when “there was a general desire to keep the fair sex in ignorance”—invited fear and loathing. Parsi newspapers carried disapproving articles; sethias threatened ex-communication; and Meheribai’s own family railed against the “worldwide publicity”. Unmoved by “the wrath of the entire male portion of the whole native community“, the mother refused to back down. So it was that little Dosebai ventured beyond the conservative world of Mumbai’s Parsi community and became one of the first girls in India to get an English education. Soon, the same sethias were seeking discreet ways to educate their own daughters. Meheribai’s rebellion played a part in furthering women’s education in India. It also shaped the life…

On April 24, when Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar came to meet Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow as part of his efforts to push for Opposition unity, he did not meet Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati. Since meeting one former CM of Uttar Pradesh and not the other seemed to leave an obvious gap in his quest, journalists quizzed Nitish about it, but he chose to remain silent. Sources close to them claim that it was in fact ‘Behanji’, as the BSP chief is popularly known, who was reluctant to meet the Bihar CM. Mayawati’s strategy—more of a dilemma, in this case—is now out in the open. She cannot be seen standing with a united Opposition that has the SP as its key constituent at a…

On March 16, shortly after 13-year-old Tushar, a Class 6 student, went missing from his house in Patna’s Kanhauli village, his father, Raj Kishore Pandit, received a ransom call on WhatsApp. The kidnapper wanted Pandit, a government schoolteacher, to pay up Rs 40 lakh for the safe return of his son. Three days later, police recovered the boy’s charred body from a secluded spot and arrested the alleged perpetrator—Mukesh Pandey, 28, who ran a coaching centre and private school in the same locality. Police claim Pandey, confronted by private moneylenders from whom he had borrowed Rs 20 lakh, found an easy target in his former student Tushar, who unsuspectingly accompanied the accused only to be strangled to death, his body later burnt to hide evidence. Pandey then allegedly started sending…

The aggressive advance of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on vital portions of the 3,488-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) in recent years had sharpened fears around an old truth. Beijing had always been known to show a beaver-like diligence in building a modern road network on its side of the de facto border. Now, the clashes along the LAC in 2020 and the protracted standoff thereafter made apparent the sheer depth of its capacity build-up—new frontier depots and barracks had sprouted on the back of a massively scaled-up grid of roads and runways. That realisation acted like a spur in the flank of the Indian army, and it consequently began looking with renewed urgency at the task of ramping up its own border infrastructure. Enhanced frontier connectivity is…

Chief minister Ashok Gehlot seemed to have taken a leaf out of Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath’s book in his address at the Rajasthan Police Foundation Day event in Jaipur on April 16. “Our police will not be cowed down,” he declared. “Gangsters and criminals should either surrender or they will be ruined.” That same day, the reward money on fugitives was enhanced after a decade, with the state’s top cop getting the powers to announce a reward of Rs 5 lakh, up from Rs 1 lakh. Meanwhile, a video with the social media profiles of a few of Rajasthan’s notorious gangsters is doing the rounds. It has a dialogue from the filmPushpa: The Rise—“Pushpa, Pushpa Raj… mein jhukega nahin (I will not bow down)”—playing in the background, followed by…

1957: Three lions from a zoo transloc ated to Chandra prabha san ctuary near Varanasi in UP. After steady increase, they slowly die out October 1979: The Gujarat government writes to the Centre to find alternative habitats for the Asiatic lion 1995: Kuno sanctuary identified as most suitable for lion translocation. Other habitats discussed are Sita Mata, Darrah sanctuaries in Rajasthan 1998-2000: 24 villages with 1,545 families from the Sahariya community, Gurjars and Yadavs are moved out of Kuno to create an inviolate habitat for lions 2004: Gujarat government refuses to part with lions under the plan to translocate them to Kuno, calling them “heritage of the state” March 2023: MoEFCC tells SC that lions can’t be brought to Kuno as cheetahs are already there. Relook of lion translocation project…