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Regional

- CBI conducts searches in Gujarat in NEET-UG case

- 4 workers die in explosion at fireworks unit near Sattur

- Two government hospitals in city get new equipment

- Study finds rising prevalence of type 2 diabetes in younger individuals compared to older people

- ‘No one can beat the life and work ethic of Karunanidhi’

- Memoir of ex-T.N. Governor P.S. Ramamohan Rao released

- Off-site drill on industrial safety organised in Ponneri

- Resident of K.P. Park in Pulianthope dies after falling accidentally from lift

- Kalaignar centenary hospital in Guindy to get paediatric multi-speciality block

- ‘India is a powerhouse of mathematics, says Krishnaswami Alladi

- Storm in the rice bowl

- Death of 4 in fireworks unit blast spur renewed pleas for regulation

- CAG reports flag overcharging at Tasmac outlets, lapses in e-procurement system

- Illicit liquor crimes: imprisonment for life among punishments in new Bill

- SPs will be held accountable in cases of hooch-related deaths, says Chief Minister

- House passes Bill, increasing age limit of chief of SC/ST commission

- New health insurance scheme to be restructured, says Stalin

- Members of PMK stage walkout from Assembly

- Two tribals admitted to hospital after drinking liquor

CBI holds searches in Gujarat in NEET leak case; one more held

The Hindu Bureau

PATNA/DELHI

Mukesh Kumar, an accused in the case, leaves after his medical check-up in Patna. ANIANI

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Saturday searched multiple locations in Gujarat as part of its probe into an alleged conspiracy to help 30 students in the recently held National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for undergraduate medical colleges at a Godhra examination centre. On Friday, the agency also arrested one more accused in the NEET question paper leak case in Jharkhand.

The searches were carried out in places linked to the accused persons and suspects in Godhra, Ahmedabad, Kheda, and Anand districts of Gujarat.

The accused arrested in the paper leak case on Friday evening was identified as Jamaluddin, a journalist working for a Hindi newspaper in Hazaribagh in Jharkhand. According to the agency, on the day of the examination, he assisted the Hazaribagh-based Oasis School principal Ahsanhul Haque and vice-principal Imtiaz Alam, who were earlier arrested in the case. On Saturday, the CBI took the three, along with two other accused people, Manish Prakash and Ashutosh Kumar for a medical check-up.

4 workers die in explosion at fireworks unit near Sattur

The Hindu Bureau

Sattur

Four workers were killed in a blast at a fireworks unit in Banthuvarpatti near Sattur in Virudhunagar district on Saturday.

According to the police, friction while mixing chemicals at the Guru Star fireworks factory led to an explosion, in which three sheds were destroyed.

One booked

The licence-holder of the unit, Sahadevan, has been booked under various Sections of the Indian Penal Code, including culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and under provisions of the Indian Explosives Act.

Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced a solatium of ₹3 lakh each to the families of the deceased.

Two government hospitals in city get new equipment

The Hindu Bureau

CHENNAI

An interventional neurovascular bi-plane cath lab has been set up at a cost of ₹13 crore at Kalaignar centenary hospital; RGGGH gets bi-plane digital subtraction angiography facility

State-of-the-art facilities: Health Minister Ma. Subramanian and Health Secretary Gagandeep Singh Bedi inspecting the new equipment on Saturday. Special arrangement Special arrangement

Two government hospitals in Chennai have received new equipment worth nearly ₹29 crore.

At the Kalaignar Centenary Super Speciality Hospital (KCSSH), an interventional neurovascular bi-plane cath lab was set up at a cost of ₹13 crore, while the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (RGGGH) got a bi-plane digital subtraction angiography facility at a cost of ₹10.92 crore. Health Minister Ma. Subramanian inaugurated the new equipment on Saturday.

He said KCSSH, which was inaugurated in June 2023, had treated 3,13,854 outpatients and 66,855 in-patients so far. It had performed 2,315 surgeries, a press release said.

The interventional neurovascular bi-plane cath lab that has been set up at the hospital would enable treatment of conditions such as clots or blockages in the blood vessels of the brain.

Treatment will be covered under the Chief Minister’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme (CMCHIS). In addition to this, a holmium laser for treatment of enlarged prostate was provided at a cost of ₹1.25 crore.

Mr. Subramanian said three announcements made for the Health Department were being executed — signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras for the development and implementation of Indian systems of medicine (ISM) using modern technologies; an MoU between the Commissionerate of Indian Medicine and Homoeopathy and the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences to certify the quality of drugs in ISM; and publishing a Standard Operating Procedure for pharmacies under ISM.

At RGGGH, the bi-plane DSA would help in treating patients with stroke and in performing mechanical thrombectomy. While the golden hour is six hours, thrombectomy can be done within 24 hours, said E. Theranirajan, RGGGH’s dean.

MoU with IIT-M

The Madras Medical College has also entered into an MoU with the IIT-M for research and to bring in technology in patient care. In a move to monitor air pollution levels in the hospital’s surroundings, an air quality monitoring system will be established.

Health Secretary Gagandeep Singh Bedi, IIT-M Director V. Kamakoti, and KCSSH’s Director L. Parthasarathy were present.

‘Diabetes cases rising faster among the younger population when compared to older people’

The Hindu Bureau

CHENNAI

A study has found a higher percentage increase in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes among younger individuals than in older individuals in southern India over a period of 10 years. Obesity and family history of diabetes were found to be the primary contributing factors for the rise in prevalence.

A team of doctors, led by A. Ramachandran, of the India Diabetes Research Foundation and Dr. A. Ramachandran’s Diabetes Hospitals studied the prevalence and incidence of type 2 diabetes and its associated risk factors in younger individuals aged between 20 and 39 and older individuals aged 40 and above over a 10-year period (2006-2016).

The doctors have published the findings of the study in an article — The rising prevalence of type 2 diabetes among the youth in southern India - An ancillary analysis of the Secular Trends in Diabetes in India in the Journal of Diabetes.

The analysis was done using data of two epidemiological surveys conducted in 2006 and 2016 in three regions — Chennai (city), Kancheepuram (town) and Panruti (peri-urban village).

A total of 7,066 persons were enrolled for survey I and 9,848 for survey II.

“In 2006, the survey found a 9% prevalence of diabetes in the rural area. In 2016, when we went back, we found that this had increased to 13%. In Chennai, the prevalence increased from 18% to 22%. Now, we used the same analyses to look at the prevalence of diabetes between the older and younger population and found that there was a significant increase in the prevalence of diabetes in the younger group when compared to the older population in a decade’s time,” Nanditha Arun, the lead author of the study, said.

Why was there a rise in prevalence? She said when adjusted for family history and age, they found that waist circumference — abdominal obesity — was an independent risk factor.

“We found that physical activity significantly reduced among the entire study population, while dietary habits also worsened with increased fat consumption and higher calorie intake. While family history and age are non-modifiable risk factors, adopting a healthy lifestyle, improving dietary habits, and physical activity could help younger individuals in managing modifiable risk factors such as abdominal obesity,” she added.

‘No one can beat the life and work ethic of Karunanidhi’

Akhila EaswaranAkhila Easwaran

State Minister for Tamil Development, Information, and Publicity M.P. Saminathan at the closing ceremony of the Kalaignar Centenary Celebrations, organised by the Tamil Nadu Iyal Isai Nadaga Mandram, in Chennai on Saturday said former Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, fondly known as Kalaignar, had done a lot to bring the benefits of Tamil to the people of the State and the world. N. Ram, veteran journalist and Director, The Hindu Group Publishing Private Limited, said Karunanidhi’s creativity was unparalleled. “No one can beat Kalaignar’s life and work ethic. Karunanidhi’s stance on secularism was firm,” he said.

Memoir of ex-T.N. Governor P.S. Ramamohan Rao released

M. VEDHAN M. VEDHAN

Governor R.N. Ravi launched Governorpet to Governor’s House: A Hick’s Odyssey, abook authored by P.S. Ramamohan Rao, former Tamil Nadu Governor and DGP of Andhra Pradesh. Speaking at the event held at the Raj Bhavan here on Saturday, Mr. Rao said the events described in the book were recollected entirely from his memory. M.K. Narayanan, former Governor of West Bengal, and C. Rangarajan, former Andhra Pradesh Governor, were present.

Off-site drill on industrial safety organised in Ponneri

An emergency off-site drill by 14 departments of the government to handle hazardous emergency situations was held at Kondakarai in Tiruvallur district on Saturday. A press release said the drill was organised by Reliance Industries Limited, under the guidance of M.V. Karthikeyan, Joint Director of Industrial Safety and Health, and presided over by Sanket Balwant Waghe, Sub-Collector of Ponneri.

Resident of K.P. Park in Pulianthope dies after fall through elevator shaft

The Hindu Bureau

CHENNAI

The elevator was stuck between the sixth and seventh floors due to a power outage, and the victim fell during the rescue attempt. Activists call for audit of the quality and functioning of lifts at T.N. Urban Habitat Development Board tenements

S. Ganeshan Special arrangement

A 60-year-old resident died on Saturday after accidentally falling from an elevator that got stuck between two floors in the Tamil Nadu Urban Habitat Development Board (TNUHDB) high-rise apartments at Keseva Pillai (K.P.) Park in Pulianthope.

The police identified the victim as S. Ganeshan, a resident of the eighth floor of the tenement’s E-block. On Friday, when he was descending in the elevator, it got stuck between the sixth and seventh floors due to a power outage. Schoolchildren passing by noticed that Ganeshan was inside the elevator. They alerted Samuvel, the elevator operator, who rushed to the floor, opened the lift’s door, and attempted to rescue Ganeshan. Ganeshan, who was reportedly drunk, accidentally fell through the gap between the wall and the elevator and hit the basement. He died on the spot, the police said.

The Pulianthope police and the Tamil Nadu Fire and Rescue Services personnel reached the spot and recovered the body.

The police registered a case under Section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure for unnatural death. Residents of the tenements had been complaining of poor quality of construction and structural issues in the buildings, including poor maintenance of elevators, for a while now. The tenements have 1,900 flats in four towers with nine floors each and four towers with 11 floors each.

Vanessa Peter, Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities, said, “There have been several issues related to poor maintenance of elevators in sites such as Perumbakkam prior to this incident. There should be an audit of the quality and functioning of the lifts in these tenements. If the TNUHDB has insurance for the elevators, it has to be displayed in the lifts and also informed to the residents’ welfare associations.”

“The lifts are not maintained properly and have no proper power back-up. Residents frequently complain about lift facilities and other problems. They should be duly addressed,” said G. Selva, secretary of the Central District Committee, CPI(M).

Kalaignar centenary hospital in Guindy to get paediatric multi-speciality block

The Hindu Bureau

CHENNAI

With the Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children in Egmore having a high caseload, the Health Department will establish two paediatric multi-speciality centres at the Kalaignar Centenary Super Speciality Hospital, Guindy, and the Government Raja Mirasdar Hospital, Government Thanjavur Medical College, at a cost of ₹250 crore to provide speciality services to children in south Chennai and in the delta region, Health Minister Ma. Subramanian said in the Legislative Assembly on Friday.

The Minister, as part of the 110 announcements for the Health Department, said a dedicated hospital for the differently abled will be established at a cost of ₹50 crore on the premises of the Government Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, K.K. Nagar. He made a number of announcements for newborn care.

As in previous budgets, a number of new initiatives were announced for non-communicable diseases. The community-based screening programme for cervic, breast, and oral cancers that was implemented in four districts — Erode, Tirupattur, Kanniyakumari and Ranipet — on a pilot basis will now be extended to all districts at a cost of ₹27 crore, Mr. Subramanian said.

Bariatric surgery will be offered at Government Stanley Medical College Hospital and the medical college hospitals in Coimbatore and Madurai.

Six Regional Research Centres will be established under the Tamil Nadu Dr. MGR Medical University.

Among other announcements were developing a comprehensive action plan to prevent adolescent pregnancy and improve adolescent health.The budgetary allocation for the healthcare sector in 2023-24 was ₹18,660.69 crore. It has been hiked to ₹20,197.40 crore for 2024-25.

‘India is a powerhouse of mathematics’

The Hindu Bureau

CHENNAI

The autobiography of reputed mathematician Krishnaswami Alladi titled My Mathematical Universe-People, Personalities and The Profession was launched in the city on Saturday. At the event, organised by the Chennai International Centre, Prof. Krishnaswami, who is with the University of Florida, said India was a powerhouse of mathematics and some top centres included the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Chennai Mathematical Institute.

Storm in the rice bowl

Multiple factors, not just the availability of water for irrigation, have plunged the Cauvery delta region of Tamil Nadu — widely known as the Granary of South India — into immeasurable distress. T. Ramakrishnan visits the region to record the developments.

1 of 4 Soldiering on: The problems of the farmers in the Cauvery delta are aplenty: inadequate returns, fragmentation of landholdings, lack of water, and the reluctance of the next generation to take up agriculture. A farmer working on his paddy field at Nannilam in Thiruvarur district.R. Ragu The Hindu

2 of 4

3 of 4

4 of 4 Gone bone dry: Brahmanavayal in Pudukkottai depends entirely on the Cauvery or the rain. Farmers are in distress with no water discharged from the Mettur dam. R. RAGU The Hindu

It would not be a cliché to say the Cauvery delta farmers are at a crossroads. Their list of woes is long: widening gap between the cost of cultivation and the returns; continuous fragmentation of landholdings; vagaries of monsoons (southwest and northeast); lack of water; depleting groundwater table; changing dynamics of labour market perceived to be due to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS); and the increasing involvement of “outsider-workers”. The ever-shrinking farmland and the reluctance of the next generation to take up agriculture complete the picture. Brahmanavayal, 60 km from the picturesque 17th Century Thirumayam Fort and in the Manalmelkudi block of Pudukkottai district, reflects the condition of farmers in the delta. It is in the tail end of the system, depending entirely on the river or the rain. The groundwater table has sunk below 1,000 feet. “We cannot afford the cost of installing a borewell,” says K.S. Subramanian, a farmer.

No silt removal either

The village comes under the Grand Anicut Canal System. (There is no water in the canal this year as water release did not start from the Mettur dam on the scheduled date of June 12 for the short-term kuruvai cultivation season). “Even when the water is released, we do not realise the optimal quantity,” say farmers S. Shanmugasundaram and S. Thangavel. “Somehow, the canal that passes through our village has been left out of the government scheme for silt removal. A number of petitions have been given to any number of officials, but to no avail,” they say.

The villagers say private traders buy their paddy for more than what is paid at direct purchase centres (DPCs). Perhaps, a silver lining is that “at our DPCs, no one demands extra money — ₹30 or ₹40 a bag,” says K. Chandran, another farmer.

In Karaikal in the Union Territory of Puducherry, another tail end of the delta, P. Rajendran, president of the Karaikal Mavatta Delta Vivasayigal Nala Sangam, explains how his area was adversely affected when the authorities adopted the conventional turn system of water distribution. In recent years, a change in the turn system has made the situation less burdensome.

Impact of MGNREGS

Concurring with many of his colleagues in the Tamil Nadu part of the delta on the impact of the MGNREGS on the availability of farm workers, he cites, for instance, the picking of fully bloomed cotton flowers. “I am not against NREGA or 100 naal thittam [which are how the MGNREGS is popularly called], but the authorities should ensure that at the time of cotton-picking, there should be no work under NREGA. If there is no clash between the scheme and agricultural work, there won’t be any issue. Otherwise, there will not only be a labour shortage but also a steep hike in wages.”

A spell of heavy rain in May brought down the price of cotton from ₹110 a kg to ₹45. “When the price crashed, the wage component itself was around ₹20. Consider the other components. How can a grower sustain himself or herself,” he asks, adding that the price has gone up again to ₹62-₹72.

Though Karaikal’s veteran farmer says “north Indian” workers have not yet taken over the manual work (transplanting) in his areas, the other parts of the delta, especially in Tamil Nadu, seem to have found a solution to labour shortage by hiring them. “Today, there would not be farming in the delta, but for the north Indians,” says a farmer of Thiruvarur district.

“Once upon a time, this region had reacted violently when people from one village went to work at another,” says V. Dhanapalan, president of the Joint Movement of Tamil Nadu Farmers’ Associations, who operates from Kilvelur in Nagapattinam district. Mechanisation has also brought about a sea change in harvesting, once a labour-intensive process.

“In my place [Thirumanur in Ariyalur district where the Cauvery forms part of the southern boundary], we don’t get north Indians, but people from Andhra Pradesh, at the time of transplanting,” says N. Dhanapal, a prominent figure of the area.

Protection of delta

His grievance is that though the Ariyalur, T. Palur, and Jayankondam blocks are considered part of the Cauvery delta, they have been left out of the Tamil Nadu Protected Agricultural Zone Development Act, 2020. In October last, the government decided to bring the newly formed Mayiladuthurai district under the law.

However, a cross-section of the farmers in the delta feels that the law has not brought about any substantive change. In fact, in the Policy Note of the Agriculture Department for 2024-25, there is not even a mention of the law. Last year’s document talked of sanctioning a project for promoting crop diversification and improved agricultural practices in saline-affected districts in the Protected Agricultural Development Zone for ₹5 lakh. In addition, ₹5 lakh was sanctioned for undertaking research for improving crop diversification and increasing water use efficiency. The status of these projects is not yet known. However, K. Senthilkumar, secretary of the People’s Awareness and Legal Aid Movement, a voluntary organisation functioning from Thiruthuraipoondi in Thiruvarur district, says further damage to the ecosystem, through oil and natural gas exploration by new players, seems to have been stalled.

The Act came after the 2017 Neduvasal and Kadiramangalam protests, which took place immediately after a massive agitation in the State in support of jallikattu. The protests had only confirmed that hydrocarbon projects would not be welcome in the area. The substance of the law is that while any new project such as zinc, copper, and aluminium smelters, tanneries, and oil and natural gas exploration and extraction has been prohibited, the Act will not come in the way of infrastructure development.

At Nannilam in Thiruvarur lives V. Ravichandran, who is in his sixties and a member of the Global Farmer Network, an organisation based out of Des Moines, Iowa, U.S. It works to highlight the cause of farmers in trade, technology, sustainable farming, economic growth, and food security. Calling upon companies such as ONGC to engage themselves more in ecosystem restoration and preservation of the Cauvery delta, he says ONGC can complement and supplement the State government’s efforts at the removal of silt from rivers, canals, tanks, and lakes all over the region in phases and in a sustained manner. While no farmer is against the Act, the priority should be for protecting waterbodies and water courses from encroachment; preserving them; and strengthening them, he says.

R. Ramesh, general secretary of the Thiruvarur-based Tamil Nadu Consumer Protection and Environmental Research Centre, and his colleagues N. Kalimuthu, C. Selvakumar, and V. Dharmadoss, are of the view that the law needs to be tightened as the conversion of farmland into housing plots, or its use for non-agricultural purpose, is going on unhindered. V. Sathyanarayanan of Kottur in Thiruvarur, who is the general secretary of the Consortium of Cauvery Delta Farmers, insists on proper implementation of groundwater-recharge programmes. They all underscore the need to fine-tune the methodology for assessment of damage to or failure of crops under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (Prime Minister’s Crop Insurance Scheme).

However, an official of the Agriculture Department says the process of introducing changes has begun.

The reluctance of youth to take up agriculture is an important topic in the entire delta. Prakash, a young farmer who is part of the Joint Movement, says that if it is demonstrated that farming can be carried out successfully, the youth will be drawn towards farming. He is not off the mark, as this writer came across a senior citizen in Thanjavur, who has got about two dozen acres and is aided by his two sons. But what farmers point out is that income from farming alone cannot sustain their families. “You should have diversified your activity. Otherwise, I cannot even meet the educational expenses of my children,” says G. Sither, a specialist in natural farming.

Will natural farming help?

Some have taken to natural farming, organic farming, and cultivation of traditional varieties of paddy. No one claims there has been success. But a section of farmers seems to be determined to go back to the age-old practices. Mr. Senthilkumar, who identifies himself with G. Nammalvar (1938-2013), a prominent advocate of organic farming and a critic of genetically modified crops, urges the government to procure organically produced rice for anganwadis, to start with.

A drive from Thanjavur to Tiruchi through Thiruvaiyaru can be misleading, given the endless green paddy fields on either side of the road. Lack of water seems to be a non-issue for those raising the paddy during the kuruvai season as they extract water with borewells or filter points. But what farmers and officials alike should keep in mind is that the future of the traditional source of livelihood is tied to a judicious use of water and other inputs even in the delta — where cultivation has been going on uninterrupted for over 2,000 years.

Death of 4 in fireworks unit blast spurs renewed calls for regulation

The Hindu Bureau

Sattur

Licence-holder of the unit booked ; Virudhunagar Collector says licences of many erring factories have been suspended in the past three months; political leaders urge government to ensure that fireworks manufacturers adhere to safety protocols

A working shed of the fireworks’ unit in Sattur that was destroyed in the explosion on Saturday. Virudhunagar SP says friction while mixing chemicals could have triggered the accident.HANDOUT

With the death of four persons in an explosion at a fireworks’ manufacturing unit here on Saturday, there are now renewed demands to regulate the fireworks units and ensure that there are no more deaths due to such accidents.

Virudhunagar Superintendent of Police, K. Ferozekhan Abdullah, said that friction while mixing chemicals at the unit, which held a licence from the District Revenue officer (DRO), could have triggered the explosion. All the four workers, including the manager of the unit, were killed on the spot. They have been identified as M. Rajkumar, 43 of Achchankulam; K. Marichamy, 40, of Nadu Soorangudi; M. Selvakumar, 35, and M. Mohan, 30, from Chathrapatti.

Meanwhile, the watchman of the unit, K. Ramachandran, 60, sustained injuries from the flying debris after the explosion. Three working sheds of the unit were razed.

Sattur Taluk police have booked the unit’s licence-holder, Sahadevan, under different Sections of the Indian Penal Code, including culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and provisions of the Indian Explosives Act. His son, Gurusamy Pandian, has been picked up for an inquiry.

Chief Minister M.K. Stalin has announced a compensation of ₹3 lakh each to the family of the deceased. Collector V.P. Jeyaseelan handed over the compensation from the Chief Minister’s Public Relief Fund to them.

Various precautionary measures were taken by the district administration to avert such accidents. Four special teams were formed to inspect fireworks units, and action was taken against the violators, the Collector said.

Licences suspended

The licences of 86 units, out of 439, that were found violating safety norms were suspended during the inspections conducted by special teams and revenue officials in the last three months.

Action had also been initiated against 56 units that were found flouting safety rules, during inspections by officials of the Directorate of Industrial Safety and Health. The Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organisation had ordered the suspension of licence for 12 of these units.

The Collector has instructed all fireworks units to put up notice boards at their entrances, furnishing details such as the name of the licencee, the licence number, the type of licence and its validity, the licensing authority, and the permitted number of workers. Action would be taken against those who do not comply with the directive within a week, he added.

Leaders condole deaths

Union Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting L. Murugan condoled the death of the four persons, and expressed concerns over the recurring fire accidents in Virudhunagar district. He alleged that the Tamil Nadu government had not been ensuring the adherence of fireworks manufacturing units to safety protocols.

Expressing his condolences, TMC (Moopanar) president G.K. Vasan urged the State government to ensure that periodic audits of cracker manufacturing units were conducted to monitor their compliance with safety standards.

CAG reports flag overcharging at Tasmac outlets, lapses in e-procurement system

The Hindu Bureau

CHENNAI

Reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) tabled in the Assembly on Saturday pointed out, among others, that transactions at outlets of the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation Limited (Tasmac) continued to be predominantly cash-based, amid complaints of overcharging.

Lapses in e-procurement system and functioning of the Tamil Nadu Construction Workers Welfare Board (TNCWWB) were flagged too.

The compliance Audit (Revenue) report of the CAG for the year that ended on March 31, 2022 said that cashless transactions should be encouraged, and that Point-of-Sale (PoS) machines had been installed in all Tasmac retail vending shops for the purpose. Of the 5,359 machines installed, only 3,114 were working, and the remaining were inoperative due to technical reasons. Immediate measures were not being taken to restore them, it added.

Besides, by not maintaining these machines, Tasmac had indirectly encouraged cash transactions, it said. During the exit meet in April 2023, the State government had replied that measures were being taken to improve cashless trade in retail vending shops, the CAG recalled.

Perusal of records

The CAG further said that a perusal of the records in eight out of 43 depots revealed that Tasmac did not pay the differential excise duty amounting to ₹30.5 crore due to revision of rates of Indian Made Foreign liquor, even as the MRP was revised accordingly.

The observation was accepted and a demand had been raised against Tasmac, the report said.

It further pointed out that the procurement and retail vending policy of Tasmac was old and not transparent. Tasmac was being entrusted with sheer monopoly in procuring and vending liquor, and should adopt an equitable purchase policy from all manufactories, without favouring any of them. The CAG noted that the end-to-end computerisation project of Tasmac has already been delayed, and the management should finalise it expeditiously to have an efficient Goods Monitoring System in place.

The CAG further pointed out that incorrect reference of a document of release among partners of a firm resulted in a loss of revenue of Stamp Duty and Registration Fee worth ₹3.44 crore.

The CAG conducted a subject-specific compliance audit on the Commercial Taxes Department’s oversight on GST Payments and Return Filing, and found deficiencies with a revenue implication of ₹992.38 crore.

E-procurement system

The CAG report on Performance Audit on Implementation of e-procurement system in Tamil Nadu highlighted that in the absence of specific instructions from the State government mandating entities to procure through the Government eProcurement System of the National Informatics Centre (GePNIC) portal, various departments had adopted differing modes of procurement, including purchasing manually.

According to the report, 74% of the entities did not utilise the portal though 15 years have passed since it was started. It further highlighted that though online Earnest Money Deposit (EMD) collection system was enabled in December 2017, the EMD was collected offline from bidders, resulting in delayed refunding of the deposits to unsuccessful bidders.

The Tamil Nadu government in its reply during the exit meeting, had said that the online EMD collection would be made mandatory, and the portal would be modified to refund EMD of the rejected bidders automatically on the 30th day after the Award of Contract.

The report recommended the State government to come up with a comprehensive solution to address the technical and procedural shortcomings and issue orders to all the procuring entities to mandatorily use the eProcurement portal for all procurement activities.

Illicit liquor crimes: imprisonment for life among punishments in new Bill

The Hindu Bureau

CHENNAI

Eyeing deterrence: In the light of the Kallakurichi tragedy, the Tamil Nadu Assembly passed a Bill making offences pertaining to prohibited liquor more stringent. File photoKUMAR SS

The Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly on Saturday adopted a Bill that makes punishment more stringent for offences pertaining to prohibited liquor such as denatured spirits and methanol.

If there is a death due to consumption of illicit liquor containing elements of prohibited liquor, the Bill, which amends the Tamil Nadu Prohibition Act, 1937, proposes rigorous imprisonment for life with a fine of not less than ₹10 lakh for the accused. The maximum term of rigorous imprisonment for certain other offences has been fixed at seven years with a penalty of ₹2 lakh to ₹3 lakh. It provides for confiscation of all movable assets used to commit the offences, and sealing of unlicensed places for liquor consumption.

Making the offences non-compoundable, the Bill’s statement of objects and reasons says that executive magistrates would be empowered to issue orders requiring those who “habitually commit” the offences to execute bonds with sureties for a substantial amount.

The Bill, tabled in the House in the light of the Kallakurichi tragedy, explains the rationale behind the amendment, stating that the existing punishments “for heinous crimes, especially for offences related to manufacture, possession and sale of illicit liquor”, are insufficient to put an end to the crimes and stop the offenders.

Minister for Finance Thangam Thennarasu suggested that the consent of the public prosecutor be obtained before granting bail to the accused in such offences.

This was accepted by the House.

G.K. Mani of the PMK reiterated his party’s position on total prohibition.

‘More changes’

S. Muthusamy, Minister for Housing and Urban Development, who is also in-charge of Prohibition and Excise, said that the government was serious in tightening the legal framework with respect to prohibition. More changes would be made to the law, he said.

SPs will be held accountable in cases of hooch-related deaths, says Chief Minister

The Hindu Bureau

Chennai

Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on Saturday told the Assembly that in the event of hooch-related deaths, the Superintendent of Police (SP) of the district concerned, and other jurisdictional police officers, would be held accountable.

“I had warned about this at a meeting of Collectors and SPs held after the Kallakurichi incident,” Mr. Stalin told the House, wrapping up the debate on the demands for grants to the Police and Fire and Rescue Services Departments.

A total of 65 persons have died in the Kallakurichi hooch tragedy so far.

He questioned the AIADMK’s demand for a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the Kallakurichi incident. Referring to the remarks of the Leader of the Opposition, Edappadi K. Palaniswami, that the DMK [while in the Opposition] had sought a CBI inquiry into the custodial deaths of two persons in Sattankulam [in June 2020], Mr. Stalin pointed out: “It does not matter whether two people or 20 people have died. Even the death of one person is a great loss. Since the AIADMK tried to suppress the matter [Sattanknulam incident] and twist it, we demanded a probe by the CBI into the incident. But, we have not hidden anything [in the Kallakurichi incident]. In a short time, the guilty were arrested. Not a single person can escape.”

Listing the steps taken by his government in the aftermath of the Kallakurichi incident, Mr. Stalin said that he had been advising the police to be as determined in the elimination of narcotics as in cases involving illicit liquor. In the last two years, authorities have seized 46 properties, worth ₹18.05 crore, belonging to those caught for ganja-smuggling.

On the Kodanad heist-cum-murder case, Mr. Stalin said 268 witnesses had been examined and phones and four SIM cards, used by the accused were sent to Coimbatore for forensic analysis. As the accused had received phone calls from international numbers, the case had to be investigated with the help of Interpol.

Religious events

Mr. Stalin pointed out that many religious events were peacefully conducted during the DMK regime, including the car festival of Swarnamutheeswarar temple in Kandadevi, Sivaganga district, held after an 18-year-gap.

The Chief Minister further said that he regretted the “AIADMK’s attitude” in the current session of the Assembly.

House passes Bill increasing age limit of chief of SC/ST commission

The Hindu Bureau

Chennai

The Tamil Nadu Assembly on Saturday approved an amendment to the State Commission for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act, enhancing the upper age limit for the Chief of the Commission from 70 to 75 years.

Minister for Adi Dravidar and Tribal welfare N. Kayalvizhi Selvaraj tabled the Bill. The change had been proposed to utilise the services of experienced former judges of the High Court. M. Sinthanai Selvan of the VCK demanded that the government consider including eminent persons from fields other than the judiciary for the post of chief of the panel.

The House passed a Bill to amend the Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Act to promote gender equality, providing rights to unmarried women on a par with those of unmarried men.

On the merger of village panchayats with urban local bodies, Minister for Municipal Administration K.N. Nehru told the House that a committee, comprising secretaries of his department and Rural Development, would hold public hearings. Later, the House adopted two Bills concerning urban local bodies. Ten other Bills were also passed and the Assembly adjourned sine die.

New health insurance scheme to be restructured, says Stalin

Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on Saturday announced that the benefits of the new health insurance scheme for employees of the Tamil Nadu government would be extended to their dependent parents. He told the House, during the discussion on the demand for grants to the departments of Police and Fire and Rescue Services, that government employees from various departments sought the inclusion of their dependent parents as beneficiaries under the new scheme. The government would, therefore, restructure the scheme, Mr. Stalin said.

Members of PMK stage walkout from Assembly

The PMK members staged a walkout from the Assembly on Saturday, alleging that they had not been provided enough time to discuss the need for a caste-based survey and internal reservation for Vanniyars. PMK floor leader G.K. Mani told mediapersons: “The remarks made by Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, and Ministers S. Regupathy and S.S. Sivasankar that the caste-based survey conducted in Bihar had been struck down by the Patna High Court were not true. We demand that their remarks be expunged from the Assembly records.” He further said that the Patna High Court had struck down only the increase in reservation from 50% to 65% in educational institutions and government jobs, and not the survey. The State government is empowered to conduct a survey to enumerate the social and economic status of the people under the provisions of the Collection of Statistics Act, 2008, he said, urging the government to release a White Paper on caste-wise employment benefits availed of through reservation in State government jobs.

Two tribals admitted to hospital after drinking liquor

The Hindu Bureau

COIMBATORE

Two persons from a tribal settlement in Anamalai Tiger Reserve near Udumalpet were admitted to private hospitals in Coimbatore on Saturday after they developed diarrhoea due to suspected consumption of contaminated liquor, amid rumours that five persons were battling for life after drinking spurious liquor.

However, the Tiruppur police said that false information was being spread. Police sources said there was no trace of methanol in the blood of Mahendran, 40, and Ravichandran, 55, who is a functionary of a political party.

The police said that on Friday, the duo had mixed with the liquor, water drawn from a tank maintained by the local body. They suspect that the local body may have sprayed mosquito-repelling chemicals in the water.

National

- No ED notice yet arraigning CPI(M) as accused in bank scam: Govindan

- D.K. Shivakumar warns of action against party leaders if they speak on change of leadership

- Former united APCC chief D. Srinivas passes away

- After delay due to supply chain-related issues, LCA-Mk1A deliveries may begin by end of July

- On CBI plea, Delhi court sends Arvind Kejriwal to judicial custody till July 12

- Five soldiers killed as tank swept away in Ladakh’s Shyok river

- Grave danger in perceiving courts as temples, judges as deities: CJI

- Create a force that is first in the field of disaster management, says Shah

- 2 lynched in Kolkata over suspicion of stealing cellphones

- CBI conducts searches in Gujarat in NEET-UG case

- INDIA bloc plans a united front for a possible Deputy Speaker election

- Janata Dal(U) appoints RS member Sanjay Jha its working president

- Quota posts cannot be unreserved, U.P. government replies to Anupriya’s letter

- Bengal Governor files defamation suit in HC against Mamata

- Congress targets Modi over Adani Group’s ties with Chinese firms

- Om Birla’s comments on Emergency not apt: Pawar

- NTA’s plan to add more online exam centres yet to take off

- ‘Dengue may have helped stem COVID-19 wave severity’

- TISS terminates nearly 100 teaching, non-teaching staff across various campuses

- NCPCR to felicitate 30 district officials for containing drug abuse among school children

- Canopy of new Rajkot airport collapses in heavy rain

- Congress attacks BJP over NEET paper leak

- NEET-PG dates will be announced soon: Minister

- Officer suspended in J&K for ‘sabotaging’ Amarnath Yatra

- Nine arrested in Gauhati University marksheet scam

- 5 policemen injured during demolition drive in Kathua

- Profile 1

- Profile 2

- Rabble-rouser

- In fear of freak weather

No ED notice yet arraigning CPI(M) as accused in bank scam: Govindan

The Hindu Bureau

Thiruvananthapuram

The party’s Kerala State secretary addresses Enforcement Directorate accusations, political attacks , and says the outfit is resilient enough to weather Centre’s ‘intimidation’; he says the party has legal and political clarity in the Karuvannur case

M.V. Govindan

Communist Party of India (Marxist) Kerala secretary M.V. Govindan said in New Delhi that he was yet to receive any notice from the Enforcement Directorate (ED) about the agency’s purported move to arraign the political outfit as an accused in the Karuvannur Service Cooperative Bank loan scam.

Mr. Govindan said anti-Left forces and the right-wing media attempted to lay down a smokescreen of lies to put the CPI(M) on the defence. He said the Central government ruthlessly used the ED to silence dissent. The CPI(M) was the latest victim of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s political witch-hunt using Central enforcement agencies.

However, Mr. Govindan said the Central government would fail in its bid to intimidate the CPI(M) into silence. He said the party had legal and political clarity in the Karuvannur case. Mr. Govindan said the CPI(M) would emerge unblemished and stronger.

He slammed the ED for acting as a law unto itself. The agency’s actions were capricious, arbitrary, and devoid of any legal substance, Mr. Govindan said adding that the ED’s intention was propaganda, not prosecution.

Party’s Thrissur district committee secretary M.M. Varghese said he was unaware of the ED’s move to name the party as an accused in the case. “I cannot take questions on developments still in the realm of fiction,” he added.

The CPI(M) seemed wary that the ED had earlier arraigned the Aam Aadmi Party as an accused in the Delhi liquor policy case.

Under agency’s scanner

The agency had already frozen several CPI(M) bank accounts and impounded a few of its properties in Thrissur. It also froze the bank account of CPI(M) legislator and party’s State committee member A.C. Moideen and questioned him several times. Other CPI(M) leaders, including P.K. Biju, were also under the agency’s scanner.

The CPI(M) was also conscious of the political fallout of the ED’s efforts to cast the party leadership at the centre of the cooperative bank fraud. For one, the Left Democratic Front had emerged a distant third in the Irinjalakuda Assembly segment in the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls.

The Congress and the BJP exploited the alleged cooperative bank loan fraud to assail the CPI(M) and mar its public image in the State. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had used the scam as a major campaigning platform against the CPI(M) in Kerala and promised not to let the “perpetrators of the fraud on unsuspecting and poor depositors” go scot-free.

D.K. Shivakumar warns of action against party leaders if they publicly speak on change of CM

The Hindu Bureau

BENGALURU

Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar on Saturday warned that notices would be issued and disciplinary action taken against those party leaders who publicly speak about the change of the Chief Minister or creation of additional posts of Deputy Chief Minister.

Speaking to reporters at his residence, Mr. Shivakumar, who is also Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president, said, “Anyone issuing public statements on the change of Chief Minister or Deputy Chief Minister will face disciplinary action from the AICC and the KPCC. Discipline is paramount for the party”.

Soon after returning from Delhi, Mr. Shivakumar said, “AICC president Mallikarjun Kharge, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, and I held a meeting in Delhi and decided that everyone has to work for the party. Ministers, MLAs, and swamijis should not speak about party matters.”

This statement comes in the backdrop of Vishwa Vokkaligara Mahasamsthana Math seer Chandrashekhara Swami publicly asking Mr. Siddaramaiah to give up his post to Mr. Shivakumar, during Kempe Gowda Jayanti celebrations recently. On Saturday, Balehonnur Rambhapuri seer Veera Someshwara Shivacharya Swamy pitched for a leader from the Veerashaiva-Lingayat community to be considered for the Chief Minister’s post in case there is a leadership change or in the event of creation of additional Deputy Chief Minister posts in Karnataka.

Prior to this, a few Ministers had been demanding the creation of additional posts of Deputy Chief Minister to give representation to other communities.

When asked if there was a discussion with the high command on the issue of the change of Chief Minister or creation of more Deputy Chief Minister posts, Mr. Shivakumar said, “There were no discussions on the matter. The high command will evaluate my performance and take a suitable decision.”

Former united APCC chief D. Srinivas passes away

The Hindu Bureau

HYDERABAD

Dharmapuri Srinivas

Senior Congress leader and former united Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) president Dharmapuri Srinivas passed away on Saturday following a heart attack.

Mr. Srinivas, popularly known as DS, 76, breathed his last at his house. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

The last rites would be performed with State honours on Sunday in Nizamabad.

Having worked in the Youth Congress, Mr. Srinivas went on to become a legislator, Minister, two-time PCC chief and Rajya Sabha member. Mr. Srinivas first entered the A.P. Legislative Assembly in 1989 by winning the Nizamabad seat.

When the Congress won the 2004 Assembly election, along with Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, Srinivas said that he was in the race for the CM’s post. But it was another matter that the high command chose to make YSR the Chief Minister recognising his padayatra, which was considered the game-changer.

After delay due to supply chain-related issues, LCA-Mk1A deliveries may begin by end of July

Dinakar Peri

NEW DELHI

The first aircraft, LA5033, of the Tejas Mk1A Aircraft series took to the skies from the HAL facility in Bengaluru on March 28. FILE PHOTOANI

After some delay, the deliveries of the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA)-Mk1A by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) to the Indian Air Force (IAF) are now expected to begin by July-end with officials stating that the delay is due to supply chain issues, including at the HAL and at General Electric (GE) in delivering the engines.

One jet is now expected to be handed over to the IAF by July-end, two officials independently confirmed.

In February 2021, the Defence Ministry signed a ₹48,000-crore deal with the HAL for 83 LCA-Mk1A jets, a more capable fighter than the LCA-MK1 in service.

Under the contract, three LCA-MK1A planes were to be delivered to the IAF in February 2024 and 16 aircraft per year for the subsequent five years. As the present LCA, these fighter jets will be powered by the GE F-404 engines.

There have been significant supply chain delays that have delayed the manufacture and deliveries, HAL and defence officials said while expressing confidence that the process would be speeded up once deliveries begin with plans lined up to scale production rate to 18 aircraft a year and eventually to 24 aircraft rolling out of three manufacturing lines every year.

To questions from The Hindu on delay in engine deliveries to the HAL, a GE Aerospace spokesperson said: “The aerospace industry continues to experience unprecedented supply chain pressures. GE Aerospace is working with our partner HAL and suppliers to resolve constraints and deliver F404-IN20 engines.”

The LCA is going to constitute the bulk of the IAF in the next few decades.

In addition to the 83 Mk1A aircraft on order, the Defence Ministry has given preliminary approval for procurement of another 97 LCA-Mk1A jets. This would eventually make 180 LCA-MK1A jets and 220 jets of the MK1 variant. The combined cost of the 180 Mk1As is an estimated of ₹1.15 lakh crore.

In addition, a larger and more capable LCA-Mk2 is under development that will be powered by the GE F-414 engines.

A deal for the HAL to license-manufacture the engines in India is in advanced stages. As of now, the IAF has committed to procuring around 120 LCA-Mk2 jets.

The IAF has two MiG-21 squadrons, No. 3 squadron ‘Cobras’ and No. 23 squadron ‘Panthers’, remaining in service, one of which will be phased out this year and the other next year, and they will convert to LCA-Mk1A aircraft.

Timely induction of the LCAs is crucial to keep the number of fighter squadrons from falling below 30.

On CBI plea, Delhi court sends Arvind Kejriwal to judicial custody till July 12

The Hindu Bureau

New Delhi

Delhi Chief Minister and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal being produced before a court by CBI officials, on Saturday.PTI-

A Delhi court on Saturday sent Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to judicial custody till July 12 in a case filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in connection with alleged corruption in the now-scrapped excise policy of 2021-22.

The order for the judicial remand was passed by Special Judge Sunena Sharma of the Rouse Avenue court after the CBI had moved an application seeking judicial custody of the Delhi Chief Minister.

“He needs to be in jail in the interest of the investigation and justice,” the CBI said in its remand application, and added that the Delhi Chief Minister had not cooperated in the interrogation.

Counsel representing Mr. Kejriwal opposed the application saying the case had been going on since 2022, though the Chief Minister was arrested only in March.

“...The Supreme Court granted Mr. Kejriwal interim bail to campaign for general elections. The CBI had urged that some evidence was collected against Mr. Kejriwal in January and they got prosecution sanction under the Prevention of Corruption Act in April but the agency did not want to overreach the proceedings of the SC which is why it never arrested him,” advocate Vikram Chaudhary, who represented Mr. Kejriwal, said.

Material sought

He also moved an application to seek details of material collected against his client in the alleged excise policy case.

“These material found against him cannot be disclosed to the accused,” the court said.

The court, earlier this week, had remanded the Delhi Chief Minister to CBI custody for three days which ended on Saturday. The CBI interrogated him in the jail on June 25.

Mr. Kejriwal was initially arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on March 21 on money laundering charges linked to the liquor policy case.

The ED had alleged him to be the “key conspirator” in framing the now defunct excise policy.

The agency also accused Mr. Kejriwal of diverting the monetary profits gained from the policy into the AAP coffers for the Goa Assembly election.

Five soldiers killed as tank swept away in Ladakh’s Shyok river

The Hindu Bureau

SRINAGAR/NEW DELHI

They were part of a tank crew withdrawing after training in a crucial location; rescue mission failed due to heavy current and high water levels

Treacherous waters: A view of the Shyok river in the eastern Ladakh region. REUTERSSHARAFAT ALI

Five soldiers lost their lives after a tank was swept away by strong water currents in the Shyok river during military training in Ladakh on Friday night.

An Army spokesman said the incident took place as the team was withdrawing after completing a military training activity. The Army tank got stuck in the Shyok, near Saser Brangsa, in eastern Ladakh “due to sudden increase in the water level”.

“Rescue teams rushed to the location. However, due to high current and water levels, the rescue mission did not succeed and the tank crew lost their lives,” the Army said.

The bodies have been recovered. The deceased soldiers have been identified as Risaldar M.R.K. Reddy, Havildar Subhan Khan, Daffadar Bhupndra Negi, Lance DaffadarEkeidaung Teibam, and craftsman Sadarbonia Nagaraju.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh expressed his sadness at the loss of lives.

“We will never forget the exemplary service of our gallant soldiers to the nation. My heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families. The nation stands firm with them during this hour of grief,” Mr. Singh said.

The Army spokesman said that the Fire and Fury Corps, stationed in Ladakh, and all ranks “salute the bravehearts who made the supreme sacrifice in the line of duty in Ladakh” and offered deep condolences to the bereaved families.

The crucial Sub-Sector North in Ladakh, where the incident occurred, consists of the Depsang plains and Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO). Currently, the airfield at DBO and the area in general is accessible only by the 255-km Darbuk-Shyok-DBO road, though work is at an advanced stage to build alternative access through Saser La, an ancient trade route. DBO also has one of the designated border personnel meeting points between India and China to resolve incidents along the Line of Actual Control. Since the beginning of the stand-off with China in May 2020, there has been a significant deployment of tanks, infantry vehicles and other heavy equipment.

Grave danger in perceiving courts as temples, judges as deities: CJI

The Hindu Bureau

Kolkata

Warm greeting: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee with Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud in Kolkata on Saturday. ANI

Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Saturday cautioned about the dangers of perceiving courts as “temples of justice” and “judges as deities”, and said that judges should look at themselves as “servers of the people”.

“There is a grave danger when people say that courts are temples of justice. There is a grave danger that we perceive ourselves as deities in these temples. I am a little reticent when I am told that this is a temple of justice, because temple postulates that judges are in the position of deity,” the CJI said at an event in Kolkata.

He said that he would rather recast the role of “judges as servers of people” who brought in compassion and empathy.

Constitutional values

Delivering the keynote address at the two-day East Zone II regional conference of the National Judicial Academy, CJI Chandrachud touched on the issue of “constitutional morality” that paves the way for conditions that respect diversity, promote inclusion and pursue tolerance.

“Constitutional morality is an overarching principle which is derived from, but is not confined to, specific rights or values which are enshrined in the Constitution,” he said.

“We may be masters of constitutional interpretation, because the task of interpolation has been given to us. But we are servants of the Constitution,” he said. Mr. Chandrachud said that the idea of a just society should hinge on the constitutional vision and not what an individual thinks should be a just society.

Delivering a special address at the programme, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee appealed to members of the judiciary to ensure that political bias does not interfere with the justice delivery system.

Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court T.S. Sivagnanam and judges of the Supreme Court, including Justice Dipankar Datta, were among those present at the programme, which was organised in collaboration with the Calcutta High Court and West Bengal Judicial Academy.

Create a force that is first in the field of disaster management, says Shah

Samridhi Tewari

NEW DELHI

Amit Shah being felicitated by NDRF Director-General Piyush Anand during the flag-in ceremony of a mountaineering expedition. ANI

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday said disasters such as avalanches, landslips, floods, and storms are going to increase everywhere in the future due to climate change. Keeping this in mind, governments and society at large should move firmly towards the goal of zero casualty by using scientific principles for the development of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) as its budget has increased from ₹66,000 crore to ₹2 lakh crore in 10 years.

Mr. Shah, who was speaking at the successful return of the second mountaineering expedition ‘Vijay’ of the NDRF in New Delhi, said that the government still has to increase its efficiency in many areas of disaster management, such as forest fires. “Saving human lives is not our only objective during forest fires, but we have to bring experiments happening all over the world on how to save forests and what we can do so that there is no fire on the ground. We need to prepare ourselves more for the floods caused by cloudburst,” he added.

“We should create a force in India that is first in the field of disaster management in the entire country. The PM himself is very concerned and aware of disaster management and the success achieved by India in this field is the result of this. He said that between 2004 and 2014, a total budget of ₹66,000 crore was allocated to the SDRFs and NDRF for disaster relief, which increased to ₹2 lakh crore in 10 years from 2014 to 2024,” he said.

“There was a demand for risk and hardship allowance for NDRF personnel for a long time and the Government of India under the leadership of PM has accepted this demand yesterday. Now, 16,000 personnel of NDRF will get risk and hardship allowance at the rate of 40%,” he said.

Mr. Shah said the Centre has decided that a team of the Central Armed Police Forces will participate in sports competitions. He said that the government will come up with a model for its implementation.

Two men lynched in Kolkata in separate incidents over suspicion of cellphone theft

The Hindu Bureau

Kolkata

Two lynching cases in a span of 24 hours in Kolkata, one in the heart of the city and the other in the Salt Lake area, have caused concern among its residents. Both killings were due to suspicion of mobile phone theft.

Irshad Alam, 37, was tied up and beaten to death inside a students’ hostel in the Bow Bazaar area in central Kolkata on Friday. The police arrested 14 persons in this connection. Just 24 hours later, Prasen Mandal, 22, was lynched in the Salt Lake area, the police said. Three persons were arrested for the murder of Mandal. Reports said the accused, after brutally assaulting the victim, took him to a private hospital, where he was declared dead.

The Bidhannagar Police said when the hospital staff enquired about the deceased and the injuries on his body, the three accused could not provide satisfactory answers.

The staff got suspicious and informed the local police. They were taken to the Electronics Complex police station for questioning, where they confessed that they had assaulted the victim on suspicion of mobile phone theft.

The police said Alam was beaten to death inside the Udayan Government Hostel on Friday. CCTV footage is missing and it is suspected that the evidence was destroyed. Alam, a mechanic at a television repair shop, was reportedly caught by a mob, and around 8.30 a.m., was taken to the first floor of the hostel, where he was assaulted.

The police filed a case under Sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 365 (kidnapping) and 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code at the Muchipara station. All arrested suspects are students or former students of various Kolkata colleges.

CBI holds searches in Gujarat in NEET leak case

CBI officials have carried out searches in Jharkhand and Gujarat in connection with the NEET paper leak case. PTI

It is alleged that Mr. Prakash and Mr. Kumar played a crucial role in arranging to rent the Learn Boys Hostel and Play School in Patna’s Khemnichak locality, where the leaked question papers were allegedly distributed to the 20 to 25 candidates gathered there on the eve of the examination, so that they could memorise the answers overnight.

The CBI has been granted the custody of the five accused for five days by a special court. Sources said that the agency may take all the accused to Delhi as part of the investigation.

The CBI team also visited several locations in Patna for spot verification along with Baldev Kumar alias Chintu and Mukesh Kumar, both residents of Nalanda in Bihar.

Mr. Baldev Kumar allegedly received the solved question paper of the NEET-UG exam on his mobile phone in PDF format, after which it was printed out using a wi-fi printer and distributed among the candidates to memorise the answers at the play school. Mr. Mukesh Kumar has been accused of facilitating the offence by picking up and dropping off the candidates after they memorised the answers.

The CBI is also on the lookout for Rocky, the nephew of the main accused Sanjiv Mukhiya.

INDIA bloc plans a united front for a possible Deputy Speaker election

Sobhana K. Nair

New Delhi

It is still uncertain if the Modi government will fill the post in the current Lok Sabha ; Opposition is likely to field Faizabad MP Awadhesh Prasad in case an election is held, though traditionally, the post goes to the single largest Opposition party

Awadhesh Prasad at the Parliament House complex during the first session of the 18th Lok Sabh on Wednesday.PTIKAMAL KISHORE

The Opposition is likely to field Faizabad MP and Samajwadi Party leader Awadhesh Prasad for a likely election to the post of Deputy Speaker. Learning from their experience during the Speaker’s election, where differences between the Congress and the Trinamool Congress came to the fore, the Opposition has decided to present a united front to force a contest for the position.

Though constitutionally mandated, the 17th Lok Sabha functioned without a Deputy Speaker. Besides speculation, there has been no formal indication from the government that the position will be filled in the 18th Lok Sabha either.

Article 93 of the Constitution mandates that the Lok Sabha shall, “as soon as may be”, choose a member to be the Deputy Speaker. However, it does not provide a specific time frame.

Consensus candidate

According to sources, the top leadership of the Congress, Trinamool and SP — the three leading parties of the Opposition INDIA bloc — had informal talks to pick a consensus candidate who could send a strong message.

The leaders narrowed down their choice to Mr. Prasad, a nine-time MLA and first-time MP who hit the headlines for defeating the BJP’s two-time MP Lallu Singh in the Faizabad Lok Sabha constituency. The recently consecrated Ram Temple in Ayodhya, which the BJP had hoped would see them through to an easy majority, falls within this constituency.

“Mr. Prasad’s victory symbolises the defeat of the BJP’s Hindutva agenda. As a Dalit leader, his victory from a general seat was also an extremely significant moment in Indian political history,” a top Opposition leader said. If the government does not make a move to appoint a Deputy Speaker before the first session of Parliament ends on July 3, the Opposition will write to the Lok Sabha Speaker on the issue, sources said.

A Deputy Speaker enjoys the same legislative powers as a Speaker. And in the absence of the Speaker due of death, illnesses or any other reason, the Deputy Speaker assumes the administrative powers. It is parliamentary convention to elect a Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha from a party other than the ruling party to run an accountable democratic Parliament.

Traditionally, the position is reserved for the single largest Opposition party but not all governments have followed this norm. In 2014, in the first term of the Narendra Modi government, the post was accorded to Thambi Durai of the the BJP ally All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. In 2004 and 2009, when the Congress-led UPA government was in power, Shiromani Akali Dal MP Charanjit Singh Atwal and BJP MP Kariya Munda held the position. During the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, the Congress’s P.M. Sayeed held the position.

Janata Dal(U) appoints RS member Sanjay Jha its working president

Amarnath Tewary

Patna

Sanjay Jha

At its national executive meeting in Delhi on Saturday, the Janata Dal (United), part of the ruling alliance in Bihar, appointed party leader and Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Jha its working president, and passed a resolution demanding special status or a special package for the State.

Mr. Jha, who has been close to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, is seen as having been instrumental in the JD(U) joining hands with the BJP again ahead of the Lok Sabha election. Mr. Kumar is currently the party’s national president.

“Our national party president has entrusted a big responsibility to me by appointing me the working president of the party. We will try to work with ally BJP, maintaining more coordination,” Mr. Jha told presspersons in Delhi after his appointment.

“What sort of Bihar did Mr. Kumar take over 19 years ago,” Mr. Jha asked. “…whatever growth and development has been done in Bihar in the past 19 years is because of its own resources.”

“Despite 19 years of regime, there has been no anti-incumbency trend against Mr. Kumar in the State and this was reflected in the just-concluded Lok Sabha election result,” Mr. Jha said, showering praise on Mr. Kumar.

Asked about the JD(U)’s resolution seeking special category status or a special package for Bihar at the party’s national meet, Mr. Jha expressed hope that the demand would be met. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi has always paid attention to Bihar and I do hope that the party’s demand for special category status or a package for the State will be met,” he said.

However, senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh, in a post on X, wondered if the demand would be forceful enough.

“Would (Bihar) Chief Minister dare to pass such a resolution from the State’s Cabinet as well? Would Chief Minister of Bihar put this demand forcefully?” Mr. Ramesh said.

Party sources also told The Hindu that Mr. Jha was chosen for the post of working president of JD(U) as he “maintains a good relationship with both the BJP and the JD(U)”.

Quota posts cannot be unreserved, U.P. government replies to Anupriya’s letter

Ishita Mishra

New Delhi

Days after Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Anupriya Patel alleged bias against applicants from the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) in government jobs in Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), the Yogi Adityanath government in the State sent a detailed reply to her, explaining that reservation posts remaining vacant after the selection process could not be converted to unreserved posts, as claimed by her.

Ms. Patel is the national president of the Apna Dal (Soneylal), an ally of the ruling BJP in U.P.

‘No personal details’

The government also said that applicants were given grades; no one was rejected with “not suitable” remarks; and the candidates’ personal details were not shown to interviewers.

“The candidates from OBC and SC/ST communities are constantly contacting me and saying that they are often declared ‘Not Found Suitable’ for the posts reserved for them in various competitive examinations that have an interview-based recruitment process. Later, these posts are declared unreserved,” Ms. Patel said in her letter to Mr. Adityanath.

Sources said the government had taken the allegation seriously, and the Chief Minister’s Office asked the department concerned to reply to the Union Minister.

In the reply sent to Ms. Patel, it was said that if candidates of the given categories did not clear the exam, then the UPPSC did not have the right to convert the resulting unfilled vacancies to any other category.

Bengal Governor files defamation suit in HC against Mamata

The Hindu Bureau

Kolkata

C.V. Ananda Bose ANI

West Bengal Governor C.V. Ananda Bose on Friday moved the Calcutta High Court against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, filing a defamation suit against her. The development came a day after Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday said that women did not feel safe visiting the Raj Bhavan.

Ms. Banerjee made the remark on the issue relating to the swearing-in of two newly elected Trinamool Congress MLAs, who refused to go to the Raj Bhavan for being administered the oath by the Governor.

“Why must everyone go to Raj Bhavan? The Governor can authorise the Speaker or Deputy Speaker, or attend the Assembly himself. Women have informed me they do not feel safe visiting Raj Bhavan due to recent incidents reported there,” the Chief Minister had said. A woman employee had raised allegations of harassment against the Governor on May 2.

The Governor had responded to the remarks of the Chief Minister by saying that it was expected of public representatives not to create “erroneous and slanderous impressions”.

Two MLAs-elect, Sayantika Bandyopadhyay and Rayat Hossain Sarkar, have been demanding that the Governor administer the oath to them at the Assembly.

Meanwhile, the Governor told presspersons that he was suing the Chief Minister for defamation.

Congress targets Modi over Adani Group’s ties with Chinese firms

The Hindu Bureau

New Delhi

The Congress on Saturday, citing a news report about the Adani Group selecting eight Chinese companies to assist its solar manufacturing project, questioned if the taxpayers’ money should benefit the Chinese firms.

Slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a post on X, Congress general secretary (organisation) Jairam Ramesh called for a strategy “to wean India of its dependence on China”.

“The non-biological Prime Minister infamously told the nation on June 19, 2020, after the Galwan clashes that Na koi hamari seema mein ghus aaya hai, na hi koi ghusa hua hai (Neither has anyone entered our borders, nor has anyone occupied territories). However, he shows no hesitation in liberally issuing visas to Chinese workers to help one of his tempowallah buddies,” Mr. Ramesh said, tagging the newspaper report about Adani Solar trying to bring engineers from China.

Mr. Ramesh said these collaborations are happening in the name of Atmanirbharata (self-reliance).

Om Birla’s comments on Emergency not apt: Pawar

Press Trust of India

Kolhapur

Nationalist Congress Party (SP) president Sharad Pawar on Saturday said the reference to the Emergency made by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla in his speech was not apt and did not suit the stature of his post.

Soon after his election as Lok Sabha Speaker, Om Birla on Wednesday set off a firestorm by reading out a resolution condemning the imposition of the Emergency as an attack on the Constitution by the then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Mr. Pawar said, “The Speaker’s reference to the Emergency in his address did not suit the stature of the post. It has been 50 years since the Emergency, Indira Gandhi is no longer alive. So why is the Speaker bringing up this issue now?” “The President’s speech also had a brief mention of this issue. That was also not necessary,” he said.

NTA’s plan to add more online exam centres yet to take off

Maitri Porecha

NEW DELHI

Currently, the NTA conducts at least six of its entrance exams through online or computer based test mode. PTIPTI

The National Testing Agency (NTA), which is under scrutiny for multiple question paper leak controversies, failed to amp up its infrastructure for conducting tests in online mode in 2024, as its tender to multiply testing centres failed to take off, The Hindu has learnt.

The NTA had floated a tender in January, in order to increase its capacity of computer labs, which could house ‘nodes’, or seating spaces for candidates, in as many as 378 cities. “The work has not progressed as the tenders have not been finalised,” a top NTA official told The Hindu. If the tender had gone through, the NTA had aimed to conduct exams across India in a standardised format by establishing online exam centres without any possibility of malpractice, officials added.

Currently, the NTA conducts at least six of its entrance exams through the relatively safer online or computer-based test (CBT) mode. While the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE-Main) is conducted by the NTA through the CBT mode, the National Eligibility-Cum-Entrance Test (NEET-UG) for medical aspirants is conducted in a pen-and-paper, or offline, mode. Offline tests are more vulnerable to paper leaks and other types of malpractice.

According to official data, the NTA currently has the infrastructure capability for approximately 600 CBT examination centres across India. “It conducts CBT exams in multiple shifts with multiple sets of question papers owing to the limited infrastructure availability as per the defined standards for conducting online exams,” another NTA official said.

Boosting capacity

“Currently, India does not have the capacity to conduct online exams for more than three lakh candidates in a single shift due to resource constraints,” V. Kamakoti, Director of IIT-Madras, told The Hindu.

Aware of its restraints, the NTA had envisioned setting up more exam centres for online exams, first for 40,000 candidates per shift and then to increase the capacity to 2,00,000 candidates per shift, with a capacity of 275 computer nodes in each centre. Each node would seat one candidate.

This would mean gradually doubling the existing strength of 600 centres, by adding anywhere between 145 and 700 more centres. But the tender never took off, officials said.

“The NTA had planned to start with a provision of approximately 40,000 computer nodes per shift and will increase the nodes on mutual discussion or as per industry requirement. At present candidates from remote areas need to travel a long distance from their residence to reach the exam centres,” the tender floated by the NTA said.

Multiple proposals to administer NEET-UG through online mode were sent to the Ministry of Education but in vain, officials at the NTA told The Hindu. “Talks for administering the NEET-UG in CBT mode, similar to JEE (Main), have been ongoing for at least five years now. The recent paper leak fiasco should serve as an eye-opener to change the format of the exams,” an official quoted above said.

In the tender floated in January, the NTA had sought proposals from profitable private companies or central PSUs, who have had an average annual turnover of ₹100 crore for the last five years, and who have handled projects ranging from ₹20 crore to ₹40 crore, to bid for setting up and maintaining online exam centres.

In the tender, the NTA said that it wanted to set up this infrastructure in private and government higher education institutions and schools, government and semi-government buildings which would offer areas in their campuses for the development of new IT infrastructure by outsourcing it to a private company or a PSU.

Outsourced centres

The NTA wanted to outsource the work to bidders for end-to-end execution and running of online examination centres, including arranging infrastructure such as furniture, electrification, air-conditioning, power backup, network cabling, Internet with minimum 10 Mbps speed, CCTV, and even arrange a pool of invigilators which will be maintained by the bidders in individual cities.

The tender floated in January never took off, and is currently facing a delay of nearly six months. Had it been awarded, the NTA would have expected the online centres to be live and running within three months of awarding the contract. It had said that successful bidders were expected to run the online exam centres for five years.

‘Dengue may have helped stem COVID-19 wave severity’

Jacob Koshy

NEW DELHI

A study was published in this week ; results of the research suggest that the antibodies following a dengue infection were able to ‘neutralise’ the coronavirus

Masking effect: Antibodies in the blood after a dengue infection were able to engulf and bind to coronavirus proteins.AP

Can the dengue virus beat the coronavirus and is it why the early wave of the pandemic in 2020 resulted in fewer COVID deaths or severe infections in India than in Europe or North America where dengue is not endemic? Research from the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata hints at these intriguing possibilities following an analysis of antibodies from people infected with dengue and testing them against a kind of coronavirus called murine hepatitis virus (mouse coronavirus). In research settings, this virus — being part of the same family of human coronaviruses — is considered a good surrogate to study the behaviour of the coronavirus strains that infected people during the pandemic.

Their results, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Virology this week, suggest that the antibodies following a dengue infection were able to ‘neutralise’ this coronavirus. For their analysis, the scientists relied on a combination of computer-modelling studies as well as cell-culture studies, the latter demonstrating how antibodies from dengue were able to engulf and bind the coronavirus proteins.

These latest studies build on the lab’s work from 2020 that blood tests specific to check for dengue sometimes led to a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.

“We experimentally demonstrated that serum samples from dengue patients have the potential to bind to and ‘mask’ the surface of several coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. We performed ‘virus neutralisation’ tests in cell cultures and showed that such ‘masking’ by dengue antibodies can indeed, block coronavirus entry into susceptible cells,” Subhajit Biswas, Principal Scientist and the main author of the study, told The Hindu.

The dengue family of viruses are different from the coronavirus family and hence infection from one, in normal circumstances, is not expected to protect against the other. What is known about dengue is that there are four major serotypes, or strains, that cause dengue infections. Strains Denv-1 and Denv-2 are the most common in India. However, being infected with one does not protect against the other and, in fact, a re-infection involving a different strain can be more dangerous — a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) in dengue. Whether the prevalence of dengue in dengue-endemic countries of Southeast Asia may be triggering newer mutations in the coronavirus is a factor that needs to be investigated more extensively, the authors suggest.

That the early stages of the pandemic saw a decline in dengue in India has been independently reported. The National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme of India reported a sharp decline of 75% (39,419 versus 1,57,315) in dengue incidence during 2020 as compared with 2019.

“The possible reasons for this reduction could be lower transmission of the vector, less exposure due to lockdown, and, potentially, a disparity in the reported data possibly due to underdiagnosis or underreporting because of increased attention to the pandemic,” said a 2021 study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygeine.

TISS terminates nearly 100 teaching, non-teaching staff across various campuses

Maitri Porecha

NEW DELHI

In what came as a shock to nearly 100 teaching and non-teaching staff on various campuses of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) across India, they were informed that their contracts will not be renewed and their services will end on Sunday. The TISS administration sent termination letters to the staff on June 28.

“Nearly a hundred institute staff members which were previously funded by the Tata Education Trust will become unemployed after years of service at TISS. It is completely a failure of the current leadership of TISS administration in running the institute and apathy of the Union government,” said a statement by Progressive Students’ Forum of TISS.

“After repeatedly targeting its students and curbing the campus democracy, the present TISS administration, under the BJP-led Union government, has unleashed an attack on its employees as well,” the statement further said.

“As students, we express our concern about this decision. The previous years’ NIRF data show that the student-faculty ratio is being impacted negatively. This means that the currently employed faculty is insufficient in terms of the number of students admitted to TISS each year,” it said. While the termination of a hundred such positions will directly impact the futures of the students, it might also allow for politically motivated appointments in the near future, the students feared.

Last year, the BJP-led Centre took over TISS, making it a fully “public-funded institute”.

“The result has been that students are facing delays in receiving student aid and are being threatened in the name of fee payment. While becoming a public institute should have relieved the pressure from students coming from economically and socially marginalised backgrounds, the Central government takeover has resulted in added monetary pressures,” the statement added.

NCPCR to felicitate 30 district officials for containing drug abuse among school children

The Hindu Bureau

New Delhi

A new portal called ‘Prahari’ (sentry) will also be launched by the Union MoS. NAGARA GOPAL

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) will felicitate 30 top performing districts in the country for the successful implementation of a Joint Action Plan to contain substance abuse among schoolchildren.

The recognition will be awarded here on Sunday to the respective District Magistrates and Collectors by Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai. The event will be held on the sidelines of a national review and consultation organised jointly by the NCPCR and the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on the ‘Joint Action Plan on Prevention of Drugs and Substance Abuse and Illicit Trafficking’.

The Joint Action Plan (JAP) was developed by the NCPCR and the NCB based on deliberations with the Ministries concerned in 2021. It streamlines efforts made by different agencies to bring paradigm shifts in prevention.

Representatives of the Commission for Protection of Child Rights of States and Union Territories, as well the Departments of Women and Child Welfare, Health, Education, Police, Drugs Controller, Excise, Pharmacy Councils, and State AIDS Control Societies will participate in the consultation.

New portal

A new portal called ‘Prahari’ (sentry) will also be launched by Mr. Rai. “Through this portal, quarterly activities for awareness on drugs and substance abuse in schools will be conducted by children and teachers nominated by special ‘Prahari’ clubs,” a senior official said. ‘Prahari’ clubs are associations managed and run by children to achieve common goals.

Canopy of new Rajkot airport collapses in heavy rain

A day after a portion of a canopy of the Delhi airport’s Terminal-1 collapsed, a part of the canopy at a terminal in Rajkot (Hirasar) International Airport collapsed following heavy rain in Gujarat on Saturday. A video shows the canopy collapsing at the passenger pick-up/drop area outside the airport terminal. No injury or death has been reported. The new greenfield airport, built by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) at Hirasar village was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2023. This is the third incident of infrastructure failure at Indian airports in under a week.

Congress attacks BJP over NEET paper leak

The Hindu Bureau

NEW DELHI

The Congress on Saturday alleged that the Narendra Modi-led government is not keen on allowing a parliamentary debate on the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for undergraduate medical college admissions as it will “expose” the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) links with those involved in the alleged NEET paper leak scam.

At a press conference, Gujarat Congress chief Shaktisinh Gohil claimed that one of the key accused, Arif Vohra, who has now been arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), is an office-bearer of the BJP.

Mr. Gohil also questioned why the National Testing Agency (NTA) had selected the Jay Jalaram (Gujarati) school in Godhra as an examination centre, despite the fact that the Gujarat HC had previously imposed a penalty of ₹35 lakh on the organisation that runs these schools.

“If you go Google a little bit, then you will find Jai Jalaram Education Trust among those who donated to the BJP. I have found it myself,” Mr. Gohil said.

NEET-PG dates will be announced soon: Minister

The Hindu Bureau

New Delhi

Union Minister for Education Dharmendra Pradhan said that the new schedule for NEET-PG will be announced by the National Board of Examinations (NBE) in the next two days.

Mr. Pradhan was speaking in Panchkula, Haryana ahead of a BJP event where Union Home Minister Amit Shah addressed party workers.

The NEET-PG exams were cancelled last week because of the controversy raging over irregularities in the conduct of NEET-UG.

“The date of National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, Postgraduate will be announced by the NBE in one or two days,” Mr. Pradhan said.

The comments by Mr. Pradhan come a day after the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced revised dates for three exams that were cancelled.

The University Grants Commission-National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) which was cancelled a day after being conducted on June 18 will now be conducted from August 21 to September 4, the National Testing Agency said.

(With agency inputs)

Officer suspended in J&K for ‘sabotaging’ Amarnath Yatra

A local officer was suspended in Anantnag district of Jammu & Kashmir on allegations of “sabotaging” the Amarnath Yatra by remaining absent from duty. Syeed Fakhrudin Hamid, Deputy Commissioner, Anantnag, in an order, suspended Pahalgam Naib Tehsildar Ovais Amir for “leaving the station without permission and sabotaging the ongoing Amarnath yatra”. A Sub-Divisional Magistrate-level officer was appointed to “inquire into the matter of non compliance of the Naib Tehsildar”. “The suspended officer shall remain attached with his office during the period of his suspension,” the order read.

Nine arrested in Gauhati University marksheet scam

The Assam Police arrested nine persons, including the prime accused, in an alleged marksheet scam involving officials of Gauhati University. It came to light after Azizul Haque, an undergraduate student at the Ganesh Lal Choudhury College in Barpeta, was found to have possessed a forged marksheet. An official probing the case said the arrests were made from various locations in Guwahati, Barpeta, Kalgachia, and Dhubri. Among the arrested were Krishan Krishnamurti, an employee of Gauhati University, Shivtosh Mahato, an employee of Dhubri Law College, and Aminul Islam, a librarian of a college in Dhubri.

5 policemen injured during demolition drive in Kathua

Five policemen, including an officer, were injured in a clash with protesters opposing the J&K authorities’ demolition drive, including a mosque, in Kathua district on Saturday. Tensions gripped the Kalyanpur Padri area in tehsil Nagri when a mob attacked and chased a joint team of the J&K Police and revenue officials carrying out an anti-encroachment drive against a mosque. A Deputy Superintendent of Police-rank officer was hit in the head and four others also sustained minor injurieswhen a stone-throwing mob, which was also carrying lathis, chased the policemen from the demolition spot. Several vehicles were damaged in the clash.

Overlords of the developing world

G. Sampath

IMF Mass protests in Kenya, in which at least 30 people were shot and killed by police, against an IMF-backed finance Bill that sought to raise taxes on essentials bring into focus, once again, the conditions the multinational lender imposes on poor countries in return for loan assistance

Kenya is roiled by protests against a new finance Bill introduced by the government of President William Ruto. As demonstrations spread across the country’s 47 counties, protesters in the capital Nairobi attempted to storm Parliament. The government clamped down, with 30 people killed in police firing and over 200 injured. Mr. Ruto eventually bowed to public pressure and announced he would not sign the controversial Bill, which sought to raise taxes on essentials such as bread, cooking oil, sugar and diapers.

Despite Mr. Ruto backing down, the protesters have called for his resignation. They see him as more loyal to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) than to the people of Kenya. A sign from the protests seemed to reflect the public mood: ‘Kenya is not IMF’s lab rat,’ it read.

In 2021, Kenya signed a four-year loan agreement with the IMF for $2.34 billion, and with another deal signed in May 2023, its loan volume rose to $3.6 billion. But IMF money for developing countries comes in tranches, and with conditions.

As part of the 2021 loan deal, the IMF forced a COVID-battered Kenya to agree to austerity measures that would raise its revenue collection to 25% of GDP. The lender’s demands included a combination of tax hikes and budget cuts, including elimination of subsidies on fuel and electricity and cuts in spending on education and health.

Mr. Ruto, when he came to power in September 2022, went about diligently following the IMF diktat. He cut subsidies on maize and fuel, with the latter sparking a surge in inflation. Massive protests ensued in March and July 2023, in which 30 people were killed by the police. Nonetheless, Mr. Ruto stayed the course on other fiscal consolidation measures, and earlier this month, his government reached a staff level agreement with the IMF. It was expected to open the tap on another $976 million, provided the finance Bill — projected to raise revenues of $2.68 billion — went through. But with Mr. Ruto forced to abandon it, the future flow of IMF funds is in doubt.

None of this, however, is new. Kenya has been through this before, as have much of Africa, whose governments often find themselves caught between the interests of their people and that of private investors and Western commercial banks, fronted by the IMF. The IMF describes itself as “being governed by and accountable to its member countries”. But its history and management structure tell a different story — of an organisation that has served as a tool of American foreign policy, and works to further the interests of Western financial elites.

In 1944, when the IMF was created at a conference of 44 nations in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the U.S., the global supremacy of American economic might was already a reality, with the rest of the world either devastated by the Second World War or by colonial plunder, or both. This power dynamic got encoded into both the Bretton Woods twins — the IMF and the World Bank. For instance, the World Bank president is always an American, while the IMF head is always from a European ally of the U.S.

Unwritten mandate

In theory, their function is to aid economic development and promote monetary cooperation and stability. But in practice, they have followed an unwritten mandate to foster the integration of newly independent former colonies into a global economic order on terms designed to serve the interests of American capital.

Against this background, it shouldn’t be surprising that voting rights at the IMF don’t follow the democratic logic of one-member country-one vote but are quota-driven, based on dollar contributions. The U.S. alone has a voting share of 16.5%, while the wealthy G-7 countries together command more than 40% of the voting power. This is more than that enjoyed by all the nations in Africa and Latin America put together, and populations most affected by decisions taken by IMF bureaucrats live precisely in these countries.

As of March 2024, among Africa’s 54 countries, 31 had outstanding loans with the IMF. But they have nothing remotely resembling a ‘say’ in how the IMF is run.

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres flagged the bias in the IMF framework last year when he said the Bretton Woods system reflected “the power relations of 1945”.

This unfairness, and the unequal relationship with the IMF, is partly why so many developing countries, from Kenya to Ghana, Zambia and Pakistan, have witnessed protests against the IMF and IMF-imposed economic policies — the infamous ‘Structural Adjustment Programs’ (SAPs).

SAPs, adopted by the IMF from 1986 onwards, typically require governments to cut public spending, privatise state enterprises, reduce import duties and tariffs, and implement other measures so that the country pursues export-led growth. The predictable outcome of these policies, documented in the IMF’s own internal research, is extreme inequality.

Impact of SAPs

A 2002 World Bank-funded study by the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network tracked the impact of the IMF’s SAPs in nine countries across four continents.

Its report highlighted four ways in which they furthered “impoverishment and marginalisation of local populations”: one, by causing the demise of domestic manufacturing sectors and loss of employment for small producers; two, agricultural, trade and mining reforms decimated small farms and poor rural communities; three, they triggered job losses; and four, the reduced role of state in providing guaranteed access to essential services led to increase in poverty. Yet, the IMF, as the international lender of last resort, continues to impose SAP-like requirements.

Faced with a backlash in dozens of countries, the IMF did introduce ‘social spending floors’ to protect public spending on education, health and social protection from being cut as part of its loan conditionalities. But an Oxfam analysis of 27 loan programmes negotiated with low- and middle-income countries found that “for every $1 the IMF encouraged governments to spend on public services, it has told them to cut six times more than that through austerity measures.”

In 1994, the New York Times described the IMF and the World Bank as the “overlords of Africa”. In the 30 years since, as Kenyans can testify, little seems to have changed. The overlords continue to influence economic policies in low and middle-income nations, with the fates of millions determined not in their own Parliaments but in the boardrooms of the IMF headquarters in Washington.

Chair of the House

Nistula Hebbar

Om Birla The BJP lawmaker’s first term as Speaker of the Lok Sabha was known for both his inclusive approach as well as the unprecedented punishments he handed to Opposition lawmakers

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla’s re-election as the chair of the Lok Sabha after completing a full five-year term is being seen as part of the continuum that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to establish between his last term and the current one.

After repeating nearly all Ministers in his Council of Ministers, and reappointing his earlier team of officials at the Prime Minister’s Office, the re-nomination of Mr. Birla as the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) candidate as Speaker was almost a given. Mr. Birla won, but not before some high drama with the Opposition fielding its own candidate and stopping just short of asking for a division of votes.

While this election of Mr. Birla had an air of inevitability around it, it was not always the case. The choice of Mr. Birla for his first term as Speaker had taken everyone by surprise, including himself. Mr. Modi’s choice for Speaker in his first term as Prime Minister was the veteran Sumitra Mahajan, an eighth-term MP. In his second tenure, he picked Mr. Birla, a second-term MP from Kota, Rajasthan.

Mr. Birla, who began his career in student politics, in Kota, steadily climbed the party ladder while working at the youth wing of the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM).

He went from the district unit head of the BJYM to its State president. He was elected to the Rajasthan legislature three times. His appointment as the Lok Sabha Speaker was a leap, both in profile and responsibility.

An RSS recruit, he was ideologically aligned to the Sangh Parivar, and had the trust of Mr. Modi, who had engaged with him on several occasions in the past with regard to politics in Rajasthan. Mr. Birla was evolving as an important resource from Rajasthan for the BJP’s national leadership, when this offer came his way.

First session

It was perhaps his experience as a backbencher in Parliament that helped him conduct the House smoothly in the early years. In the first session he presided over in 2019, all first time MPs got an opportunity to speak as he kept the Lok Sabha working till very late in the evening. A record 1,066 subjects were raised in the Zero Hour in the first session, another record.

When Pramila Bisoyi, a first term MP of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) who had not even completed her primary education, kept avoiding all attempts to make her speak in Parliament, Mr. Birla sought her out to find out the reason only to discover that her hesitancy stemmed from her inability to speak either in Hindi or English. She spoke a local version of Odia. Mr. Birla then arranged an Odia to Hindi translator from among the Parliament staff, to help her speak.

When Ministers of the BJP-led government did not come up with satisfactory answers to questions by MPs on Question Hour, some got the sharp end of Mr. Birla’s tongue, with many Opposition MPs appreciating his efforts at ensuring everyone had their say in the House.

All this, however, was eclipsed when he created a new record by suspending 100 Opposition MPs in the Winter Session of 2023. And while everyone got a chance to speak, least number of government Bills went through parliamentary scrutiny. On the day he was re-elected as Speaker, Mr. Birla read out a statement condemning the Emergency— the Indira Gandhi-led Cabinet imposed Emergency 49 years ago — drawing protests from the Opposition.

The rough start raises questions on what approach Mr. Birla would take in his second term. Unlike in his first term, when the BJP had absolute majority in the House, this time, the BJP has formed a coalition government with NDA allies, and the Opposition seems resurgent.

Opposition MPs are hoping that Mr. Birla’s accommodative gestures from his previous tenure, in ensuring that all MPs get a chance to speak, and calling Ministers to account for not doing their parliamentary homework be the model he chooses to continue in his second tenure. But if he chooses to take the confrontational path, that could lead to showdowns. It is to be seen, which aspect of continuity he chooses to enforce.

Rabble-rouser

Sumeda

Björn Höcke The far-right AfD leader, who stands trial for using Nazi-era slogans, calls for a ‘180-degree turn’ in how Germany remembers its past, including Holocaust

While addressing a gathering late last year, far-right German politician Björn Höcke, then on trial for raising a Nazi slogan at a 2021 rally, invoked the phrase “Everything for…,” prompting the crowd to respond “Germany” to complete the banned Nazi slogan, which was inscribed on the knives of Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers, who played a key role in his rise to power in the 1930s.

The former history teacher had earlier faced criticism for inciting racial hatred and using anti-Semitic language when he described the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and called for a“180-degree turn” in how Germany remembers its past.

“Never, never must we allow ourselves to let the demagogy of a Björn Höcke go unchallenged,” the then Germany’s Vice Chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said. The Central Council of Jews said the “anti-Semitic and utterly inhuman words” had revealed the true face of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The party nearly expelled him, warning that his approach could “damage its acceptance.”

Despite a string of controversies, the 52-year-old rose through the ranks of the AfD to become one of the most powerful figures in the shifting German political landscape. He has consistently pushed the limits of public discourse with controversial stances on history, nationalism, race and migrants.

He now stands trial for the second time on charges of using a Nazi slogan, just months ahead of the regional elections in Thuringia, where he plans to run for Governor.

History deeply influenced Mr. Höcke’s life and career. He was born in Lünen, Westphalia, in 1972, with roots tracing to German refugees from East Prussia. His upbringing instilled a sense of displacement and a longing for a lost homeland, themes evident in his political ideology. “Key to understanding Höcke is his ideology-shaping heritage of East Prussia where Höcke’s forebears originated... A second ideology-shaping element is the idea that ‘battles create identities’... Höcke says, ‘to be Prussian is a lifestyle’… This means Prussian authoritarian militarism,” Sebastian Hennig notes in the book Never Twice in the Same River. He described Mr. Höcke’s life as “dutiful” until he became aware of “German suffering” and felt the need to change the national discourse. In 2013, he co-founded the AfD's Thuringia chapter, launching his political career.

Revisionist views

Quickly rising to prominence as one of Thuringia’s most radical figures, Mr. Höcke gained notoriety for his revisionist views on Nazi history and rhetoric reminiscent of the 1930s. During the 2015 European migrant crisis, he warned large crowds against “German alienation”. His oratory style drew comparisons to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Mr. Höcke participated in far-right demonstrations, made racist comments, attempted to normalise Nazi-era words, and questioned national guilt over the Holocaust. “Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital... the laughable policy of coming to terms with the past is crippling us,” he said. He claimed multiculturalism threatened Germany’s existence.

Mr. Höcke’s divisive remarks caused internal strife. In 2019, a court ruled that it is legally justifiable to label him a “fascist”. The AfD’s regional branch was placed under surveillance as a “right-wing extremist” group.

His relentless testing of political boundaries peaked when he concluded a speech at a political event with the Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany” in 2021. In court he argued he was unaware of its “criminal relevance.” However, he repeated the slogan at another event in December 2023. The legal troubles didn’t affect his popularity, though.

Following the AfD’s strong show in the EU elections, Mr. Höcke is now focused on Thuringia, aiming for victory in the regional polls. If successful, Björn Höcke could secure his first constitutional post, transitioning from a polarising figure to a potential state Premier.

In fear of freak weather

Extreme rainfall, unanticipated dust storms and unprecedented temperatures push cities and States across India into uncharted territory

Billboard tragedy: A giant hoarding collapsed after a storm at Ghatkopar in Mumbai on May 13. It took away 17 lives and left at least 75 injured. Investigation revealed that the hoarding was erected on a weak foundation and had flouted standards. ANIANI

Separated by 1,500-odd kilometres but equal victims of freak weather, Delhi and Mumbai were buffeted by dust storms, a summer phenomenon, in a span of three days in May.

Conditions were ideal for dust storms with the blazing hot weather in the northern plains and in areas around the coastal metropolis of Mumbai. Accompanying these storms were rain and even thundershowers. The Mumbai storm did a lot of damage, sending a huge unauthorised hoarding crashing on a fuel pump where many commuters were filling up. The death toll was 17, and more than 75 people were injured. The 250-tonne hoarding was erected on massive metal frames but failed to meet many standards, including the need for a solid foundation.

While the Mumbai incident was not just an act of nature, the recent incident in Delhi airport where a portion of the roof collapsed causing the death of one person after heavy rain in the city has brought about conversations on how many Indian towns and cities are under severe stress each time the monsoon comes calling.

June saw Delhi and Tamil Nadu recording the highest rainfall in a calendar month. Sudden rain in the Western Ghats triggered flash floods in the Old Courtallam waterfalls. A teenager who had come as part of a tourist group was washed away.

Floods and landslips in Sikkim led to disruptions in road connectivity. Indian Army engineers from Trishakti Corps constructed a 150-foot suspension bridge in northern Sikkim to reconnect the border villages that got marooned.

In Assam, over 5 lakh people were affected by floods. Three major rivers — the Kopili, Barak and Kushiyara — were flowing above the danger level. Relief camps were set up to help those internally displaced.

According to the India Meteorological Department, isolated heavy rainfall is expected in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan till July 3.

Business

- Synergy in data must for ‘coherent’ policy decisions: NSC chief

- Collate finance panels’ data in one place: Panagariya

- Vermeiren India chalks out ₹100 crore expansion plans

- Vietnam’s Q2 GDP growth accelerates to 6.93%, led by exports

- Interest equalisation scheme extended for MSME exporters

- Steel Ministry raises alarm on Chinese imports, urges trade curbs

- FSIB recommends C.S. Setty for SBI Chairman’s post

- Merge RRBs with sponsor banks, say 2 bank unions

- Titan takes its jewellery brand Tanishq to Bangladesh

- Agrawal named Central Board of Direct Taxes Chairman

Synergy in data must for ‘coherent’ policy decisions: NSC chief

Vikas Dhoot

NEW DELHI

Correlating data such as GST and export-import figures flagged as an example by the National Statistical Commission chairman Karandikar

Data talk: NSC chief Karandikar says data must ‘talk to each other’ to make it useful for nationwide policy making.MosPIMosPI

India’s apex autonomous statistics body’s chief on Sunday underlined the imperative to harmonise the collection and dissemination of data by various government departments to make policy decisions more informed and “efficient”, stressing that it was tough to correlate economic data such as indirect tax collections and export-import figures in the current system.

“There are so many entities in the national as well as State governments that are collecting and using data in their own way,” National Statistical Commission chairman Rajeeva Laxman Karandikar observed. “Some of it is made available to public, some is not. Even when made available to public, the data doesn’t talk to each other,” he added.

“I am not talking in terms of a text file versus PDF, but in terms of the way a table is made, or let’s say, the code,” he said. Citing the example of Goods and Services Tax (GST) numbers and foreign trade data, he said they used different codes. “Therefore, if you want to do some analysis which involves both these data, it is very difficult to put it together and make some coherent decision based on that,” he explained.

Mr. Karandikar emphasised the need of “interoperability and linking of databases generated by various agencies” at an event to mark Statistics Day, in honour of the birth anniversary of Prasanta Chandra Mahalonobis, widely regarded as the Father of Indian Statistics.

“The decision is not just going to be based only on the GST data, you have to merge it with various other things, and only then that will be useful,” he noted.

“Our goal is to make efficient decisions for the large masses and we can use all that is happening in the best possible way. We can talk to others in the government and try to come up with this plan of integrating various datasets so that it can be best used,” Mr. Karandikar said, suggesting that such harmonisation could begin with Central government departments and then the States could be roped in.

‘Form expert group’

Conceding people’s concerns about privacy with such data, the NSC chief said thought needed to be given as to what part of the data could be released “at least to decision-makers”.

“There is a strong need to create... an expert group that involves all stakeholders, which will look at these issues and try to come out with common codes and ways of data collection and dissemination, so that the best use of data can be made in times to come,” he underlined.

Collate finance panels’ data in one place: Panagariya

The Hindu Bureau

NEW DELHI

Arvind Panagariya

Sixteenth Finance Commission chairperson Arvind Panagariya on Sunday mooted compiling data generated by all the Finance Commissions in one place, noting that a lot of statistics were generated by the constitutional body appointed every five years, which could come in handy in the future.

“Finance Commissions are appointed every five years and remain in office for a couple of years. And each Finance Commission collects its own data, but there is no permanent home for this data. So each Commission goes out, then the next one comes in and starts gathering data all over again,” Mr. Panagariya lamented.

Speaking at a Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) event to mark Statistics Day, he reckoned that at the end of a Finance Commission’s tenure, all its members and staff “really leave with lots of Excel files that most likely remain on their computers”.

“So I think… it’s not necessary that the MoSPI has to do it, but somebody ought to take some sort of a lead in creating a home for these data on a permanent basis. So that the work of the Commission actually will certainly get much smoothened out, for at least in the future,” Mr. Panagariya said. This could be done through a single portal to host these data sets, he suggested.

The first vice chairman of Niti Aayog, now in charge of the Commission to recommend the revenue-sharing formula between the Centre and States for the five-year period starting April 1, 2026, said data, and their analysis were critical to conceive and implement good economic policies.

“The challenge is to produce authentic, robust and accurate statistics to cope with the huge demand for information that is now almost universally accessible. The need of the hour is to ensure the availability of accurate data so these can be appropriately fed into the decision-making processes,” aided by technology, Mr. Panagariya noted.

With India now becoming a member of the United Nations Statistical Commission, he said it had a responsibility to contribute to the standard-setting agenda for global statistical systems, while making the Indian statistical system more robust.

Vermeiren India chalks out ₹100 crore expansion plans

N. Anand

CHENNAI

Belgium wheelchair maker Vermeiren India Rehab Pvt. Ltd., has commenced a ₹100 crore expansion-cum-diversification project at its Sri City SEZ unit, said a top executive.

“This is our fourth expansion in eight years,” MD Syed Riaz Qadr said during an interaction.

The firm would more than double its monthly production capacity of wheelchairs and commode chairs from 18,000 to 50,000, he said. Besides, it would expand its portfolio with walkers, rollators and patient beds.

“Initially, we said we can produce one lakh wheelchairs per annum. We are doing more than two lakh and plans are on to produce six lakhs units annually. Four more types of commode chairs will be rolled out, taking the total to six,” he said.

Begun with a 9-acre facility in 2016, the firm added eight acres two years ago and another 15 recently. About 70% of the expansion cost would be funded by the parent firm and the balance through borrowings.

“We commenced production of wheelchairs with eight lines and 10 more are going to be added. The new lines will go on stream from December 2025,” he said.

Mr. Qadr said walkers, rollators and patient beds would be made beginning May 2025. He added they planned to produce 1,000 patient beds per month and 5,000 units of walkers and rollators collectively.

On exports, he said 95% of volume went to Europe, West Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Singapore and Malaysia would be added soon.

In FY24, the firm logged revenue of ₹180 crore.

Vietnam’s Q2 GDP growth accelerates to 6.93%, led by exports

Reuters

HANOI

Vietnam’s economic growth accelerated in the second quarter on robust exports, government data showed on Saturday, but rising inflation remained a challenge for the Southeast Asian country.

Gross domestic product is estimated to have expanded by 6.93% in the second quarter from a year earlier, faster than 5.87% in the first quarter, the government’s General Statistics Office (GSO) said.

The economy expanded 6.42% in the first half of this year, the GSO added.

Vietnam, a key exporter of smartphones, electronics and garments, is seeking to shore up business activity after missing last year’s growth target due to weak global demand and power shortages.

“Vietnam’s socio-economic situation continues a positive trend, with each quarter being better than the previous one,” the GSO said in a statement.

Interest equalisation scheme extended for MSME exporters

The Hindu Bureau

COIMBATORE

The Department of Commerce has extended the Interest Equalisation Scheme for pre- and post-shipment rupee export credit for Micro, Small and Medium-scale (MSME) exporters till August 31.

According to a Department trade notice, the outlay for the extended period is ₹750 crore. The extension is not applicable for non-MSME exporters beyond June 30.

The scheme’s terms will remain the same.

Sudhir Sekhri, chairman of the Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC), said the extension of the scheme will benefit the labour-intensive garment sector, which largely has MSME units. The garment exporters are grappling with high interest costs, he said. But, there should be stability and predictability in the policy regime. The policies and schemes should stay for at least a period of five years.

Steel Ministry raises alarm on Chinese imports, urges trade curbs

Abhishek Law

New Delhi

India’s Steel Ministry has initiated discussions with the Ministry of Commerce on curbing an influx of cheap Chinese imports of the metal, a senior official aware of the discussions said. A probe into imports from Vietnam is also being considered.

The discussions come amid persistent calls for higher tariffs from producers even as India turns a net importer. According to the Ministry official, industry has also sought an investigation into steel shipments coming in through Vietnam. Preliminary discussions suggest a good portion of low-cost imports from China are being routed into India through Vietnamese traders.

“We have monitored the rise in imports, and have alerted the concerned ministry, in this case the Commerce Ministry. Discussions with them (Commerce Ministry) are underway to take necessary steps,” the official told businessline.

The Steel Ministry official said demand continues to be depressed in China while there have not been any production cuts in the region. Prices remain depressed, resulting in excess stock being exported across Asian and Latin American nations, “sometimes at less than cost price”, the official noted.

(The writer is with The Hindu businessline)

FSIB recommends C.S. Setty for SBI Chairman’s post

The Financial Services Institutions Bureau (FSIB) has recommended the appointment of Challa Sreenivasulu Setty for the post of Chairman of the State Bank of India (SBI). Mr. Setty is now the senior most Managing Director heading Global Markets & Technology at India’s largest bank. SBI Chairman Dinesh Kumar Khara’s tenure ends in August. Mr. Setty will be the 27th Chairman of SBI, which came into existence on July 1, 1955 after taking over the business of Imperial Bank.

Merge RRBs with sponsor banks, say 2 bank unions

The Hindu Bureau

CHENNAI

Two major bank unions have sought the merger of 43 Regional Rural Banks (RRBs) with 12 scheduled commercial banks (sponsor banks) for improving operational efficiency and viability of the sector.

Competition among PSBs and RRBs are leading to a waste of scarce financial resources for offering the same type of services to few select customers in rural areas, officials of the All India Bank Officers’ Confederation (AIBOC) and the All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) said in a statement issued on Thursday.

Titan takes its jewellery brand Tanishq to Bangladesh

Titan Company said it was introducing its jewellery brand Tanishq in Bangladesh as part of expansion plans in the international market. On Friday, the Tata Group-managed firm signed a JV agreement to this effect with Rhythm Group which will make Tanishq available across the Bangladesh market, according to a joint statement. The joint venture will commence with the opening of the manufacturing facility in Narayanganj in Bangladesh, it added. PTI

Agrawal named Central Board of Direct Taxes Chairman

The Centre on Saturday appointed Ravi Agrawal as the new chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), the top policy-making body of the Income Tax Department. As per the notification issued by the Personnel Ministry, Mr. Agrawal, a 1988 batch Income-Tax cadre Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer, has been appointed as the Chairman from July 1 till superannuation on September 30 and subsequently on contract basis till June 30, 2025.

Science

- India lacks diagnostic tests for emerging infectious diseases

- inStem’s fabric offers protection from pesticides

- Specific PET scan for TB for more effective treatment

- Marsquakes

- Anti-measles antibody prevents viral fusion: study

- Proteins in cerebrospinal fluid offer markers of Alzheimer’s

- Antibody shields hamsters from SARS-CoV-2 variants

India lacks diagnostic tests for emerging infectious diseases

Bani Jolly, Vinod Scaria

Zika virus is a mosquito-borne pathogen belonging to the flavivirus family of viruses which also includes dengue; India’s lack of significant Zika surveillance means we might never fully understand its spread

A recent case of Zika virus infection in Pune has renewed concerns about India’s preparedness for diagnosing emerging infectious diseases. After experiencing symptoms like fever and rashes, the 46-year-old doctor was hospitalised and diagnosed with Zika virus infection after his samples were sent for testing to the apex virology institute. Subsequent testing of his family members revealed that his 15-year-old daughter was also infected. This is not the first time Zika has been identified in India. Cases have been identified in multiple States in India in the past, with larger outbreaks occurring in Kerala and Uttar Pradesh as recently as 2021.

Zika virus is a mosquito-borne pathogen belonging to the flavivirus family of viruses which also includes dengue. Clinical symptoms of Zika infection in many cases could be mild and indistinguishable from other infectious diseases including dengue. However, for pregnant women, the Zika virus poses a significant risk as it can be transmitted from mother to child, potentially leading to microcephaly in the offspring.

Due to climate change, it is not surprising that multiple dengue outbreaks are making headlines. The same vectors that spread dengue could also spread Zika. However, India’s lack of significant Zika surveillance means we might never fully understand its spread. In March 2023, CDSCO, India’s apex organisation for diagnostic approvals, confirmed that there is no approved diagnostic test for Zika. This limitation hinders our ability to diagnose Zika, relying only on classical symptoms and high clinical suspicion, making it complex as we see a concurrent upsurge in dengue cases across the country. Surveillance by ICMR on Aedes mosquitoes showed Zika viruspositivity followinghuman cases, indicating that many cases are likely being missed. Zika is not an isolated case. A case of avian influenza A/H5N1 was recently reported from Australia in a child who had traveled to India, hinting at more undetected infections. Despite multiple avian influenza outbreaks in India this year affecting poultry, and an ongoing outbreak in Kerala, human testing and surveillance have remained limited. This is partially compounded by the lack of widely available diagnostic tests and over-reliance on a few apex institutes.

Consider the case of the Nipah virus, which has seen multiple outbreaks in Kerala. India has experienced several Nipah virus outbreaks, notably in West Bengal (2001 and 2007) and Kerala (2018, 2021, and 2023). In Kerala, identification of the virus relied heavily on clinical suspicion. Some cases were indeed missed during initial admissions due to the lack of routine testing. Rapid identification and isolation of cases, contact tracing, and targeted screening of contacts are key to the effective containment of Nipah outbreaks.

While many countries grant emergency approvals for diagnostics based on synthetic genomic material, India requires validation on clinical samples, which are not readily accessible. These limitations hamper rapid development. Although there have been multiple publications on Zika and Nipah outbreaks over many years now, the genomes from these outbreaks are still not rapidly released in public repositories. For example, the Nipah virus genome from the 2023 outbreak in Kerala was only released last month. Even with ongoing avian influenza outbreaks in multiple States, we do not yet have the whole genome sequences available in GISAID, the primary repository for influenza sequences, hampering our understanding of the disease and spread and more importantly, our ability to rapidly develop and deploy diagnostics.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, India swiftly expanded its testing infrastructure by rapidly decentralising and leveraging the existing network of hospitals, medical colleges, and private laboratories nationwide and tapping into the industry with a systematic approach for approvals of diagnostic tests making diagnostics widely available and accessible. The experience gained from the COVID-19 pandemic can be a stepping stone for improving testing capacities for other emerging diseases.

By decentralising testing facilities particularly at the district and sub-district levels, and developing accessible and affordable diagnostic tests for Zika, Nipah, avian influenza, and many more emerging infectious diseases, India can ensure a more effective response to future outbreaks. There has never been a better time to swiftly establish a decentralised system for diagnostics, genomic surveillance, and data sharing to enable preparedness and public health response to emerging infectious diseases.

(Bani Jolly is a senior scientist at Karkinos Healthcare, and Vinod Scaria is a senior consultant at Vishwanath Cancer Care Foundation and Adjunct Professor at IIT Kanpur and DY Patil Vidyapeeth)

inStem’s fabric offers protection from pesticides

R. Prasad

Right way: The fabric deactivates the pesticide and breaks it down into non-toxic products.AP

Researchers at the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem), in Bengaluru have developed an anti-insecticide fabric that effectively neutralises organophosphate-based pesticides. In an earlier work published about six years ago, the team had developed a gel for topical dermal application to deactivate the pesticides. But considering that compliance might be poor, the researchers looked at another alternative that is as effective in deactivating the insecticide but at the same time does not reduce compliance.

When esters present in organophosphate-based pesticides enter the body they bind and inhibit an enzyme (acetylcholinesterase or AChE) critical for neuromuscular function from working. Therefore, inhibition of this important enzyme is implicated in learning deficits, suffocation, paralysis, muscle weakness among others.

In a paper published recently in Nature Communications, the team led by Dr. Praveen Kumar Vemula from inStem coated the cotton fabric with small molecules, rendering the final product the ability to deactivate the insecticide. “The small molecules are covalently bonded with the cellulose of the fabric making the cloth not only breathable but also durable,” says Dr. Vemula. The small molecules that are covalently bonded with the fabric are nucleophile in nature, and can detoxify the pesticides upon contact through nucleophile-mediated hydrolysis, says Dr. Vemula. “The fabric attacks the pesticide molecule and breaks it into non-toxic products. The pesticide is deactivated even before it reaches the skin surface,” he says. The fabric with covalently-bonded small molecules was developed in collaboration with Sepio Health Pvt Ltd, a spin-off company from inStem.

“The fabric retains the anti-insecticide property even after washing 150 times.” Though the reusability after 50 cycles was reported in the paper, the researchers continued the reusability testing and found the effectiveness to last up to 150 cycles of washing. “Unlike the gel, the reusability will make the fabric an affordable solution to prevent insecticide-induced toxicity to farmers. It will also increase compliance,” he says.

According to Dr, Vemula, the small molecule-coated fabric does not act as a physical barrier to organophosphate-based insecticide. Instead, the fabric hydrolytically deactivates the insecticides, causing the prevention of insecticide-induced AChE inhibition.

To investigate the efficiency of the fabric containing the small molecules, the active AChE in the blood before and three days after exposure to the insecticide was measured in rats. While direct exposure or when normal cloth did little to halt the drop in active AChE in blood, no reduction in blood active AchE level was observed in the presence of the fabric coated with small molecules. Several organs from the exposed and unexposed rats were studied and compared, and the researchers found that the active AChE levels in the organs did not drop in the case of rats that were exposed to the insecticide in the presence of the fabric coated with small molecules. Also, while rats that were repeatedly and directly exposed to ethyl paraoxon (an activated organophosphate insecticide) or through the normal fabric died within four days, none of the rats exposed to the insecticide in the presence of the special fabric died.

Farmers get repeatedly exposed to the insecticide due to frequent usage, and this can cause chronic toxicity and severe adverse health effects. The animal study results show promise that the fabric containing the small molecules can prevent chronic toxicity in farmers, he says.

“The design of one nucleophile that can deactivate a wide range of organophosphates and carbamates was challenging. Subsequently, optimising the industry-friendly chemistry to covalently attach on the fabric was the key in developing anti-pesticide fabric,” says Dr. Ketan Thorat, a former research student at inStem and coauthor of the paper.

Specific PET scan for TB for more effective treatment

The Hindu Bureau

A more accurate way to scan for tuberculosis has been developed by researcher based in the U.K. and the U.S. using positron emission tomography (PET).

The team has developed a new radiotracer, which is taken up by live TB bacteria in the body. Radiotracers are radioactive compounds which give off radiation that can be detected by scanners and turned into a 3D image. The new radiotracer, called FDT, enables PET scans to be used for the first time to accurately pinpoint when and where the disease is still active in a patient’s lungs.

The researchers have put the new radiotracer through extensive pre-clinical trials with no adverse effects and it is now ready to go into Phase I trials in humans. The study has been published inthe journalNature Communications.

Currently, two methods exist for TB diagnosis: testing for the TB bacteria in a patient’s sputum using smear microscopy or a molecular test. The other is the use of a PET scan to look for signs of inflammation in the lung, using the common radiotracer FDG.

While a sputum test can show a negative long before the disease has been fully treated in the lungs, which could result in patients finishing treatment too early, scanning for inflammation can be helpful in seeing the extent of the disease, but it is not specific to TB, as inflammation can be caused by other conditions. Inflammation can also persist in the lung after the TB bacteria has been eliminated, leading to treatment continuing longer than necessary.

The new approach developed by the researchers is more specific as it uses a carbohydrate that is only processed by the TB bacteria. A key advantage of the new approach is that it only requires a hospital to have standard radiation control and PET scanners, which are becoming more available throughout the world. The new molecule is created from FDG using a simple process involving enzymes developed by the research team. This means it can be produced without specialist expertise or laboratories and so would be a viable option in low- and middle-income countries with less developed healthcare systems. These countries currently see over 80% of global TB cases and deaths from the disease.

Marsquakes

Can meteorite strikes cause quakes on Mars?

Using seismic data, researchers have derived the first estimate of global meteorite impacts on Mars. Their findings indicate that 280 to 360 meteorites strike the planet each year, forming impact craters greater than 26 feet across. Using data from the seismometer deployed during the NASA InSight Mission to Mars, researchers found that six seismic events recorded near the station had been previously identified as meteoric impacts. Now, researchers have found that these six seismic events belong to a much larger group of marsquakes, so calledvery high frequency events. The source process of these quakes occurs much faster than for a tectonic marsquake of similar size. Where a normal magnitude 3-quake on Mars takes several seconds, an impact-generated event of the same size takes only 0.2 seconds or less, due to the hypervelocity of the collision. By analysing marsquake spectra, a further 80 marsquakes were identified that are now thought to be caused by meteoroid strikes.

Anti-measles antibody prevents viral fusion: study

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structures of an anti-measles antibody reveal its therapeutic potential by blocking the virus’s fusion process, a new study reports. The work paves the way for the next generation of measles virus therapeutics and illuminates a mechanism that may be shared by antibodies against other viral pathogens. The structures generated by the researchers also revealed an important epitope that may provide a new druggable target for MeV as well as other paramyxoviruses like mumps.

Proteins in cerebrospinal fluid offer markers of Alzheimer’s

By mapping out the landscape of proteins in cerebrospinal fluid, researchers have discovered potential markers of Alzheimer’s disease that appear as many as 20 years before symptoms. The scientists generated a robust map of protein activity, consisting of 34 “modules”. They identified three that correlated with disease and with the genetic risk factor APOE-e4. Also, shifts in these modules in blood samples were linked to a risk of dementia more than 20 years before the patient was diagnosed.

Antibody shields hamsters from SARS-CoV-2 variants

Scientists show that a new antibody therapy for COVID-19 can neutralise the Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2 in hamsters and is safe in humans, according to their research. The antibody (AZD3152) could provide an additional layer of protection to vulnerable groups at risk of severe COVID-19. The antibody binds to the back “left shoulder” of the receptor binding domain on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, and is designed to be more potent against emerging variants.

Edit

- Why has the NTA failed to deliver?

- What is holding up the Teesta treaty?

- What was the tussle over Covaxin IPR?

Why has the NTA failed to deliver?

Priscilla Jebaraj

How many examinations are under the charge of the National Testing Agency? Is it equipped to handle the large number of students and centres? What are the challenges? What are the loopholes in the system that can be manipulated by unscrupulous players?

Outrage and uproar: Members of the Students’ Federation of India staging a protest in Vijayawada on June 22. G.N. RAO RAO GN

The story so far:

The National Testing Agency (NTA) has come under intense fire over the past few weeks, with widespread allegations of cheating, paper leaks and other irregularities impacting flagship examinations such as the NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) for undergraduate medical college admissions and the UGC-NET for Ph.D and assistant professor appointments. The agency’s director general, Subodh Kumar Singh, has been removed, the CBI is probing irregularities, and a high-level panel has been set up to create a roadmap for a systemic overhaul.

What is the NTA?

The NTA was set up in 2017 as a specialist, self-sustaining and autonomous organisation under the aegis of the Union Education Ministry. Its director general and governing body are appointed by the Union government. However, it is registered as a society and is a separate legal entity, which raises questions about the government’s legal liability for the NTA’s actions. Its main mandate is to conduct efficient, transparent and international standard tests to assess the competency of candidates for admission, and recruitment purposes. Soon after it was established, the NTA took over the conduct of major all-India examinations, such as the JEE for engineering college admissions, NEET-UG, and UGC-NET (both of which had previously been conducted by the Central Board for Secondary Education or CBSE), as well as the entrance tests for Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University. The National Education Policy of 2020 envisaged a broader role, recommending that the NTA conduct an entrance or aptitude test for all universities across the country. In all, the NTA now has charge for more than 20 examinations.

Why have there been so many problems?

One of the main problems is that the NTA was originally intended to conduct computer-based tests only. “This will ensure that high volume can be processed in a short period of time,” says the agency’s website, claiming that such online testing will “eliminate the possibility of leakage of questions and question papers, post-test malpractice of filling in the OMR sheets, late entry of students to cheat in the test, subjectivity errors on descriptive testing, etc...In a short period of three years, all the tests administered by NTA will be computer adaptive. This will completely eliminate the problem of cheating,” it declares. Thus, when the NTA took over conduct of the UGC-NET examination from the CBSE six years ago, it was converted from a pen-and-paper examination to a computer-adaptive test. This year, however, for reasons that are unclear, UGC-NET shifted back to the pen-and-paper mode. The day after it was conducted for over 11 lakh aspirants, the government cancelled the examination, citing inputs from the cyber crime unit. “Pen-and-paper is a heaven for scamsters,” said one former official, noting that the printing process is particularly vulnerable to leaks. It is interesting that when the government announced fresh dates for UGC-NET 2024 to be held again, it also stipulated that it would be a computer-adaptive test this time.

However, when the conduct of NEET-UG was taken over by the NTA, the Health Ministry flatly refused to allow it to shift to a computer-based exam, citing concerns about students in rural areas who would not be prepared for an online exam, as well as Supreme Court rulings on how the examination should be conducted. Hence, the NTA has been forced to run a major examination in a mode that it was never intended to implement by design.

Officials and educationists note that the agency is severely understaffed for the role it is currently being asked to undertake. According to a senior official, the agency was set up with only about 25 permanent staff positions. A number of its functions have also been outsourced to technical partners from the very beginning. Given that NEET-UG alone had more than 23 lakh candidates writing the examination in almost 5,000 centres across the country and abroad, this has left the agency stretched thin, according to some officials. “The NTA was set up to be a lean, professional organisation. The more people, the higher risks. The NIC [National Informatics Centre] simply does not have the capacity or IT infrastructure needed, so it was always meant to engage third-party technical partners which have the robust cyber security expertise needed to run large-scale computer based examinations,” said R. Subrahmanyam, former Higher Education Secretary who was in charge at the time the NTA was set up. However, some educationists have complained that engaging third-party players takes accountability out of the government’s hands and leaves loopholes in the system which can be exploited by unscrupulous players.

Officials say the NTA has also failed to develop robust mechanisms needed to handle a large-scale pen-and-paper examination, including the setting of the question paper and its encryption, selection of external printing presses and exam centres, transportation to printing presses, storage and distribution to examinees at examination centres and then the collection and transportation of answer sheets to evaluation centres. Each of these is a stage where malpractice can occur without robust security mechanisms.

What is the way ahead?

The high-level panel headed by former ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan has been given two months to recommend reforms in the examination process, improve data security protocols, and overhaul the NTA’s functioning.

Educationists, however, propose starkly different pathways for the future. One option is to add manpower and infrastructure to the NTA to equip it to take on large-scale pen-and-paper examinations in an improvement to the CBSE system that preceded it. Those recommending this return to the past point out that pen-and-paper examinations are more equitable, especially for students in rural and remote areas with little access to technology.

Another option is to dismantle the centralisation process that seeks to move all testing in the country under the NTA. Some State governments, and professors from individual universities, notably JNU, have called for entrance tests for their institutions to be removed from the NTA and handed back to the institutions themselves, arguing that more decentralised structures are needed to meet the vastly differing needs of institutions.

However, others seek a more radical reform of the assessment system. They suggest systemic changes to remove the single, high-stakes entrance examination which results in extreme pressure on students, encourages an inequitable coaching industry, and incentivises malpractice. Instead, periodic assessments of knowledge, concept-based understanding, and aptitude can be conducted in the final years of school education as the precursor to the admission process, using online testing, and AI-based proctoring which can be overseen by the NTA.

What is holding up the Teesta treaty?

Shiv Sahay Singh

What has the Indian government told Bangladesh? What is the technical team going to look into? Why is Bengal Chief Minister protesting this development? What about the Ganga water sharing agreement? When does it come up for renewal? What is the state of both the rivers?

Extreme weather: The flooded bank of the Teesta river following heavy downpour, in Siliguri, West Bengal, on June 14. PTI-

The story so far:

During the recent state visit of Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, to India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 22 said: “A technical team will soon visit Bangladesh to discuss conservation and management of the Teesta river in Bangladesh.” The remark triggered fresh speculation about the Teesta water sharing treaty with Bangladesh, a key bilateral agreement that has been pending between the two countries for over a decade.

What is India’s stand?

After Mr. Modi’s comment, Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra told the media that the discussion “between the two leaders was less about water sharing per se, and more about the management of the water flows within Teesta”. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took issue with the Centre’s stand. On June 24, she wrote a letter to Mr. Modi conveying her strong reservation that no discussion on the sharing of Teesta waters should be taken up with Bangladesh without the involvement of the State.

Why is Bengal upset?

Ms. Banerjee pointed out that if Teesta’s water is shared with Bangladesh, lakhs of people in north Bengal will get severely impacted. This is not the first time she has voiced her opposition to the proposed water sharing agreement of India with Bangladesh. In July 2019, the Trinamool Congress chairperson admitted that Bangladesh is hurt because the Teesta waters could not be shared and added, “If I had the ability, I would have definitely shared Teesta waters with them.” In 2017, the Chief Minister had also referred to an alternative proposal of sharing waters of the Torsa, Manshai, Sankosh and Dhansai rivers but not Teesta.

In all, 54 rivers flow between India and Bangladesh and sharing of river waters has been a key bilateral issue. India and Bangladesh agreed on the sharing of waters of the Ganga in 1996 after the construction of the Farakka Barrage and by the 2010s the issue of sharing of the Teesta came up for negotiation. In 2011, during the United Progressive Alliance-II government, India and Bangladesh were close to signing an agreement on the Teesta but Ms. Banerjee walked out of the deal, and since then, the agreement has been pending.

What is the proposal?

In 2011, when the proposal for sharing Teesta water was drawn up, it was said India would get 42.5% and Bangladesh 37.5% of the river water from December to March.

A tributary of the Brahmaputra, the Teesta river originates from the Tso Lhamo Lake at an elevation of about 5,280 metres in north Sikkim. The river travels for about 150 km in Sikkim and 123 km in West Bengal, before entering Bangladesh from Mekhligunj in Cooch Behar district; it flows another 140 km in Bangladesh and joins the Bay of Bengal. Teesta is Bangladesh’s fourth largest trans-boundary river and its floodplain covers an area of 2,750 square kilometres in Bangladesh. But 83% of the river’s catchment area lies in India and the remaining 17% is in Bangladesh, supporting 8.5% of its population and 14% of its crop production.

What are the political considerations?

While the Awami League government in Bangladesh is facing questions from the Opposition about the delay in inking an agreement on the Teesta, the dams for hydro-electric power generation in Sikkim and the Teesta Barrage Project at Gazoldoba in West Bengal is making the flow of the river erratic in Bangladesh, leading to either floods or scarcity of water. The visit of a technical team from India to discuss conservation of the Teesta in Bangladesh also comes amid the backdrop of China proposing major dredging work on the river and building reservoirs and embankments in 2020. The Bangladesh government has put the proposal on hold for the past four years.

Soon after returning to Bangladesh, Prime Minister Hasina announced that her country would accept India’s proposal to develop the Teesta River basin. Ms. Banerjee raised questions about the health of the Teesta river after the construction of a series of hydropower projects in Sikkim, deforestation in upper catchment areas and impact of climate change. She expressed surprise that no concrete steps have been taken by the Ministry of Jal Shakti to restore the river to its original form and health on the Indian side when a bilateral cooperation between India and Bangladesh for restoration of Teesta in Bangladesh is being proposed.

Environmental activists have also been raising questions on the ecological impact of hydro-electric projects on the river. In October 2023, a glacial lake outburst triggered floods in the Teesta basin that claimed hundred lives and destroyed the Teesta III hydroelectric dam.

Sharing of waters of transboundary rivers have been mandated by international laws including The Helsinki Rules on the Uses of the Waters of International Rivers in 1966. Article 253 of the Indian Constitution gives powers to the government to enter any transboundary river water-related treaty with a riparian state.

Why is Bengal talking about Ganga treaty?

The Ganga water sharing treaty with Bangladesh completes 30 years in 2026 and a renewal of the agreement is on the cards. The Trinamool Congress chairperson has pointed out that water sharing with Bangladesh has changed the Ganga’s morphology and affected lakhs of people in West Bengal owing to river erosion.

“Lakhs of people have been displaced from their habitation rendering them homeless and also leading to their loss of livelihood. The reduced silt load in Hooghly has impeded the nourishment of the Sundarban delta,” she wrote in the letter to the Prime Minister.

What was the tussle over Covaxin IPR?

Jacob Koshy

What are the rules for patenting the intellectual property rights of a vaccine? Why was the ICMR not included?

The story so far:

The maker of the indigenous coronavirus vaccine, Covaxin, Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL), has admitted to an “inadvertent error” in patent filings to protect the vaccine’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). One of India’s leading biotechnology companies, it had failed to include scientists from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) as co-inventors in the Covaxin patent filings.

What kind of rights govern vaccine patents?

India’s patent laws govern both product and process patents. Product patents grant an inventor a monopoly over, say, a drug. Process patents bar competitors from making a similar drug using the same sequence of steps. In response to queries from The Hindu, Bharat Biotech said it had patented the process, namely of making a batch of vaccines from the virus strains that were provided by the ICMR-NIV (National Institute of Virology). This is the lab that has expertise in extracting viruses from blood samples, identifying its characteristics, conducting various tests to gauge its infectiousness and qualify it in comparison to related strains. However, preparing a vaccine out of this at an industrial scale is beyond the capabilities of a lab and requires a different order of facilities that only established vaccine manufacturers have. Covaxin is an inactivated version of COVID-causing coronavirus; once injected into the body it coaxes it into producing antibodies that can potentially protect against severe disease from a coronavirus infection. To do this effectively, an ‘adjuvant’ is added which increases the vaccine’s potency. Vaccine makers may have their own ways of bringing all of these steps together and, given the competitive nature of the field, strive to ward off competitors from imitating these processes to gain a temporary monopoly in the market and rake profits.

To be sure, while companies are free to file for a product or process patent in as many countries as they can afford, a patent is only granted after regulatory authorities grant them one or are convinced that this process is indeed novel or inventive. BBIL, as far is publicly known, hasn’t yet been granted these patents.

What were the roles of BBIL and ICMR?

BBIL had collaborated with the ICMR-NIV for all the steps in developing a vaccine. The two organisations had signed an agreement that spelt out each entity’s responsibilities. As ICMR is a public entity and because of the scale of the COVID crisis, there were Right To Information requests to make this agreement public. However, it was only in July 2021, that parts of the agreement were made public in Rajya Sabha.

Beyond transferring the strains and making vaccines, the agreement said, ICMR would also test these vaccines on animals — rodents to monkeys — and then on people to establish that the vaccine worked as intended. The ICMR also funded these clinical trials — ₹35 crore — and incurred costs in developing Covaxin. In return it was to get 5% of royalties that BBIL earned from the sale of Covaxin. Since the announcement of the BBIL and ICMR collaboration, it was generally accepted that both entities would contribute to the vaccine and would therefore hold “joint intellectual property rights,” as was stated in Parliament.

However, BBIL first told The Hindu that it made a distinction between the rights governing the making of the vaccine and the rights over the data generated from clinical trials. The ICMR hadn’t invested in the actual making of the vaccine and so wasn’t included in patent applications. However, a day after the matter became public, BBIL said it had made a mistake, and that it would be making amends by filing fresh applications that listed ICMR personnel as inventors. It is unclear what prompted this.

Why does being cited as an inventor matter?

IPR is a vast, complex domain and spans the minutest parts of the product invention process. As the development of pharmaceutical products involves a wide range of expertise, it is hard for single firms or entities to develop everything in-house. Just like the BBIL-ICMR collaboration, companies may enter into several licensing agreements — BBIL for instance had a technology licensing agreement with Virovax for the adjuvant — with other companies. If a single product thus involves multiple entities and collaborators, being listed as an inventor has a bearing on the sharing of intellectual property rights, royalties and even determining how a product can be used. There is no field of human activity that is untouched by disputes over IPR. In patent filings, not listing out all the inventors — in the U.S especially — could even lead to patent applications being rejected.

Foreign

- Vinicius special drives Brazil to big win over Paraguay

- Ultraconservative, reformist to face off in Iran elections

- Gazans living in bombed-out buildings and camps near piles of trash: UNRWA

- Women’s rights is an internal issue, say Taliban before talks

- Malvika shocks Kristy, enters the semifinals

- German far-right party AfD re-elects leaders at convention

- ‘At least 30 killed in anti-government protests in Kenya’

- Attacker with crossbow killed outside Israeli embassy in Serbia

- Russian attacks on south and east regions of Ukraine kill 10 persons

- Ruling party wins parliamentary elections in Mongolia

- IS killed more than 4,000 since Syria territorial defeat: monitor

- Iran warns of full-blown war if Hezbollah is attacked

Vinicius special drives Brazil to big

Reuters

Las Vegas

Influential: After largely being anonymous in Brazil’s first match, Vinicius stepped up with a brace against Paraguay.AFP

Brazil’s Vinicius Junior scored twice in his side’s 4-1 Copa America victory over Paraguay in a Group D clash in Nevada on Friday, bouncing back from a lacklustre display in his first game of the tournament.

Colombia advances

Colombia cruised to a 3-0 win over Costa Rica in Group D and booked its spot in the quarterfinals thanks to strikes from Luis Diaz, Davinson Sanchez and Jhon Cordoba.

Colombia tops Group D with six points after two matches, with Brazil in second on four points.

Costa Rica is third with one point and Paraguay, bottom with zero after two defeats, has been eliminated.

From the whistle, Vinicius’ pace and trickery posed a constant threat to Paraguay down the left flank, a far cry from his performance in Brazil’s 0-0 draw with Costa Rica in their opening group stage match, in which he was largely ineffectual.

Despite Brazil’s strong start, it was Paraguay which almost went ahead in the 15th minute as Damian Bobadilla’s goal-bound effort took a massive deflection off Eder Militao and nearly wrongfooted Brazil goalkeeper Alisson Becker, who showed quick reflexes to keep out the strike.

Penalty miss

Brazil earned a 28th-minute penalty for a handball, which was fired wide by Lucas Paqueta, but the midfielder made up for his miss seven minutes later as he set up Vinicius with a first-time pass to cap off a flowing team move.

Girona winger Savio doubled Brazil’s advantage after pouncing on a rebound inside the box, before Vinicius stuck out a boot to divert a clearance from Omar Alderete into the net for his second goal of the night in first half stoppage time.

Paraguay got a goal back after the break as Alderete netted a superb long-range, but any hopes of a comeback were swiftly dashed when Brazil was awarded a penalty in the 68th minute after a handball by Mathias Villasanti.

Despite his earlier miss, Paqueta stepped up and made no mistake at the second time of asking to send Brazil’s fans at the Allegiant Stadium into delirium.

The results: Colombia 3 (Diaz 31-pen, Sanchez 59, Cordoba 62) bt Costa Rica 0; Paraguay 1 (Alderete 48) lost to Brazil 4 (Vinicius Jr 35, 45+5, Savio 43, Paqueta 65-pen).

Iran to have run-off between reformist and conservative

Agence France-Presse

Tehran

Masoud Pezeshkian gets 42.4% of the vote while Saeed Jalili wins 38.6% votes ; only slightly more than 40% of the 61 million electorate took part in the first round — a record low turnout

Limited choice: Saeed Jalili is an ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator while Massoud Pezeshkian is a reformist candidate.AFPATTA KENARE

The sole reformist in Iran’s presidential election, Masoud Pezeshkian, will face the conservative Saeed Jalili in a run-off, authorities said on Saturday, following a vote marred by historically low turnout.

Mr. Pezeshkian, 69, secured 42.4% of the vote, while Mr. Jalili, a 58-year-old former nuclear negotiator, came second with 38.6%, according to voting figures announced by Mohsen Eslami, spokesperson for Iran’s elections authority.

Conservative parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was next with 13.8% of the vote, while the only other candidate, conservative cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi, received less than 1%.

“None of the candidates could garner the absolute majority of the votes,” Mr. Eslami said, adding that those who finished first and second would face each other in a runoff next Friday.

Only slightly more than 40% of the 61 million electorate took part in Friday’s first round — a record low turnout for the Islamic republic.

The electoral authority said more than one million ballots were spoiled.

Out of Iran’s 13 previous presidential elections since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, only one has led to a run-off, which occurred in 2005.

Raisi’s death

The poll had been scheduled to take place in 2025 but was brought forward by the death of conservative President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month.

Gazans living in bombed-out buildings and camps near piles of trash: UNRWA

Agence France-Presse

Geneva

Piecing together: A man carries salvaged items following an Israeli raid in Rafah on the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday.AFPEYAD BABA

Gazans are forced to live in bombed-out buildings or camp next to giant piles of trash, a United Nations spokeswoman said on Friday, denouncing the “unbearable” conditions in the besieged territory.

Louise Wateridge from UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, described the “extremely dire” living conditions in the Gaza Strip.

“It’s really unbearable,” she told reporters in Geneva, via video-link from central Gaza.

Ms. Wateridge, who returned on Wednesday after four weeks outside the territory, said that even in that time the situation had “significantly deteriorated”.

“Today, it has to be the worst it’s ever been. I don’t doubt that tomorrow again will be the worst it’s ever been,” she said.

Nearly nine months into the war between Israel and Hamas, Ms. Wateridge said the Gaza Strip had been “destroyed”.

She said she had been “shocked” on returning to Khan Yunis in central Gaza.

“The buildings are skeletons, if at all. Everything is rubble,” she said. “And yet people are living there again.

With no bathrooms, “people are relieving themselves anywhere they can”.

Women’s rights is an internal issue, say Taliban before talks

Agence France-Presse

Kabul

Tough life: The United Nations has labelled the restrictions imposed on Afghan women by Taliban as gender apartheid. AFPSANAULLAH SEIAM

Taliban authorities said on Saturday that demands over women’s rights were “Afghanistan’s issues” to solve, ahead of United Nations-led engagement talks where the exclusion of Afghan women has sparked outcry.

The Taliban, which has imposed restrictions on women since seizing power in 2021 that the UN has described as “gender apartheid”, will send its first delegation to the third round of talks starting in Qatar on Sunday.

Civil society representatives, including from women’s rights groups, will attend meetings with the international envoys and UN officials on Tuesday, after the official talks. Rights groups have condemned the exclusion of Afghan women from the main meetings and the lack of human rights issues on the agenda.

The Taliban authorities “acknowledge the issues about women”, government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in Kabul on the eve of the latest talks. “But these issues are Afghanistan’s issues,” said Mujahid, who will lead the delegation.

He said the Taliban government would represent all of Afghanistan at the meetings and, given their authority, should be the only Afghans at the table.

“If Afghans participate through several channels, it means we are still scattered, our nation is still not unified,” he said.

Malvika shocks Kristy, enters the semifinals

Press Trust of India

Fort Worth

India’s Malvika Bansod stunned Scotland’s Kristy Gilmour in a thrilling three-game match to advance to the women’s singles semifinals of the US Open Super 300 badminton tournament here.

The 22-year-old, ranked 49th, registered a 10-21, 21-15, 21-10 win over Kristy, the 2014 Commonwealth Games silver medallist.

Malvika had defeated Kristy at the Hylo Open in 2022 when the Scot had retired in the second game due to an injury. The Indian had lost twice to Kristy in the past.

The Indian, who had won the Azerbaijan International Challenge this year, will face sixth-seeded Japanese Natsuki Nidaira.

In men’s singles, Priyanshu Rajawat lost to fourth seed Lei Lan Xi of China 21-15, 11-21, 18-21 in a last-eight contest that lasted just over an hour.

Second seeds Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand went down 17-21, 21-17, 19-21 to Japanese sixth seeds Rui Hirokami and Yuna Kato in the quarterfinals.

The results:

Men, pre-quarterfinals: Lei Lan Xi (Chn) bt Priyanshu Rajawat 15-21, 21-11, 21-18.

Women, quarterfinals: Malvika Bansod bt Kristy Gilmour (Sco) 10-21, 21-15, 21-10.

Doubles: Rui Hirokami/ Yuna Kato (Jpn) bt Treesa Jolly/ Gayatri Gopichand 21-17, 17-21, 21-19.

German far-right party AfD re-elects leaders at convention

Associated Press

BERLIN

The far-right Alternative for Germany or AfD, re-elected its leadership duo on Saturday after the party made gains in the recent European election, while thousands of people protested against its convention and some demonstrators tried to block roads or clashed with police.

The AfD took 15.9% of the vote to finish second in the European Parliament election which was held on June 9, despite recent scandals and setbacks.

At the regular two-day convention in the western city of Essen, co-leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla were elected unopposed to new two-year terms. They were backed by 79.8% and 82.7% of delegates respectively — a display of harmony by the party's often-argumentative standards.

Ms. Weidel vowed to work to “tear down the unspeakable so-called firewalls” that other parties have set up against working with AfD.

‘At least 30 killed in anti-government protests in Kenya’

Agence France-Presse

Nairobi

At least 30 people died in protests in Kenya this week sparked by a government drive to substantially raise taxes in the East African country, Human Rights Watch said Saturday.

“Kenyan security forces shot directly into crowds of protesters on (Tuesday) June 25, 2024,,” the NGO said in a statement.

“Although there is no confirmation on the exact number of people killed in Nairobi and other towns, Human Rights Watch found that at least 30 people had been killed on that day based on witness accounts, publicly available information, hospital and mortuary records in Nairobi as well as witness accounts,” the statement said. “Shooting directly into crowds without justification, including as protesters try to flee, is completely unacceptable under Kenyan and international law,” said Otsieno Namwaya, associate Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

Attacker with crossbow killed outside Israeli embassy in Serbia

AFPOLIVER BUNIC

A Serbian police officer on Saturday killed a man who shot him in the neck with a crossbow in front of the Israeli embassy in Belgrade, the Serbian Interior Minister said. Some arrests were made and a number of people known to the security services were suspected of being linked to the attack. afp

Russian attacks on south and east regions of Ukraine kill 10 persons

REUTERSVOLODYMYR ZELENSKIY VIA TELEGRAM

Russian strikes on a southern Ukrainian town and villages in the embattled Donetsk region killed 10 persons on Saturday. An attack on Vilniansk in south Ukraine killed six civilians and wounded eight. Three persons were killed in an attack on Zarichne in Donetsk while another was killed in the frontline village of New York. afp

Mongolia’s ruling People’s Party wins parliamentary elections

REUTERSRENTSENDORJ BAZARSUKH

Mongolia’s ruling party, the People’s Party (MPP), emerged from this week’s polls with its parliamentary majority reduced on Saturday, after a campaign dominated by graft fears and the state of the economy. Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene’s MPP won 68 seats, giving it a majority of four in the 126 member House. afp

IS killed more than 4,000 since Syria territorial defeat: monitor

APHADI MIZBAN

Islamic State fighters have killed nearly 4,100 people in Syria since 2019 when the jihadists lost their last stronghold in the country, a war monitor said on Saturday. IS overran large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a so-called caliphate and launching a reign of terror in June of that year. afp

Iran warns of full-blown war if Hezbollah is attacked

Agence France-Presse

Tehran

Iran on Saturday warned that “all Resistance Fronts”, a grouping of Iran and its regional allies, would confront Israel if it attacks Hezbollah.

The comment from Iran’s mission to New York comes with fears of a wider regional war involving Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement. The two sides have engaged in near-daily exchanges of fire since the war in Gaza began.

Israel’s military said plans for a Lebanon offensive had been “approved and validated”, prompting Hezbollah to respond that none of Israel would be spared in a full-blown conflict.

Sports

- Rohit’s ‘Miracle Men’ conjure stunning title win

- Nerves of steel

- Golden sunset for Kohli and Rohit as stalwarts call time on T20I careers

- SCOREBOARD

- ‘The ICC did a fantastic job to promote the game in America’

- India’s 176 the highest team score in a T20 World Cup final

- Kohli’s second-highest score by an Indian in final, says it’s his last WC

- Kohli-Axar partnership the biggest for India for any wicket in final

- South Africa fights back through Luus and Kapp

- Sable overwrites own meet record, Kushare consolidates Paris spot

- We stuck to our game plans: Luus

- Switzerland sends holder Italy packing from the Euro 2024

- ‘We were focusing more on stock balls’

- Verstappen wins sprint, takes pole

- Shiven, Aadya emerge boys’ u-15 and girls’ u-13 champs

- SCOREBOARD

- Ducati’s Bagnaia wins Dutch MotoGP sprint

- Praggnanandhaa lets Gukesh off the hook

- LiVE TELECAST

- Slovakia no pushover for misfiring England

- Dominant Hemanth Muddappa notches up a double crown

- Around THE CITY

- India beats Philippines, enters quarterfinals

- tnca U-14

- BFI assures extensive support for u-18 women

- Engagements

- Sabalenka not certain for Wimbledon due to injury

- HI names core probables group for women’s camp

- Varnika downs Harjani in State-ranking table tennis

- Vaidehi Chaudhari cruises into the final

- MRF Natl. supercross attracts 120 entries from across the country

Rohit’s ‘Miracle Men’ conjure stunning title win

Ashwin Achal

Bridgetown (Barbados)

Kohli and Axar’s stand helps India reach 176 for seven ; South Africa comes within touching distance only for the Hardik-Bumrah-Arshdeep trio to wrest back control and deliver the knockout punch

Masters of the globe: India went unbeaten to clinch its second World T20 crown, 17 years after winning the inaugural edition in South Africa. The triumph should banish the painful memories of the ODI World Cup loss at home last year. K.R. DEEPAKDEEPAK KR

The long wait is over. India is world champion again.

In a classic ICC Men’s T20 World Cup final sure to be remembered for years to come, India made history with a nail-biting seven-run win over South Africa.

And with it came the celebrations. There was an undeniable sense of relief as well, as India finally managed to cross the final hurdle after two heartbreaking falls in just the last year.

This time around, Rohit Sharma’s men displayed nerves of steel in the face of pressure. The game seemed to slip away when South Africa got ahead in the chase, but the Men In Blue were unwilling to throw in the towel. Nothing could stop the Indians from wearing that coveted crown.

When the job was done, Virat Kohli looked up to the sky with hands aloft. Rohit was mobbed by his teammates, and the support staff ran on to the ground with the National flag. An emotional Hardik Pandya grabbed the tri-colour, and walked over to grab a piece of the pitch.

Man for the moment

It was sweet, sweet redemption for Kohli, who came good with the bat when it mattered. His 59-ball 76 may not have set the pulse racing, but it immensely helped the team’s cause. India found two more heroes in Jasprit Bumrah and Suryakumar Yadav. With a miserly 18th over, Bumrah tightened the screws on South Africa. The ace speedster conceded two runs and picked up a wicket in those six balls, which put the Proteas in a tight spot.

The final nail in the coffin was driven by Suryakumar, who pulled off a brilliant catch to dismiss David Miller in the last over. A juggling effort from Suryakumar at long-off sent the last recognised batter back. South Africa was knocked out cold.

After winning the toss, India made a challenging 176 for seven. There was concern among the Indian fans at the Kensington Oval when India slipped to 34 for three.

India was forced to rebuild. Axar Patel and Kohli calmed nerves with sensible batting. Using clean technique and shots along the ground, Kohli stuck in for the long haul. Axar knew his role well, having performed this task against Pakistan earlier in the tournament.

A 72-run fourth-wicket partnership was exactly what India needed to stay afloat. There could have been more, if not for a lazy piece of running from Axar. Though halfway down the track, Axar had time to turn back and make the crease. Axar, however, stopped in his tracks for a moment. Wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock took full advantage, throwing down the stumps at the bowler’s end to catch Axar short.

Kohli’s desire to make it count was evident when he did not acknowledge cheers for his fifty.

The time to take it all in would come later. The evening ended with a lap of honour, with hugs and greetings from Chris Gayle and other past stalwarts.

And in spirit, millions of Indians around the world joined in the festivities.

Nerves of steel

1 of 4 The catch that won the match: With the contest in the balance, Suryakumar caught Miller spectacularly at long-off. K.R. Deepak DEEPAK KR

2 of 4

3 of 4

4 of 4

Golden sunset for Kohli and Rohit as stalwarts call time on T20I careers

Ayan Acharya

Bridgetown (Barbados)

Signing off in style: Kohli’s final T20I innings proved crucial in India’s victory while Rohit led the side with aplomb. K.R. DEEPAK

Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma announced their retirements from T20Is after India’s T20 World Cup win.

“This is my last T20 game for India, the last [T20] World Cup I was going to play,” Kohli said. “I wanted to make the most of it and this was our aim. We wanted to win an ICC tournament, we wanted to lift the cup. As I said, it was the occasion that helped me put my head down and respect the situation rather than try to force things out there.”

Moments later, captain Rohit took everyone by surprise when he said he too was bringing down the curtain on his T20I career. “This was my last [T20I] game as well,” Rohit said in response to a question at the press conference after the final. “No better time to say goodbye to this format. I’ve loved every moment of this. I started my India career playing this format. This is what I wanted, I wanted to win the cup.”

After the game, Rohit was effusive in his praise for Kohli. “No one doubted Virat’s form. He’s been on top of his game for the last 15 years. When the occasion calls, big players stand up.”

INDIA

Rohit Sharma c Klaasen b Maharaj 9 (5b, 2x4), Virat Kohli c Rabada b Jansen 76 (59b, 6x4, 2x6), Rishabh Pant c de Kock b Maharaj 0 (2b), Suryakumar Yadav c Klaasen b Rabada 3 (4b), Axar Patel run out 47 (31b, 1x4, 4x6), Shivam Dube c Miller b Nortje 27 (16b, 3x4, 1x6), Hardik Pandya (not out) 5 (2b, 1x4), Ravindra Jadeja c Maharaj b Nortje 2 (2b); Extras (nb-1, w-6): 7; Total (for seven wkts. in 20 overs): 176.

FALL OF WICKETS

1-23 (Rohit, 1.4 overs), 2-23 (Pant, 1.6), 3-34 (Suryakumar, 4.3), 4-106 (Axar, 13.3), 5-163 (Kohli, 18.5), 6-174 (Dube, 19.4), 7-176 (Jadeja, 19.6).

SOUTH AFRICA BOWLING

Jansen 4-0-49-1, Maharaj 3-0-23-2, Rabada 4-0-36-1, Markram 2-0-16-0, Nortje 4-0-26-2, Shamsi 3-0-26-0.

SOUTH AFRICA

Reeza Hendricks b Bumrah 4 (5b, 1x4), Quinton de Kock c Kuldeep b Arshdeep 39 (31b, 4x4, 1x6), Aiden Markram c Pant b Arshdeep 4 (5b, 1x4), Tristan Stubbs b Axar 31 (21b, 3x4, 1x6), Heinrich Klaasen c Pant b Hardik 52 (27b, 2x4, 5x6), David Miller c Suryakumar b Hardik 21 (17b, 1x4, 1x6), Marco Jansen b Bumrah 2 (4b), Keshav Maharaj (not out) 2 (7b), Kagiso Rabada c Suryakumar b Hardik 4 (3b, 1x4), Anrich Nortje (not out) 1 (1b); Extras (b-1, lb-4, nb-1, w-3): 9; Total (for eight wkts. in 20 overs): 169.

FALL OF WICKETS

1-7 (Hendricks, 1.3), 2-12 (Markram, 2.3), 3-70 (Stubbs, 8.5), 4-106 (de Kock, 12.3), 5-151 (Klaasen, 16.1), 6-156 (Jansen, 17.4), 7-161 (Miller, 19.1), 8-168 (Rabada, 19.5).

INDIA BOWLING

Arshdeep 4-0-20-2, Bumrah 4-0-18-2, Axar 4-0-49-1, Kuldeep 4-0-45-0, Hardik 3-0-20-3, Jadeja 1-0-12-0.

Toss: India.

Player-of-the-Match: Kohli.

Player-of-the-Series: Bumrah.

India won by seven runs to emerge champion.

‘We never got comfortable, there was always scoreboard pressure’

K.R. DEEPAKDEEPAK KR

A “gutted” South Africa captain Aiden Markram conceded that scoreboard pressure got to his team in the T20 World Cup final. “We never got comfortable and there was always scoreboard pressure. Having said that, this was a really good game which proves that we were worthy finalists,” Markram said.

India’s 176 the highest team score in a T20 World Cup summit clash

K.R. DEEPAKDEEPAK KR

India’s score of 176 for seven against South Africa in Bridgetown (Barbados) on Saturday is the highest team score in a T20 World Cup final. The previous highest in a title clash belonged to Australia when it made 173 against New Zealand in Dubai in the 2021 summit clash while chasing 172.

Kohli makes second-highest score by an Indian in a T20 WC final

K.R. DEEPAK

Virat Kohli’s 76 in the final of the T20 World Cup 2024 against South Africa is the second-highest individual score by an Indian batter in the title clash. Kohli holds the record (77 vs Sri Lanka in the 2014 final). The best in a final is West Indies batter Marlon Samuels, who struck an unbeaten 85 against England in 2016.

Kohli-Axar partnership the biggest for India for any wicket in a final

K.R. DEEPAKDEEPAK KR

Virat Kohli and Axar Patel broke the record for the highest partnership for India for any wicket in a T20 World Cup final. The duo added 72 for the fourth wicket after India had slipped to 34 for three, and bettered the record held by Gautam Gambhir and Yuvraj Singh who had added 63 during the final against Pakistan in 2007.

South Africa fights back through Luus and Kapp

S. Dipak Ragav

Chennai

The two batters score half-centuries with the Proteas’ hopes resting on the latter’s shoulders ; Sneh (three for 61) is the pick of the Indian bowlers with her guile and extra bounce

Picture of concentration: Kapp showed her class with some exquisite boundaries through the off-side.B. Jothi RamalingamJOTHI RAMALINGAM B

Half-centuries from Sune Luus (65) and Marizanne Kapp (69 batting) helped South Africa hold its own against India on day two of the one-off Test at the MAC Stadium on Saturday. The Proteas ended the day at 232 for four after India declared at 603 for six — the highest total by a team in women’s Tests.

Resuming on 525 for four, India went past Australia’s record of 575, as skipper Harmanpreet Kaur (69) and Richa Ghosh (86) completed their half-centuries.

Richa entertained the crowd that had turned out early, essaying beautiful shots on both sides of the wicket. She reached her fifty with a flick to the leg-side and then pressed the accelerator.

Just when the two batters looked set for a ton, South Africa struck twice in three overs and forced the host to declare. Harmanpreet was out leg-before to pacer Tumi Sekhukhune, while Richa was trapped in front trying to sweep left-arm spinner Nonkululeko Mlaba.

When South Africa began its reply, skipper Laura Wolvaardt and Anneke Bosch started positively seeing off the half-hour session prior to lunch.

Useful partnership

After losing Wolvaardt early in the second session, Bosch and Luus steadied things with their 63-run partnership for the second wicket and kept the Indian spinners at bay for most of the second session. Just before tea, Sneh Rana had Bosch caught at slip.

The South African batters showed great application, using the depth of the crease and waiting for the bad deliveries to put away on a pitch beginning to assist the spinners.

For India, Sneh (three for 61) was the best bowler on the day, beating the batters with her guile and extra bounce.

The Indian catching, though, was shoddy as Luus got two reprieves — on 38 and 44. First ’keeper Richa dropped an edge off Sneh and then Sneh missed a sharp catch at first slip off Deepthi Sharma.

In the final session, Kapp showed her class, batting positively with some glorious boundaries through the off-side off pacer Pooja Vastrakar and got to her half-century in style, driving left-arm spinner Rajeshwari Gayakwad to the long-off boundary.

Though South Africa fought back on the second day, it still needs another 221 runs to avoid the follow-on, and the side will need Kapp to make a big one.

Meanwhile, the Indian bowlers will look to be more clinical on the field and get to the lower-order quickly.

Sable overwrites own meet record, Kushare consolidates Paris spot

Uthra Ganesan

Panchkula

Doing it in style: Sarvesh continued his brilliant season, equalling the six-year old meet record. RITU RAJ KONWAR

Avinash Sable was far from his best but still ahead of the rest of the pack by a distance as he practically sauntered to win the 3000m steeplechase on day three of the 63rd Inter-State athletics championships here on Saturday.

The national record holder, who has already attained the Paris Olympic qualifying standard, clocked 8:31.75 to overwrite his own previous meet record of 8:33.19, set five years ago in Lucknow.

That was also the last time he had participated in the Inter-State meet. Despite the slow race, Sable was satisfied with his effort, saying he had run only at 75-80%.

“I think I am peaking at the right time. Earlier, I had thought of entering the 1500m to check my speed.

“But given the weather and conditions here, I thought I would have to put more effort in 1500m and so decided against it,” Sable admitted.

On Saturday, he explained, his main aim was to check his progress and so had started slowly for the first kilometre.

“But then I realised I was not putting any effort at all and started pulling harder for the remaining laps,” he said. The change was evident in the way he broke away from the rest of the pack to lead by more than 250m by the time he neared the finish line.

“Earlier I used to start my season early and then train quietly before the big events without any competition to actually check myself. This time I have decided to mix training and competition closer to the Olympics.

“At the Paris Diamond League also I will not try to go full out. My main focus during training has been on the final kick and I have learnt from my previous mistakes,” he said confidently.

In high jump, Sarvesh Kushare continued his brilliant season, equalling the six-year old meet record of 2.25m for a season’s best to further consolidate his position on the Road to Paris rankings (he is currently 29th).

In shot put, Tajinderpal Singh Toor went all out in final attempt to take the top spot with 19.93m, then admitted he was still recovering and far from full fitness but insisted he would be ready for Paris. Toor too has qualified through the world-rankings quota.

The results (only finals):

Men: 3000m Steeplechase: 1. Avinash Sable (Mah, 8:31.75), 2. Sumit Kumar (MP, 8:46.93), 3. Shankar Swami (Har, 8:47.05); pole vault: 1. Yugendran (TN, 5m), 2. M. Gowtham (TN, 4.90m), 3. Lakshay (Har, 4.90m); hammer throw: 1. Praveen Kumar (Raj, 68.76m), 2. Damneet Singh (Pun, 66.40m), 3. Mohd. Shahban (UP, 65.02m); shot put: 1. Tajinderpal Singh Toor (19.93m), 2. Samardeep Gill (MP, 19.68m), 3. Aryan Tyagi (UP, 18.02m); high jump: 1. Sarvesh Kushare (Mah, 2.25m), 2. Tejaswin Shankar (Del, 2.23m), 3. Jesse Sandesh (Kar, 2.18m); long jump: 1. Arya (Kar, 7.78m), 2. Jeswin Aldrin (TN, 7.75m), 3. Aravinth (TN, 7.73m); decathlon: 1. N. Thowfeeq (Ker, 7042 pts), 2. Jashbir Nayak (Odi, 6791), 3. Rohit Roman (AP, 6667).

Women: 3000m Steeplechase: 1. Parul Chaudhary (UP, 9:45.70), 2. Komal Jagadale (Mah, 10:12.64), 3. Chhavi Yadav (MP, 10:13.58); 20km walk: 1. Ravina (Har, 1:39:53.00), 2. Munita Prajapati (UP, 1:40:20.00), 3. Sejal Singh (Mah, 1:41:28.00); discus: 1. Seema (Har, 57.19m), 2. Nidhi (Har, 52.06m), 3. Priti (Raj, 49.40m).

We stuck to our gameplan: Luus

S. Prasanna Venkatesan

CHENNAI

Patient knock: Luus was involved in two useful partnerships to help the Proteas dig in.B. Jothi Ramalingam

Sune Luus’ 65 and her 63-run second-wicket stand with Anneke Bosch (39) and 93-run third-wicket partnership with Marizanne Kapp (69 batting) helped South Africa dig in to 236 for four against India here on Saturday.

It is to be commended as the batters had to contend with the Chennai heat, low bounce, and sharp turn from the Indian spinners.

“I think we just stuck to our game plans. We obviously had certain plans against the various bowlers, and then we felt using the depth of our crease and just keeping a straight bat.

“We had four days (after the ODIs). It feels long, but we only had two days to prepare for the Test. I think your game plan is just to bat longer, be patient, and have a good defence.

“Playing in India, it’s one of the toughest Test matches you’ll play in your career. I think Perth felt like winter when I look back now (to the Test vs Australia in February), compared to Chennai. Today was really one of the hottest days I’ve ever experienced in my long career,” she said after the second day of the one-off Test.

Luus attributed her team’s impressive batting to their new coach Baakier Abrahams and the spin-centric camp they had before the ODI series. “I think we obviously got the new batting coach on board with some new ideas and a fresh perspective on things.

“And he really helped us just to tweak one or two things, just to add some elements to the game that could help us in this situation. Like I mentioned earlier, using the depth of the crease. So, all those things coming into play today to really just help us,” she said.

On the conversations she had with Kapp during their partnership, she said: “There was a lot of conversation about just me keeping her calm today.

“She knew that she needed to be patient and still has a long way to go. She just needed to be level-headed and she just asked me to help her out with that.”

Switzerland sends holder Italy packing from the Euro 2024

Agence France-Presse

Berlin

Class act: Vargas, who set up Switzerland’s opener, curls in a stunner for the second.AFP

Switzerland dumped reigning champion Italy out of Euro 2024 with a stunning 2-0 victory on Saturday to reach the quarterfinals for the second time in its history.

Murat Yakin’s supremely well-drilled side outplayed the flat two-time winner in the last 16 clash and will face England or Slovakia in the next round.

Ruben Vargas teed up Remo Freuler for Switzerland’s 37th minute opener before curling home superbly himself right at the start of the second half to deservedly double the lead.

A new-look Italy, short on star power and without many of the key figures that led it to Euro 2020 glory, offered little in response to Switzerland’s energetic display.

Former Arsenal midfielder Granit Xhaka, arriving at the Euros after a stunning season with German champion Bayer Leverkusen, pulled the strings as the Swiss rarely looked like letting the lead slip away.

Italy coach Luciano Spalletti dropped Jorginho after his worrying group stage performances, bringing in Nicolo Fagioli in defensive midfield among a hefty six changes which failed to bring the Azzurri to life.

The 23-year-old started a major tournament match for the first time, having missed most of the season with Juventus after a seven-month ban for gambling on football matches.

The result: Switzerland 2 (Freuler 37, Vargas 46) bt Italy 0.

‘We were focusing more on stock balls’

Sports Bureau

Chennai

Sneh.B. JOTHI RAMALINGAMJOTHI RAMALINGAM B

Sneh Rana, who’s playing for India after six months, was the standout bowler with three for 61 on the second day of the one-off Test against South Africa here on Saturday.

Asked how she keeps herself motivated and about her preparation, she said: “We had the BCCI inter-zonal multi-day tournament for motivation. I think a player should always be motivated. Any challenge is given to you, you have to be spot on.

Speaking about the pitch behaviour and India’s bowling plan on the day, she said: “We were focusing more on our stock balls. In Test cricket, fielding is the only way to dominate the other team. So we focused more on fielding well.

“In the beginning, there was not much turn. But later on, as the wicket got older, I think we saw more bounce on the wicket and there was more turn.”

Verstappen wins sprint, takes pole

Reuters

SPIELBERG

Verstappen.AFP

Max Verstappen is looking unbeatable again at the Austrian Grand Prix. The Formula 1 leader followed up his win in the sprint race on Saturday with another dominant performance in qualifying to take pole for the fourth straight year at the Red Bull Ring.

It ended a streak of three straight races where the three-time defending F1 champion failed to take pole position, and dealt a blow to his closest rivals who hoped to challenge him on Red Bull’s home circuit this weekend.

“It's been a while that we've actually been on pole. So it’s a great feeling,” Verstappen said. “This is a great statement and hopefully we can also show that tomorrow in the race.” After qualifying in the last three races was decided by narrow margins, this one wasn’t even close as Verstappen’s final lap in third qualifying beat McLaren’s Lando Norris by 0.404s.

Shiven, Aadya emerge boys’ u-15 and girls’ u-13 champs

India’s Shiven Agarwal and Aadya Budhia emerged the boys’ u-15 and girls’ u-13 champions in the 31st Asian junior individual squash championships which concluded in Islamabad on Saturday. Shiven got the better of Malaysian Muhammad Raziq Putra Mohd Fakhrur Razi 11-7, 8-11, 11-5, 13-11 in the final, while Aadya put it past her compatriot Goushika 11-5, 11-5, 11-4. India won two gold medals in the championship after a gap of 12 years.

INDIA — 1ST INNINGS

Shafali Verma run out 205 (197b, 23x4, 8x6), Smriti Mandhana c Dercksen b Tucker 149 (161b, 27x4, 1x6), Shubha Satheesh c Jafta b de Klerk 15 (27b, 2x4), Jemimah Rodrigues c de Klerk b Tucker 55 (94b, 8x4), Harmanpreet Kaur lbw b Sekhukhune 69 (115b, 4x4), Richa Ghosh lbw b Mlaba 86 (90b, 16x4), Deepti Sharma (not out) 2 (7b); Extras (b-16, lb-6): 22; Total (for six wkts. decl. in 115.1 overs): 603.

FALL OF WICKETS

1-292 (Smriti, 51.6 overs), 2-325 (Shubha, 58.6), 3-411 (Shafali, 74.1), 4-450 (Jemimah, 86.6), 5-593 (Harmanpreet, 112.4), 6-603 (Richa, 115.1).

SOUTH AFRICA BOWLING

Klaas 17-2-74-0, Dercksen 17-0-80-0, de Klerk 12-1-79-1, Sekhukhune 14-0-70-1, Mlaba 26.1-1-122-1, Tucker 26-1-141-2, Luus 3-0-15-0.

SOUTH AFRICA — 1ST INNINGS

Laura Wolvaardt lbw b Sneh 20 (36b, 3x4), Anneke Bosch c Deepti b Sneh 39 (73b, 4x4, 1x6), Sune Luus lbw b Deepti 65 (164b, 6x4, 1x6), Marizanne Kapp (batting) 69 (125b, 8x4), Delmi Tucker c Richa b Sneh 0 (8b), Nadine de Klerk (batting) 27 (28b, 5x4); Extras (b-14, nb-2): 16; Total (for four wkts. in 72 overs): 236.

FALL OF WICKETS

1-33 (Wolvaardt, 7.6), 2-96 (Bosch, 30.4), 3-189 (Luus, 59.5), 4-198 (Tucker, 62.4).

INDIA BOWLING

Renuka 7-0-22-0, Pooja 9-2-32-0, Sneh 20-2-61-3, Rajeshwari 16-3-50-0, Deepti 15-3-40-1, Harmanpreet 3-0-9-0, Smriti 2-0-8-0.

Ducati’s Bagnaia wins Dutch MotoGP sprint

Two-time defending world champion Francesco Bagnaia won the Dutch MotoGP sprint at Assen on Saturday ahead of current championship leader Jorge Martin and fellow Spaniard Maverick Vinales.

Praggnanandhaa lets Gukesh off the hook

Grandmaster R. Praggnanandhaa missed out on becoming a joint leader at the the Superbet Classic chess tournament after settling for a draw against compatriot D. Gukesh in the third round here. Praggnanandhaa had a great opportunity to equalise the score this year but could not find a winning continuation after Gukesh spoiled a drawn endgame.

The results: (third round): D. Gukesh (2) drew with R Praggnanandhaa (1.5); Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (Fra, 1.5 drew with Firouza Alireza (Fra, 1.5); Anish Giri (Ned, 1.5) drew with Ian Nepomniachtchi (FID, 1.5); Nodirbek Abdusattorov (Uzb, 1) drew with Fabiano Caruana (Usa, 2); Wesley So (Usa, 1.5) drew with Deac Bogdan-Daniel (Rom, 1).

India Women vs South Africa Women: Only Test, day 3, Sports 18-1 & JioCinema, 9.30 a.m.

Hockey: Pro League, Sports 18-1 & JioCinema, 6.30 p.m.

Formula One: Austrian GP, F1 TV, F1 TV Pro App & FanCode, 6.30 p.m.

Football: Euro 2024, Sony Sports Ten 2, 3, 5 & LIV, 9.30 p.m. & 12.30 a.m. (Monday)

Badminton: US Open, Sports 18-1 & JioCinema, 10.30 p.m.

Slovakia no pushover for misfiring England

Reuters

BLANKENHAIN

Denmark will be the underdog when it takes on Germany, but that suits it just fine as it seeks to channel the spirit of 1992

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Gareth Southgate’s hesitant England team will need to finally make its presence felt in Euro 2024 against Slovakia in the last-16, or the underdog Slovaks will fancy their chances.

Southgate’s richly talented squad arrived in Germany as a tournament favourite but optimism around the 2020 runner-up fizzled with three drab group games mired in uncertainty over the best line-up, with the coach conceding an “experiment” in the early matches had failed.

Slovakia, on the other hand, kicked off its campaign by shocking No. 3 Belgium.

Slovakia boss Francesco Calzona called his team the Cinderella story of the group stage.

England at least showed some improvement in the second half of its 0-0 draw with Slovenia on Tuesday, with Kobbie Mainoo and Cole Palmer impressing off the bench.

While England’s defence was a major concern ahead of the tournament with veterans such as Harry Maguire missing due to injury, it has been the best part of this campaign. Through the group phase England have offered up the least expected goals (xG).

Southgate will hope for a better performance from Jude Bellingham, who was excellent in the first half against Serbia, but drifted out of the two games since.

Slovakia is led by crafty Napoli midfielder Stanislav Lobotka, who Italian great Andrea Pirlo called the “best playmaker in the Italian league.”

Later in the day, Denmark will be the underdog when it takes on Germany, but that suits it just fine as it seeks to channel the spirit of 1992.

Since the draw was confirmed, much has been said in Denmark about its unexpected win over Germany in the final of the European Championship more than three decades ago.

The Danish are far less of a surprise package at Euro 2024, having gone to the semifinals in the last edition, and though they have struggled for goals in the group stage, they still fancy their chances of springing another upset.

Denmark may have to take on Germany with a depleted midfield, and a late decision will need to be taken over the fitness of playmaker Christian Eriksen.

Dominant Hemanth Muddappa notches up a double crown

Sports Bureau

Chennai

Picture perfect: The round 1 winners of the National drag racing championships held here on Saturday.

Hemanth Muddappa (Mantra Racing) gave another dominant performance to notch a double crown in the first round of the MMSC FMSCI National motorcycle drag racing championships here on Saturday.

Muddappa, a multiple National champion, won in two of the four categories he took part in, while finishing second in the others.

He won the 302-metre dash in the Super Sport 1051-1650cc category astride a Suzuki Hayabusa and 551-850cc class on a Ninja 6R.

Provisional results (all four-stroke unless mentioned): Unrestricted: 1. Mujahid Pasha (Fast Track Racing) (08.251secs); 2. Hemanth Muddappa (Mantra Racing) (08.251s); 3. Alimon (Fast Track Racing) (08.279s).

1051-1650cc (Super Sport): 1. Muddappa (08.063s); 2. Pasha (08.103s); 3. Aymaan Baig (08.117s).

851-1050cc (SS): 1. Anvay Patil (08.286s); 2. Muddappa (08.294s); 3. Sugan Prasad S.P. (Mantra Racing) (08.448).

551-850cc (SS): 1. Muddappa (08.630s); 2. Mohammed Riyaz (Fast Track Racing) (08.675s); 3. Altaf Khan (Fast Track Racing) (09.112s).

361-550cc (SS Indian): 1. Shahrukh Khan (Mantra Racing) (11.494s); 2. Imran (Fast Track Racing) (12.315s); 3. Pasha (12.452s).

166-225cc (SS): 1. Prashanth (13.683s); 2. Prashanth K. (13.928s); 3. Shaninsha R. (14.395).

Up to 165cc (SS Indian): 1. Madhan R (ACCSYS India Rookies Racing) (13.896s); 2. Bharathraj J. (Rockers Racing) (14.081s); 3. Aravind Ganesh (ACCSYS India Rookies Racing) (14.130s).

Girls (Stock 165cc): 1. Jagathishree Kumaresan (One Racing) (16.561s); 2. S.P. Shuria (One Racing) (16.894s); 3. Aisvariya (Motul Sparks Racing) (17.158s).

2-Stroke (131-165cc, SS): 1. Imran (12.719s); 2. Prashanth (12.904); 3. Balasubramanian (ACCSYS India Rookies Racing) (13.293s).

2-Stroke (Up to 130cc, SS): 1. Balasubramanian (Big Boys Racing) (13.329s); 2. Shahrukh (13.388s); 3. Madhan (Big Boys Racing) (13.425s).

1 of 3 Champion: Team Mars Marshals, winner of the CPCL table tennis title. Special Arrangement Special Arrangement

2 of 3 C. Kubendran (Apollo Tyres, 101 n.o.)

3 of 3 Sudhanthiraraj (Apollo Tyres, 5/37) Special Arrangement

Arshi Choudhary stars for Green Invaders

Arshi Choudhary’s unbeaten 91 enabled Green Invaders beat Blue Avengers by 43 runs in the TNCA-Freyer Trophy T20 tournament on Saturday.

The scores: Green Invaders 154 for no loss in 20 overs (M. S. Aishwarya 55 n.o., Arshi Choudhary 91 n.o.) bt Blue Avengers 111/9 in 20 overs (Priyanshi Pande 31, Arshi Choudhary 4/20).

Purple Blazers 152/5 in 20 overs (Trisha Madhu 84, S. Rinaaz 35 n.o.) bt Yellow Challengers 93/7 in 20 overs (Sheetal Soundraragavan 3/19).

Pink Warriors 142/5 in 20 overs (Roshini Rajasekaran 41) bt Silver Strikers 88/7 in 20 overs (S. Anusha 46).

Orange Dragons 135/3 in 20 overs (K. Yogyasri 64, S. Vaishnavi 43) bt Red Rangers 122/5 in 20 overs (Aafreen Ahamed Sait 40, Akshara Srinivasan 30).

Kubendran and Sudhanthiraraj shine

C. Kubendran (101 n.o.) and P. Sudhanthiraraj (five for 37) starred in Apollo Tyres’ 45-run victory over HVAC Projects in the G. R. Kuppuswamy memorial cricket tournament here.

The scores: R.R. Donnelly 169 in 30 overs (Meiyarasan 39, M. Mehanathan 38, Sudarshan 39) lost to YSCA 170/9 in 29.5 overs (Riyas Khan 40, K. Sivabalan 28, B. Sriram 25, K. Nithish Kannan 37, Sudarshan 4/34).

Apollo Tyres 239/5 in 30 overs (Jaya Suriya 46, C. Kubendran 101 n.o., Abinandh 43) bt VW HVAC Projects 194/9 in 30 overs (Pradeep Kumar 27, Gopi 65, P. Sudhanthiraraj 5/37, Mathan Kannan 3/54).

Mars Marshals triumphs

Team Mars Marshals consisting of Praveen Koduri, Sanjay Madhavan and Devendra Mehta defeated Team Mercurial Speedsters (Vivek Baid, Brahma Lakshman, Mahendra Bothra and Ramachandra Reddy) 2-1 in the final of the Chennai Premier Clubs League (CPCL) table tennis tournament held here recently. In the Pro-division singles summit clash, Adithya Ravishankar beat Prasanth Reddy for the title.

The results (final): Mars Marshals beat Mercurial Speedsters 2-1 (Sanjay Madhavan lost to Vivek Baid 11-13, 6-11, 1-11; Praveen Koduri bt Brahma Lakshman 11-5, 11-7, 13-11; Devendra Mehta bt Mahendra Bothra 11-6, 11-4, 9-11, 11-5).

India beats Philippines, enters quarterfinals

Press Trust of India

Yogyakarta (Indonesia)

India booked quarterfinals berth at the Badminton Asia Junior Mixed Team Championship with a 3-2 victory over Philippines in its second Group-C clash here on Saturday.

The Indian team, which had blanked Vietnam 5-0 in their tournament opener, made a couple of changes to their line-up with Rounak Chauhan replacing Pranay Shettigar in boys’ singles and K Vennala combining with Shravani Walekar in girls’ doubles.

The senior national women’s singles finalist Tanvi Sharma started India’s march with a 21-9, 21-17 win against Funtespina Christel Rei, but Chauhan could not maintain the momentum after winning the opening game against Jamal Rahmat Pandi and lost 15-21, 21-18, 21-12.

Vennala and Shravani then put India ahead once again as they defeated Hernandes Andrea and Pecious Libaton 23-21, 21–11.

The boys’ doubles combination of Arsh Mohammad and Sankar Sarawat then put the result beyond doubt with a 21-16, 21-14 win over Christian Dorega and John Lanza. The mixed doubles pair of Bhargav Ram Arigela and K Vennala lost final rubber.

Indonesia through

Indonesia are also through to the quarterfinal having beaten Philippines 5-0 and Vietnam 4-1 in their two group matches.

The results: India bt Philippines 3-2 (Tanvi Sharma bt Funtespina Christel Rei 21-9, 21-17; Rounak Chauhan lost to Jamal Rahmat Pandi 21-15, 18-21, 12-21; K Vennala/Sharvani Walekar bt Hernandes Andrea/Precious Libaton 23-21, 21-11; Arsh Mohammad/Sankar Sarawat bt Christian Dorega/John Lanuza 21-16, 21-14; Bharav Ram Arigela/K Vennala lost to Jamal Pandi/Mary Untal 8-21, 15-21).

Kancheepuram:

1 of 2 Hajeesh (Kancheepuram, 5/29) and Ashwin (Chengalpattu, 106).

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Kancheepuram defeats Krishnagiri

Kancheepuram: Kancheepuram defeated Krishnagiri on the second and final day of the TNCA inter-districts under-14 tournament pre-quarterfinals on Saturday.

At Tiruvallur, Thiruvallur drew with Kanyakumari and advanced on first innings lead.

The scores: At Kancheepuram: Kancheepuram 120 & 207/6 decl. in 39.5 overs (R. Jadan Jonah David 60, G. Yogeshwar Rajan 73) btKrishnagiri 148 in 52.3 overs (Hajeesh Nirmal Prabhu 5/29) & 112/2 in 40 overs (R. John Calvin 70 n.o.).

At Tiruvallur: Thiruvallur 228 & 116/5 in 40 overs (Chetan Kumar Meena 38, M. S. Prajwol Nath 3/48) drew with Kanyakumari 148 in 62.3 overs (M.B. Syed Faihan 37, V. Bervin 33, S. Sachin 3/37, S. Kiran Raj Yadav 3/35).

Tiruvallur advanced on first innings lead.

At Dharmapuri: Dharmapuri 116 & 124/6 in 32.3 overs (K. Sharan 46, M. Praneesh 32 n.o.) drew with Chengalpattu 358 in 90 overs (A.I. Ashwin 106, R. Rishi 68, R. Krithik Sai 55, A. Ansh 44, V. Dhuruva Suven 42, M. Praveenkumar 5/75).

Chengalpattu advanced on first innings lead.

BFI assures extensive support for u-18 women

Sports Bureau

NEW DELHI

The Basketball Federation of India (BFI) has taken several steps to wipe away the disappointment of missing the Asian championship for the Indian under-18 women.

The FIBA Asia had chosen the much lower-ranked Maldives ahead of India for the championship.

“Why are we not having a SABA zonal championship for women in that age group? It is discriminatory when we have competition for the boys. India is ready to host any tournament’, said BFI president, Aadhav Arjuna, during a media interaction in the Capital.

Assuring all support for the under-18 women players, Arjuna said that an exposure tournament has been planned for the under-18 teams in Russia. The training camp for the same will be held from July 9.

“We will call everyone. The under-18 players are the future. We stand strongly with the players. We are ready to support their education and give them scholarships.

“We request the zonal and regional bodies to conduct tournaments for both men and women. Choose the best teams,” he said.

Cricket: India vs South Africa one-off Test, MAC, third day, 9.30 a.m.; TNCA league, II div., AG’s Office vs S. Rly. Instt., S. Rly., 9 a.m.; G.R. Kuppuswamy memorial tournament, YSCA vs Apollo Tyres (8 a.m.); Equitas Bank vs Chennai City Police (1 p.m.), GE T&D ‘A’.

Sabalenka not certain for Wimbledon due to injury

Agence France-Presse

London

The Australian Open champion also defended her decision to skip the Paris Olympics , saying she made the choice to prioritise her health, wary of switching back to clay courts

Up in the air: Sabalenka said there ‘is always a chance’ she may withdraw on Monday.REUTERSPAUL CHILDS

Australian Open champion Aryna Sabalenka said on Saturday she is “not 100%” certain of playing her first round Wimbledon match due to a “really rare” shoulder injury.

Sabalenka, a two-time semifinalist at the All England Club, had to quit her quarterfinal match against Anna Kalinskaya in Berlin last week due to the problem.

“I’m not 100% fit now,” admitted the 26-year-old Belarusian who is due to face 106th-ranked Emina Bektas of the United States in the first round on Monday.

“We’re doing everything we can with my team to make sure I’ll be able to play my first match here. But, no, I’m not 100% ready.”

When asked if there was a chance she may withdraw on Monday, she said: “There is always a chance, yeah.” Sabalenka said her doctors had told her that she was “just the second or the third tennis player who injured the (shoulder) muscle”.

“It’s really a specific injury, and it’s really a rare one.”

Meanwhile, Sabalenka defended her decision to skip the Paris Olympics.

She said she made the choice to prioritise her health, wary of switching back to the clay courts of Roland Garros, where the Olympics tennis event is played. “I decided to sacrifice the Olympics for my career, for my health,” said Sabalenka.

HI names core probables group for women’s camp

Press Trust of India

BENGALURU

Hockey India (HI) on Saturday announced a 33-member Indian women’s probables group for a two-month training camp at the SAI Center here from Monday.

The Indian team went on a short break after losing all its matches in the FIH Pro League season in London and Antwerp.

“We recently travelled to Antwerp and London for the Europe leg of the Pro League, and while the results were not in our favour, we learned a lot as a team,” chief coach Harendra Singh said in a release.

“On several occasions, we were leading, and we proactively searched and threatened to score while looking for an equaliser. These are good signs and I am sure the team will be a force to be reckoned with in the future.”

The camp will conclude on August 31.

The probables group: Goalkeepers: Savita, Bichu Devi Kharibam, Bansari Solanki, Madhuri Kindo. Defenders: Nikki Pradhan, Udita, Ishika Chaudhary, Monika, Ropni Kumari, Mahima Choudhary, Jyoti Chhatri, Preeti. Midfielders: Salima Tete, Marina Lalramnghaki, Vaishnavi Vitthal Phalke, Neha, Jyoti, Edula Jyoti, Baljeet Kaur, Manisha Chauhan, Akshata Abaso Dhekale, Ajmina Kujur. Forwards: Sunelita Toppo, Mumtaz Khan, Lalremsiami, Sangita Kumari, Deepika, Sharmila Devi, Navneet Kaur, Deepika Soreng, Preeti Dubey, Vandana Katariya, Rutuja Dadaso Pisal.

Varnika downs Harjani in State-ranking table tennis

Chennai:

Chennai: G. Varnika beat S. Harjani 11-9, 11-8, 11-7 in the girls’ u-17 quarterfinals of the second Tamil Nadu State-ranking table tennis tournament on Saturday.

Other results (Quarterfinals):

Girls: U-17: N. Sharvani (Mylapore Club) bt Shameena Shah (TMDTTDA) 11-8, 11-4, 9-11, 11-9; B.R. Nandhini (MVM) bt M.R. Pooja (SKA) 11-2, 11-7, 6-11, 11-7. Yogasri (J-Academy) bt Jiyah Bhandari (CTTF) 11-3, 11-7, 11-8.

M. Ananya (Chennai Achievers) bt S.S. Bhuvanidha (TMDTTA) 11-9, 11-8, 13-11. U-13: B. Varnica (SSA-Erode) bt Ambati Pooja (LCC- Neyveli) 11-5, 11-8, 11-8.

A. Bavithra (LCC-Neyveli) bt A.S. Chaarviha (Coronation) 11-7, 11-1, 11-5; O.P. Poojaasri (HTTA-Theni) bt Chinthanya Nandagopal (DTTA) 11-6, 12-10, 11-7.

Vaidehi Chaudhari cruises into the final

Sports Bureau

Vaidehi Chaudhari outclassed Monique Barry of New Zealand 6-2, 6-0 in the semifinals of the $25,000 ITF women’s tennis tournament in Taipei, Taiwan, on Saturday.

The results: $25,000 ITF men, Hillcrest, South Africa: Semifinals: Devin Badenhorsst (RSA) bt Aryan Shah 4-6, 7-6((3), 6-4.

$15,000 ITF men, Tianjin, China: Semifinals: S. Mukund bt Dong Zhenxiong (Chn) 7-5, 6-2.

$40,000 ITF women, Palma del Rio, Spain: Doubles: Final: Martyna Kubka (Pol) & Lara Salden (Bel) bt Rutuja Bhosale & Sophie Chang (USA) 6-2, 6-1.

$25,000 ITF men, Taipei: Semifinals: Vaidehi Chaudhari bt Monique Barry (Nzl) 6-2, 6-0.

$15,000 ITF men, Los Angeles: Quarterfinals: Sahaja Yamalapalli bt Kate Fakih (USA) 6-1, 6-1.

MRF National supercross attracts 120 entries

Sports Bureau

Coimbatore

After setting the stages on fire in the opener at Nashik, the riders are ready to repeat their feat in the second round of the 22nd MRF MoGrip FMSCI National supercross championship scheduled today .

MRF Tyres is the title sponsor and TVS Motor Company, Sidvin Energy, Servo, MX Store and Monster Energy are associate sponsors. The biggest off-road two-wheeler event has attracted 120 entries from across the country. “We are always happy to come here as the fans here have the knowledge and the passion for the sport,” said Shyam Kothari, Head of Godspeed Racing, Pune, the rights-holder.

SM

- Living with extreme weather

- Queer romances to make your day

- It begins with a betrayal

- Disruptive desire and the Indian male

- Ahead of her time

- Fractured identity

- The face of science

- Portrait of an artist in the rains

- Easy like Sunday morning

- Seeking information

- The immortal lines

- The fellowship of the dark hall

- Tuning into classical music

- Nurturing a patch of green

- ‘I hate the word representation’

- Spells and a reluctant bride

Ritwika Mitra

With our cities and towns becoming increasingly vulnerable to nature’s vagaries, now is the time to climate-proof lives and livelihoods by making informed choices, improving policymaking, and implementing behavioural changes

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5 of 5 Delhi residents in the midst of a water crisis. (AFP)

With his sweat-drenched T-shirt stuck to his body, Anup Majhi, 37, pauses for a moment beneath the AC blowers in the bus parked in Kolkata’s Esplanade area. A small-time salesman selling pills and potions, Majhi has been hopping on and off buses plying on the 180-km stretch between Esplanade and Digha for the past 26 years.

“Two tablets during the day and two at night, and you will be rid of indigestion or gas,” he promises his customers. In the roughly 10 minutes he spends on the bus, he manages to sell a bottle of pills. On a busy day, Majhi makes a profit of ₹3,000. The sole earning member in his family of four, he has never taken beyond a few days off from work at a stretch. Last month, for the first time, Majhi took a whole month off. The reason: to avoid exhaustion due to the extreme heat. “The moment I would step out of the AC bus, my skin would start burning. I kept falling ill. I incurred a major loss taking a month off. But I have the rest of my life to earn money. If I keep getting sick, there is no point going to work,” he says. He was lucky his family supported him. “They were insistent that I should not go out in this heat.”

From March 1 to June 18 this year, 110 people died due to heatstroke in India, according to data from the Health Ministry. In several places, including New Delhi, maximum temperatures touched nearly 50 degrees Celsius, a record high for the month of June. The capital has banned work on construction sites between noon and 3 p.m., and several hospitals have opened heat stroke wards. The 2023-24 El Nino has been one of the five strongest on record resulting in above-normal temperatures almost everywhere, making 2023 the warmest year on record.

Informal sector workers such as Majhi, who make up 90% of India’s workforce, are the most susceptible to such climate-related emergencies. According to a World Bank study, India might account for nearly 43% of global job losses from heat stress-associated productivity declines by 2030. The ripple effect from weather-related loss of livelihood is bound to spread far and wide, with people across socio-economic strata being affected over time.

Safety nets needed

The Central government’s Climate Vulnerability Assessment report for 2019-20 had pointed out that all States in India are significantly climate vulnerable. How then can we climate-proof the economy? This will require transforming livelihood sectors and preparing for multi-hazardous conditions rather than single hazards/events, observes Chandni Singh, senior researcher at Indian Institute for Human Settlements and lead author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent climate report. “This will involve planning for where we work and under what conditions, climate-proofing certain infrastructure and at-risk sectors, providing safety nets for contract labour and insurance incentives for the most exposed,” she says.

For Om Prakash Dubey, a cab driver based in Kolkata, driving has become a chore over the past few months. “I cannot bear the humidity this year. When I’m ferrying passengers and the AC is switched on, it is bearable. I’m trying to cut down on my driving hours, and have my meals on time. My health has deteriorated this year due to the extreme heat. But what can I do?” says the 53-year-old.

Sanjay Lodhi from Uttar Pradesh works in Gujarat’s Changodar making number plates of cars for 12 hours a day. He tells me over phone that he is returning to his village in Unnao after suffering severe heat exhaustion this month. He was hospitalised for four days due to dehydration. His views echo Majhi’s: if he is healthy, he can work in the months ahead. “My colleagues at the factory are also falling sick. It is in my interest that I go back home till the weather changes. I am not returning for another two months at least,” he says.

Research shows the cascading effect of climate crisis on mental health as vulnerable groups face the direct and indirect consequences of extreme weather events in their day-to-day lives. According to health economist Barun Kanjilal, who has extensively worked in the climate-vulnerable Sundarbans, climate shocks, especially when they hit a local community repeatedly and unpredictably, directly affect the livelihood security of the people. “This usually leads to a severe disruption of the societal network. The deep sense of livelihood and societal insecurity is an excellent breeding ground for mental health problems among people of all age groups,” he says.

A 2022 IPCC report too had documented that climate change is a threat to people’s mental health and psychological well-being. The scope of manifestations range from emotional distress to anxiety, depression, grief and suicidal behaviour. A World Health Organization (WHO) policy brief recommends solutions such as governments integrating climate considerations with mental health programmes, developing community-based approaches to reduce vulnerabilities, and closing the gap in funding when it comes to mental health and psychosocial support.

Kanjilal says a combination of long-term and short-term strategies should be put in place. Long-term strategies can focus on ensuring economic security by compensating for livelihood loss, a trigger for mental health problems. In the short term, a community-based health programme should be introduced for early detection of mental health issues by trained community members, followed by a referral system for medical intervention.

Meanwhile in 2023

A report by the Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment pointed out that while the year 2023 broke global warming records, India suffered extreme weather events on 318 days in the year. The weather events claimed over 3,200 lives, affecting 2.21 million hectare of crop area, and also resulting in the death of over 1.2 lakh animals.

With April to June being unbearably hot this year, and higher temperatures and wildfires being reported from hilly regions across Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir too, lives everywhere have been grossly affected.

“This affects the local population in more than one way. Forest fires damage the surrounding grasslands on which a lot of people are dependent, and the biodiversity of the area is also threatened. Transportation systems and tourism take a massive hit too, which in turn affects local livelihoods,” says Rohit Magotra, deputy director at Integrated Research & Action for Development, a New Delhi-based think tank.

In March 2024, UN Tourism launched a policy guidance for national tourism administrations to assist governments in developing climate action policies and initiatives to support low-carbon transition for tourism. It also provided examples from around the world on how to implement climate-enabling policies.

Dealing with unpredictability

According to Subimal Ghosh, a professor at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), India needs to focus on both adaptation and mitigation strategies. “In fact, I would say adaptation is more important. Currently, there are very limited adaptation strategies in place at the policy and implementation levels.”

When it comes to water, food, health, transportation or the infrastructure sector, decisions should be taken based on the weather forecast. “If any rigorous outdoor work or construction is being planned, we must check the forecast for the day or week. We have to become weather-smart. A mechanism must be designed to deal with unpredictable weather conditions,” adds Ghosh.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) says artificial intelligence, drones, Earth observation, advanced computing, the Internet of Things and virtual and augmented reality are six technologies critical for climate adaptation. According to director Mrutyunjay Mohapatra in an interview to PTI this April, the India Meteorological Department currently uses AI in a limited way, but plans to enhance models and techniques significantly in the next five years. He acknowledged the need for village-level information to provide sector-specific inputs in agriculture, health, urban planning, hydrology and environment.

Senior researcher Singh says that early warning systems must be strengthened to improve usability of advisories, and to make them more accessible to people. She adds that space must be earmarked for building blue-green infrastructure, and a budget kept aside in urban planning. In addition, a range of adaptive strategies need to be adopted for the most vulnerable in crowded urban spaces.

To this end, grassroots organisation Mahila Housing Trust, which works with women in 10 cities across India, has implemented many small-scale climate resilient initiatives at the homes of its members, such as using reflective paint, installing bamboo roofing, and targeted cool-roof programmes in vulnerable settlements.

The Compendium of Best Practices on Climate Action from Indian States reports that the role of regional and tailored initiatives is essential in achieving India’s national goal to address climate change. A WEF report details how local communities are adapting to climate crisis, including harvesting floodwater for agriculture, cropping traditional varieties to overcome agrarian crisis, and raising awareness around mangrove conservation in Mumbai, among others.

According to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (October 2015 to July 2023), incremental adaptation alone will not be enough for Asia, which is one of the most vulnerable to climate change: transformational change is the key. Interventions such as ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (for instance, precision irrigation, drip irrigation, collecting rainwater) as seen in South and Southeast Asian countries, or changing labour laws to reduce exposure to heat as seen in West Asia, would be the way forward, the report says. The biggest challenges that Asia will face under climate crisis are around water and food insecurity, poverty and inequality, and increased frequency and severity of extreme events, the report adds.

While climate crisis is threatening lives and livelihoods globally, all hope is not lost. Small-scale efforts, informed choices, improved sectoral policymaking, and implementing global, national and regional policies with sustained behavioural changes of local population can slow the crisis. Low carbon lifestyles such as saving energy at home, changing sources of energy, switching to electric vehicles, are among small-scale solutions that can go a long way in reducing emissions.

The writer is an independent journalist.

Queer romance is booming

Ayushi Saxena

There is no dearth of romance novels in the market — it is in fact one of the highest-selling genres in commercial fiction globally. Up until a decade ago, queer love stories may have been hard to come by in the market, but today, there are all manners of romance novels, covering the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, being published. Here is a short selection:

Leeward by Katie

Daysh (2023)

A satisfyingly slow-burn romance set in the 19th century amid the Napoleonic Wars, with a strong dose of mayhem, intrigue and piracy on the high seas.

You Should be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian (2024)

The not-so-shockingly homophobic sports industry of the 1960 is the setting for this uplifting romance between a star baseball player stuck in his worst slump and a reporter who wants to interview him. A definite must-read.

Happy Endings by Minita Sanghvi (2022)

A fairytale romance with all its trappings, this is the story of two beautiful and strong women, Krishi and Mahek, who have to navigate the glamourous yet treacherous world of Bollywood to get to their happily-ever-after.

One Night Only by Saumyaa Vohra (2023)

This book about love, sexuality and female bonding will probably make you want to take a trip with your friends. The bisexual protagonist portrayed with nuance and sensitivity is a bonus.

Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure by Courtney

Milan (2019)

What a time to be a reader, when romance isn’t just for the young. Mrs. Martin is 73 years old and ends up meeting Violetta, who’s a youthful 69. The romance that follows is enjoyable, funny and touching too.

The writer is a

consulting editor who

has worked on several award-winning and bestselling children’s books.

Sudipta Datta

The much-awaited sequel to Brooklyn works marvellously with Irish novelist Colm Tóibín ticking all the boxes

1 of 3 In the moment Actors Emory Cohen and Saoirse Ronan in the 2015 movie adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn; and (below) the author. (special arrangement and getty images)

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Sequels can be tricky, because however good the book is, it is always compared to the original. Mention the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and his debut novel Things Fall Apart has top-of-the-mind recall, not the sequel, No Longer at Ease.

Sometimes, a sequel is written after a long interval, like Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which appeared 34 years after her dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). It’s a lovely coincidence, of course, if they work as companion pieces, and in the case of Atwood, it does. Like it also does in Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton novels.

Writers usually do follow-up novels if they know they can access different characters in the original and embellish their stories. Colm Tóibín decided to write Long Island, the sequel to his celebrated novel, Brooklyn, published 15 years ago, when an image came to his mind.

A new novel by a master of contemporary Irish fiction is a gift. The 69-year-old Tóibín, shortlisted for the Booker Prize thrice, has ruled the literary world with his 11 novels, essays, poems and short stories. The sequel to Brooklyn works marvellously because Tóibín ticks all the boxes — it’s a story with upheavals and quiet joys, and new things to say, the characters have been mined further to give them layers of interiority, and the beautiful prose ensures the narrative never sags. And while it’s not imperative to read Brooklyn to appreciate Long Island as it is a great standalone novel, the predecessor completes it.

In the aftermath

We are not giving away spoilers, because Long Island starts with a big bang and it is this terrifying premise on which the whole story revolves. Eilis Lacey, married to Tony Fiorello for two decades, is seemingly happy in their Long Island home with two children, Rosella and Larry, till an Irishman comes knocking and drops a bombshell. Eilis’s husband, a “very good plumber”, has had an affair with the stranger’s wife; she is pregnant and he threatens to drop off the newborn at the Lacey-Fiorello home.

Actions have consequences, and the rest of the novel traces the aftermath. What will Eilis do? She may have immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s from Ireland, but she is still an outsider in the 1970s, and has built her life around domesticity. She has no peer support group, no one to turn to, unlike her husband Tony who has built a house on a plot where the rest of his family, his two brothers and his parents, also have homes.

Eilis decides to visit Enniscorthy, where her mother lives and is about to celebrate her 80th birthday. This is the town that Tóibín grew up in, and readers will get more atmospheric details of an Irish town of the 70s with its bars, quaint shops and homes without telephones or refrigerators than of the Long Island of the title.

Back to base

In Brooklyn, Eilis had gone home from New York to be with her mother after her sister Rose passed away suddenly. Tony, the Italian she gave her heart to, in a fit of desperation and certain she would not return, asks her to marry him — and they do, quietly. Back home in Ireland, Eilis keeps the marriage a secret from her mother and friends, and that “made every day she had spent in America a sort of fantasy, something she could not match with the time she was spending at home”. She meets an Irishman, Jim Farrell, who will inherit a bar, and thereby hangs many a tale. Soon, “the idea that she would leave all of this — the rooms of the house once more familiar and warm and comforting — and go back to Brooklyn and not return for a long time again frightened her”.

But Eilis does go back, and Long Island picks up the story decades later, with Farrell, now getting a lot of attention, who wishes “he had been with her [Eilis] all the years, but there was nothing could be done about it now”.

Will Eilis and Farrell be together? Tóibín’s eloquent storytelling doesn’t quite include settling things for either Eilis or the other characters. Readers will yearn for a third novel, though Tóibín isn’t really a fan of series writing, unless a compelling image crops up.

Disruptive desire and the Indian male

Joshua Muyiwa

In setting out to capture the relationship between cishet men, Saikat Majumdar exposes their inability to convey their innermost feelings

1 of 2 Beyond labels Youngsters on a beach in Goa. (Getty Images)Balaji Srinivasan

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Having grown up queer in the 90s, I’ve looked on with envy at the ease between heterosexual men. As usual, we’ve got an ugly word — bromance — to name the texture of these male friendships. As queer, we will always be the juju in every room that viscerally reminds everyone of sexual desire and deviance. They might not be entirely wrong; having been — like lionesses in the Serengeti — stealthy and secretive, it’s hard for us to turn it off. They’re right that we are always watching but wrong that it is always sexual. But, every outward expression of ours goes through a process fraught with smoothing away the edges; a handshake, a hug, any humanity with another body is tense.

In Saikat Majumdar’s latest novel, The Remains of the Body, this is the kind of tension he sets out to capture. From the first sentence, we are swimming (and seeing) the world through the protagonist Kaustav’s inner monologue. We see the apple of his eye, Avik, floating in a pool at his home in La Jolla, a neighbourhood in San Diego. Like Kaustav, I — the reader — too was startled by Sunetra’s voice, a few lines into the first page. Quite quickly, the book reveals itself to be about the trio. Avik and Sunetra are married to each other. Avik and Kaustav are chaddi buddies. (Strangely, later, this affectionate phrase, a testament to male friendships born in childhood, is used literally, when Kaustav wonders if Sunetra cares about Avik and him having “shared underwear as teenagers”) Kaustav and Sunetra are friends because of their common enemy, or is it lover — what’s the difference, really?

In an authorial twist, Majumdar seems to side-step the obvious; and therefore, Kaustav is straight. Instead, the novel positions us to see his desire towards Avik as the kind I’ve always assumed straight men feel for each other. Within the novel, their time spent together isn’t ever enough for Kaustav. It is framed as the potential to be something more if their physical intimacy was unlocked.

View from the outside

Other observations make their cameos into this landscape of homo (social or sexual?) desire between Avik and Kaustav. There’s Avik and Sunetra’s “quiet dance of marriage”, Sunetra and Kaustav’s relationship, North American academia and Bengalis in America. The intention is to expose the realness of these situations but it doesn’t always land. When Majumdar does sharpen the sabre, he pricks at the truth. Like the cutting words of Kwesi, a fellow academic, who “make[s] fun of everything in his thick Ghanaian accent”, who calls “Whiteboy Marxists” a cult because “they dance around him, do voodoo, totally irrational exotic stuff. We’ve got to civilise them”.

Majumdar takes these words to heart while describing the Bengali community, who are reduced to “fixing the Indian government”, “trying to bathroom sing through the parties” and eating a lot of “curried goat”. Why not just say mangshor jhol, kosha mangsho, mutton rezala, posto mangsho, niramish mangsho and more, which would have been vehicles to transport us, invite us, welcome us. Instead, much like other moments, we, the readers, are meant to be outside of them, just observing to report in shorthand. In the novel, these attempts to appear universal render them awkward, all angles.

Destination love

While Majumdar’s Kaustav ably observes Sunetra, he doesn’t flesh her out enough. She is someone “whose angularity could hurt and kill you with desire”, who has “elegant girlishness”, and is “a little girl playing at being big, wearing her mom’s clothes”. She’s a foil for Kaustav to imagine he would be a better partner to the “big baby” Avik. She’s the stand-in body for Kaustav and Avik to have finally had sex. But, even post-coital, Kaustav and Sunetra remain two cars using two different roads to reach the same destination of Avik. One thinking they’ve got the short end of the stick; the other knowing they actually have.

Within its pages, Majumdar’s The Remains of the Body does speak to the homo (social and sexual) nature of the Indian man and its particular patriarchy. It speaks to heterosexual relationships, where wives keep the friendships fed. Arranging their husband’s social calendar; making sure like a plant, he spends enough time in sunlight. It speaks to the inability of Indian men to find a language to express their desires that don’t always sound like a diktat. It addresses Indian men weaponising their silences. But, it doesn’t illuminate the ways for us — Indian men, both straight and queer — to find ourselves outside of these shames.

The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based poet and writer.

Ahead of her time

Urvashi Butalia

Nico Slate’s biography of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a woman who imagined a future for her country, is a story that is both old and new

1 of 4 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom Nico Slate HarperCollins ₹799

2 of 4 Outgoing and free (Left) Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Sarojini Naidu were active in the Progressive Writers’ Movement; and (below) Kamaladevi with Jawaharlal Nehru. (Special arrangement)

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Nico Slate’s biography of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay brings her vividly and elegantly to life. Empathetic, non-judgmental, admiring, carefully critical and at times almost breathless in trying to keep up with the speed and intensity of Kamaladevi’s life, Slate weaves together a story that is both old and new. In doing so, he reopens interesting key questions about biography writing.

I approached Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom with curiosity. Despite the fact that mainstream history, and indeed mainstream historians are, by and large, yet to recognise Kamaladevi’s many contributions to what one might call the making of modern India, she has been much written about, and indeed she herself was a prolific writer. So, the archive that is available to the biographer is rich, and variously populated. There are her own writings, a number of biographies of her, collections of her papers edited by eminent scholars; then there’s the other archive, of official papers and documents, or letters, records. There are photos of her travels, the institutions she set up, the speeches she gave, newspaper reports at home and abroad, and there is a vast circle of people, many still with us, who knew her and worked with her. With much of this in the public domain, the reader may well ask: what more is there to say?

The question though, as Slate’s biography demonstrates, is not so much about what ‘more’ there is to say, or even what is there to say that is new (although there is some of that in this story), but really what you choose to tell, and how you tell it.

A city for the displaced

I was delighted that Slate begins his story with one of my favourite incidents in Kamaladevi’s life, the setting up, despite considerable opposition, of a planned city to house the thousands of displaced Partition refugees who flooded Delhi. The city of Faridabad was a daring and visionary experiment led by a woman (and her team) that testified to being able to think, in a moment of complete upheaval, of what is needed for rehabilitation in the long term.

Indeed, this is what also marks Slate’s narrative as distinct. Even as he describes Kamaladevi’s intense involvement in issues of the time, whether it is Gandhi’s campaigns, or the pull of politics, or her many writings, her travels in India and abroad, her strong views on inequality and racial discrimination, or her commitment to art, culture, theatre, craft, there is always something that lifts the involvement in the here and now and informs it with a vision of the future. Here was a woman who, for all her faults and weaknesses, which the author gives us a good dose of, did not hesitate to imagine a future for the country whose battle for freedom she was so integrally a part of.

Multi-faceted personality

Another of Slate’s particular contributions to the writing of this life is his attempt to define what ‘freedom’ meant to her: not just the freeing of India from the shackles of the British, but the freeing of India from itself, from the many hierarchies it carried within, from the inequalities that were rife, from the patriarchies that were deep.

The Kamaladevi whose portrait Slate draws, emerges as a many faceted, complex and often contradictory person who engaged with all of these. Born to privilege, she developed a critique of class and caste discrimination in Indian society early on, which stayed with her as she transformed into a socialist and a nationalist. Fiercely private, politically committed, strongly nationalist and yet with an acute sense of the need to address class, caste and gender discrimination within India, Kamaladevi also remained outspoken (sometimes at considerable cost to herself) and true to her beliefs. This, and so much more, made her one of the most unusual women of our time.

Minor quibble

Perhaps the one — minor — quibble I have is when Slate offers a gentle critique, or seems to be mystified by, Kamaladevi suggesting that women take up embroidery. He seems somewhat surprised that this confident, outgoing woman, with such a rich history of arguing for the rights of women (and others) is exhorting women to take up this homely task. Would it not be just as interesting to speculate that embroidery can be both creative and subversive for those who don’t have many avenues for self-expression?

But this is a quibble, and doesn’t take away from the value of this book. And I’m willing to let it go for the many other details Slate includes — the tearing up of saris to make the flag, the invading of the Bombay stock exchange to sell salt, making a home in which her husband’s ex-lover lives alongside her — and so much more in the public domain that made Kamaladevi the woman she was.

The reviewer is a writer, historian, publisher.

Fractured identity

Rajiv Bhatia

A rare handbook that successfully explores the complex geopolitical dynamics of South Asia

1 of 2 The Routledge Handbook of South Asia Region, Security and Connectivity Edited by Adluri Subramanyam Raju and R. Srinivasan Routledge ₹1,356 (Amazon)

2 of 2 In the pits Rohingya women at Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh shout slogans at a protest rally. (AP)

The six blind men of the proverbial story touching an elephant and describing it partially fail in the task assigned to them, but they succeed in conveying its complexity. In contrast, the 25 scholars belonging to different disciplines, carefully chosen by the two editors, Adluri Subramanyam Raju and R. Srinivasan, of The Routledge Handbook of South Asia Region, Security and Connectivity, have succeeded on both fronts. They convincingly analyse the bewildering diversity, size and scale of the challenges of South Asia, helping us to grasp its essential reality, even though it is one of the most complex regions of the world. The handbook is a rare treasure for those interested in deciphering the history, ethnic identities, colonial legacy, political economy, environmental risks, and geopolitical dynamics of South Asia.

Stretching west to east from the Iran-Afghanistan frontier to the India-Myanmar border and north to south from the Himalayan mountains to the Indian Ocean, South Asia is home to one-sixth of humankind. Of the eight countries that constitute it, India has the largest population in the world. South Asia’s salvation and mutual interest lie in the path of cooperation and integration rather than confrontation and divisiveness. If this objective reality is so easy to grasp and articulate, why does the region remain one of the least integrated regions of the world?

The answers lie in the combined wisdom offered by this book. Divided into five parts, the introduction and 24 chapters, it delves into the nature of South Asia as a region; its political, social and security systems; its key economic facets with a focus on commerce and connectivity; human security issues covering climate change, water resources, energy security and potential for sustainable development; and the role and position of South Asia in a multipolar world. The last part offers a critical comparison of experiments in regional integration in the region and elsewhere (e.g., EU and ASEAN) as well as a penetrating analysis of the approaches adopted by the U.S. and China in dealing with South Asian states.

Three key takeaways

Several important conclusions emerge from this well-researched volume, and three need to be highlighted.

One, the region has been moulded by a colonial legacy that left it with “intense bloodshed” apparently inspired by religious divides even though the populace shared “more commonalities in culture than the dissimilarities based on religion.” And yet ethnic diversities persist in hampering the growth of “the composite new national identities.”

Two, South Asia, which marched on the path of socialist experiment in its search for social justice for decades, experienced the winds of change brought by globalisation in the 1990s. As a result, the region changed direction to step into the era of economic liberalisation. The sustained economic growth of India and Bangladesh in the past three decades gives credence to the view that real economic cooperation at the regional level has “the potential to place South Asia as a major economic powerhouse in the world.”

Three, the region faces many diverse challenges, alongside its unique and characteristic similarities. Learning from Europe and Southeast Asia, South Asia should — and can — work to attain “constructive regionalism.” This requires enlightened leadership not just in one or two states but throughout the length and breadth of the region. That, I am afraid, is a tall order because politics often trumps idealism.

This work covers a vast canvas, breaking new ground and offering valuable insights. Perusing it is not for the fainthearted, but persistence will prove rewarding.

The reviewer is a former ambassador, columnist and author, besides being a Distinguished Fellow at Gateway House.

The face of science

Ramya Kannan

How Soumya Swaminathan rose to the highest levels in her field

1 of 2 Total devotion Soumya Swaminathan with her father M.S. Swaminathan. (K.V. Srinivasan)

2 of 2 At the Wheel of Research: An Exclusive Biography of Dr. Soumya Swaminathan Anuradha Mascarenhas Bloomsbury ₹599

If the birth of Christ was the significant event that determined the counting of years in the past, in the modern world, it is probably COVID. The world as we know it will, at some point of time, be split into Before COVID, and After COVID epochs. It is no surprise that when profiling one of the key leaders who led the battle against the SARS-COV-2 virus, this new temporal duality asserts itself with ease. No better place to start, actually.

At the heart of At the Wheel of Research is an attempt to capture the multifarious personality of Soumya Swaminathan, who much of the world became acquainted with, while she was at the WHO, helming it as Chief Scientist during the pandemic. In the BC part of the narrative, captured intricately here, Dr. Soumya was always famous in her neck of the woods, in the scientific circles in India, having pushed boundaries, and glass ceilings; and standing for ethical, yet compassionate care. Some of it has definitely been absorbed as she grew up, ensconced in the liberal and progressive, scientific atmosphere of a home built by her parents — renowned agricultural scientist and father of the Green Revolution M.S. Swaminathan and educationist Mina Swaminathan. Clearly, she has gone much further since, her steely composure and ability to empathise with people complimenting her capacity for reason, and her faith in science standing her in good stead.

Providing a context

A journalist, Anuradha Mascarenhas employs the tools of the trade, recording the significant events, and providing the contexts. She’s working with a wealth of information and an inspiring life with several decades of achievements, and while that’s good material, it can also be overwhelming. Dr. Soumya’s life and works are lessons in scholarship, yes, but also hard work, persistence, weathering the rough rides, and sterling leadership. The author is not fazed though, she manages to bring to readers a nearly scientific account of a woman who rose to the highest levels in science.

Dr. Soumya Swaminathan was the face of science, of reason, for many in the world, during the dark, dark, days of COVID. As we sat quivering in our homes, her posts on social media and her interviews to television channels were the steadying force. Striking out with science and for science, while at the WHO, with her impeccable communication, and explanations of complex scientific terms, undeterred by trolling armies of anti-vaxxers, she guided the world back to sanity. She gave advice on protocols, best practices, and broke down the nearly daily advances in research and technology for better understanding. A life that must indeed be chronicled, never mind that Dr. Soumya herself first wondered what the point of a biography might be. In the interests of science itself, aren’t we glad she had a change of heart?

Nidhi Gupta

Rabindra Sangeet and Bollywood songs to train rides and art. Four creators share monsoon-drenched memories and inspirations

1 of 6 Beyond the Body and Gender by Debashish Paul.

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3 of 6 From Our Conspiring Hosts, a series of paintings inspired by the Amazon rainforest after a storm.

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Rains have always sparked artistic imagination. Vincent Van Gogh’s rain lashed over empty farmland in intense, slanted lines; miniature artists in the Mughal and Rajput traditions drew dark clouds over lush green fields in which Krishna and his gopis danced; and in a meta commentary on individuality, René Magritte poured his own bowler-hatted self from the sky in Golconda. The arrival of the monsoon can turn us all into pluviophiles, but perhaps it affects artists more than the rest of us. We asked four artists from across India what the season means to them.

Garima Gupta

Artist and researcher, Mumbai

I moved to Bombay late September of 2012 and everyone warned me of the awful October heat. I braced myself for the worst. But October decided to spare me that year; it rained every evening! Tucked in the lane flanked by a Portuguese church on one end and SiddhiVinayak on the other, I watched people walk in either direction to their place of worship in pouring rain. Older couples hand in hand, wet crows that hung upside down from electric cables, lush green rain trees. Had it not been for that monsoon, I may have never learnt to love Bombay.

l Good and bad: I am an August born and the memory of the monsoon starting with a roar around my birthday is deeply embedded. Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself that untimely rains are wrecking standing crops and causing damage. But then we as a people have also abolished all possibilities of joy because guilt and shame are dominating our thoughts. We don’t pull up our authorities when things fall apart, but will learn to kill our only chance of joy.

l Rainy day favourites: I love the Bollywood songs from the 1970s and 80s, where the protagonists are enjoying the rains. There’s something about that simple joy.

Orijit Sen

Artist and graphic designer, Goa

One of my most vivid memories is travelling on the now defunct metre-gauge train that used to run between Vasco da Gama station and Miraj Junction during the height of the monsoons. I stood at the doorway of my carriage as it crossed a bridge halfway up the swollen Dudhsagar Falls. Even at a distance, I could feel the fine spray. In the time it took us to cross the bridge, I was drenched from head to toe!

l Fresh eyes: As an artist, I experience the monsoons as a transformative season. The colours of landscape change dramatically from shades of ochre, olive and brown, to deep, saturated greens. I find the palette in my work is always influenced by this.

l Works that inspire: One of my favourite painters is Nainsukh of Guler. A painting of his shows a woman in an orange odhni running, as lightning flashes. The entire composition is full of energy and drama.

Debashish Paul

Performance artist, Varanasi

In Banaras, when the water climbs, we head to the Nepali mandir on Tulsi Ghat, which is located at a height. You can see the whole valley move. When I came to Banaras for my Masters in 2019, the monsoon had just begun. On my first evening here, I found two young boys conducting the aarti at Tulsi Ghat, and I was infatuated with one of them. I’d visit daily for six months just to see him; I’d watch the way his body moved and transformed. That became the inspiration for my first performance work, Beyond the Body and Gender.

l Rainy day favourites: I have a deep appreciation for Rabindra Sangeet. In Tagore’s songs, such as ‘Aaji jhorer raate’, ‘Megher Pore Megh Jomechhe’, and others, I can vividly see my village, in the Nadiya district of West Bengal, where we’d make boats out of banana leaves and fish in the streets when the rains came. In the monsoon songs of Tagore, you feel as if you’re soaring in the sky and smelling the rain.

Sheetal Mallar

Photographer and artist, Mumbai

After these brutal summers, I find the monsoon really romantic. The city is so chaotic, and this season is cleansing in so many ways. For photography, monsoon helps you create a mood. The light is more beautiful, the colour palette changes. Moody, melancholy feelings — the season’s really emotive. But I also find myself doing a lot of my drawings and paintings in the monsoon, for which I feel I need to go more inwards.

l Rainy day favourites: I love to swim in the rain, and go for long walks — I own two pairs of gum boots. Songs like Shubha Mudgal’s ‘Ab Ke Saavan’ and Billie Holiday’s ‘Stormy Weather’ sound sweeter. And it’s the time to feast on bhajjiya and samosas.

The writer is an independent journalist based in Mumbai, writing on culture, lifestyle and technology.

Easy like Sunday morning

Berty Ashley

What has June 30 ever given us?

Leading by design What was Swedish billionaire Ingvar Kamprad known for? (Reuters) Reuters

1 On this day in 1860, the legendary Oxford ______ debate took place at the Oxford University Museum after the publication of a seminal paper. It is where Bishop Samuel Wilberforce asked Thomas Huxley whether either of his grandparents descended from monkeys. To which Huxley replied that he would not be ashamed about that, but would be, to be connected to a man who obscures the truth. What was this debate about, the first of many?

2 On this day in 1894, this iconic bridge across the Thames opened in London. At that time, it was the largest and most complex bascule bridge. It is, however, routinely mistaken to be the ‘London Bridge’, made famous by the nursery rhyme. It gets its name from the fortress present nearby. Which iconic bridge is this found in postcards and insta stories?

3 On this day in 1898, the Winton Motor Carriage Company published an ad in Scientific American using the headline “dispense with a horse”. What was this the very first ad of?

4 On this day in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s novel was published. Set during the civil war, it follows the life of a spoilt daughter of a rich plantation owner. It was a bestseller, crossing 30 million copies. In 1939, it was adapted into a movie under the same name, and it went on to win an Oscar for best picture. What is the title of the book?

5 On this day in 1937, London introduced a new telephone number — 999. This came about as a response to a fire in a house in 1935, in which five women were killed. This was the very first number of what kind of service?

6 June 30, 1938, was the first appearance of this character in DC Comics’ Action Comics Series issue #1, the most valuable comic book in the world. Developed by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, this character in the book can leap 1/8 of a mile, outrun a train and carry a 20-storey building. This was the debut of which character?

7 Born this day in 1969, this person is considered one of the greatest attacking batsmen and all-rounder of all time. He is currently the only player to score over 10,000 runs and capture more than 300 wickets in ODI cricket. His explosive style led to his country winning the 1996 Cricket World Cup and a school conspiracy theory that he had a spring in his bat. Who was this batsman?

8 On this day in 1972, an extra second was added to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) system. This was done to accommodate the difference caused by the slowdown of Earth’s rotation. By what name is this second known, a reference to another addition that happens once every four years?

9 On this day in 1973, passengers aboard a flight intercepted the path of a total solar eclipse over Mauritania and follows the moon’s shadow. They were able to experience the longest total eclipse observation of 74 minutes. Using which supersonic commercial flight were they able to achieve this?

10 On this day in 2016, Ingvar Kamprad opened the very first museum at the premises of the very first store he opened in Älmhult, Sweden. Known world over for its ready-to-assemble furniture, this company is now the world’s largest furniture retailer. Named after the initials of his name, the farm and village where he was born, what company is this?

A molecular biologist from Madurai, our quizmaster enjoys trivia and music, and is working on a rock ballad called ‘Coffee is a Drink, Kaapi is an Emotion’. @bertyashley

Seeking information

Bob Jones

Both vulnerable, South deals

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The auction and the final contract in today’s deal were routine, but the play was a step above.

The opening spade lead went to East’s ace and East returned a spade to South’s king. There were 12 easy tricks if the missing clubs split 3-2, so declarer gave some thought to what might be done should one of the opponents have four clubs to the jack. Many players would cash the ace and queen of clubs, thinking that they could only pick up a poor club split if West had the length. This declarer took his time before playing any clubs.

South started by cashing the queen of spades, noting that West started with five spades. The ace, king, and queen of diamonds revealed that West also started with five diamonds. South led a heart to dummy’s ace and continued with the king of hearts. When West followed to two hearts, his original club holding was, at most, a singleton. South cashed dummy’s king of clubs and continued with the 10, intending to run it if East played low. East, however, covered with the jack, so declarer crossed back to dummy with the queen of hearts and finessed East for the nine of clubs. Nicely played! South had done well to cash his high diamonds before the high hearts, but he knew that he might need a late entry to dummy.

The immortal

Sudha Devi Nayak

Great poems stand the test of time, with generations down the line going back to them again and again to explain the quirkiness and wonders of the world

To understand the human condition, we go back to memorable lines from poets which have stood the test of time with their truth and relevance. Any situation or event can trigger in us a sense of deja vu, and lines that lie in the synapses of memory spring to mind.

While we are familiar with the titans of literature, there are many less-renowned authors whose lines we quote without being aware of them, their names not up for a quick recall.

Thomas Gray, the precursor of the Romantics, has written one of the most-loved, oft-quoted poems in the English language, Elegy written in a country churchyard, full of wistful melancholy and a reflection on the transience of life.

The lines “Full many a gem of purest ray serene/ The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear...” tell us of unacknowledged genius in obscure corners, those who lived faithfully quiet lives and rest in unvisited tombs. The line “The paths of glory lead but to the grave” is a gentle reminder of our mortality.

Shakespeare, the ultimate wordsmith, had immortal lines on every conceivable vicissitude of life and dominated his age and time, his contemporaries largely living in his shadow. Yet, when we need to describe the mesmerising beauty of a woman, we turn to Christopher Marlowe’s “mighty line”, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium... Oh thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars”. These lines bestow bounteous praise with an overwhelming emotion on an object of beauty.

Movers and shakers

Then there is Ode by Arthur O’Shaughnessy in which a chorus of artists, poets and dreamers, “the movers and shakers of this world”, envision a new world heralding a change in the existing order. Many may have lost the battle but the vision endures in its glorious effort.

William Johnson Cory, a schoolmaster at Eton threw light on the enduring legacy of friendship and loss: “They told me Heraclitus, they told me you were dead/ They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed/ I wept as I remembered how often you and I/ have tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky”.

Heraclitus was an ancient Greek poet on whose death his friend Callimachus wrote an elegy. Cory’s is its English version. Grief often brings us to this poem.

Edwin Markham, an American poet, inspired by the painting of Jean Francois Millet, wrote Man with the Hoe on the plight of the peasant, a sad miserable figure burdened with work, with little empathy from his fellow beings. “The emptiness of ages in his face/ and on his back the burden of the world”. The most telling line in the poem is “Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop”.

The poet’s anguished cry is an invocation to the world: “Oh masters, lords and rulers in all lands/ How will the future reckon with this man/ How answer his brute question in that hour/ when whirlwinds of rebellion are let loose?” At once an appeal and interrogation of the world’s conscience, it addresses itself even today to the humanitarian crises looming large around us.

The poem was called by philosopher, peace activist and novelist Jay William Hudson “the battle cry of the next thousand years”.

The famous nursery rhyme Twinkle, twinkle little star by Jane Wyman, handed down generations, has gladdened the hearts of countless children. The poem runs through four stanzas, though the first is the most memorable.

The little star epitomises the Socratic wonder of every child at the mystery of the universe. The poem has lent itself to several adaptations, translations, musical scores and even a parody by the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

So much for these lines that have been canonised by the hearts and voices of countless people.

The fellowship of the dark hall

Pranathi Narain

Collective enjoyment of a film in a cinema has its advantages

Watching a movie from the comfort of home has its advantages. The popcorn comes quick and fast from the kitchen without the hassle of waiting in long queues, and no rushed visits to the food kiosk and washroom during the interval.

At a simple press of the play button, the star-studded cast of the streaming movie patiently waits for you to refill your snack bowl before exploding into action again. But there is no doubt that some parts of the film-watching experience in cinemas simply can’t be replicated, no matter how big your home theatre is or how diverse your streaming platforms are.

During a recent visit to a cinema, the trailers flooded the screen before the film could begin. For some unearthly reason, much to the chagrin of the viewers, the trailers stretched to nearly half an hour. I observed in amusement that only in a cinema can the audience truly unite, as was illustrated by a loud chorus of “About time!” by the disgruntled viewers when the film started to roll at last. A similar bond is formed during those scattered peals of laughter at on-screen jokes, those collective rebukes when someone’s phone rings in the middle of the film, or even a good-natured, witty reply to a dialogue which earns appreciative laughter from the entire hall.

Another instance I witnessed recently that was a testament to the solidarity of the audience was the collective applause that resounded through the theatre at the end of a movie. Some viewers even shed tears at the ordeal the main character had gone through in the desert throughout the duration of the film. The audience felt obliged to congratulate the man on screen for surviving an arduous journey, whether or not he acknowledges the applause. One viewer begins a slow clap, and within seconds, the hall is engulfed in roaring applause as lights turn on.

What strikes me as truly fascinating is the fact that within the bright, sound-proof interiors of the cinema, we are simply people jostling to find seats and spilling popcorn in the aisles in our rush, strangers of unknown backgrounds.

But as the room fades to black, a blanket of anonymity descends upon the room.

Tuning into classical music

Adithi A.

Good compositions allow room for creativity and improvisation

“People love what other people are passionate about.” I had grossly underestimated the extent to which such passion might cause a transformation in one.

Joining the underrated and niche classical arts club in university, I immediately found my haven.

The people were introverted much like me and shared a common appreciation for culture and tradition. They were extremely devoted to, and passionate about, classical music and dance. Having learnt Carnatic music since the age of eight, I was expected to be a decent enough vocalist, that is, had I not treated music completely as a hobby, and confined my practice sessions to the 15-minute drive to my music class.

Deeper problem

But there was also a deeper problem. Though I respected classical music, I was not exposed to the brilliance and dynamic nature of the art form. It seemed archaic, rigid and quite often, distant.

In college, my first experience in the club was a live Carnatic concert by Ramkrishnan Murthy. It was my first concert, and it blew my mind. I obsessively recorded videos and shared them with my mother and sister. I was amazed by the beauty of the compositions, their presentation, and how there was room for creativity and improvisation. The club hosted jamming sessions, called Baithaks, which allowed me to admire classical music in its entirety.

My perception was completely overturned as I listened in awe to instruments such as the harmonium, tabla, flute, violin and sitar blending harmoniously with the honey-sweet, crystal-clear voices of some of the most talented singers. I immensely enjoyed having elaborate discussions about the nature of Ragas or anecdotes about composers.

My lifestyle has changed since my induction into the club. I now hunt for classical concerts in my city.

Nurturing a patch of green

Tanvi Soni

Out of the countless things that one can do at leisure every day, I chose urban gardening. In my make-do garden and usefully constrained utility balcony, I welcomed the first few members of what I had hoped would flourish into a large family. And I was quite excited to share my home with the most colourful collection of succulents, flowers, ferns and more such.

The first momentous occasion in my green adventure came on the day when the first flower blossomed in the hot, humid air. And though it looked a little frailer than I had expected, I still cherish it as it was the first plant that I was parenting.

However, the bashful flower, trying to smile through the bud-less branches, would soon find itself arrested by my unrestrained apprehensions. Its morning would begin with a nutritious cocktail of vegetable remnants religiously soaked in water every night, a rich helping of dried tea leaves, and a daily shower of home-made fungicide. Every day, I would douse it with love and yet another home-made social media-recommended concoction to help it bloom faster and fuller.

Soon my commitment towards what I was cultivating as my new hobby would be ruthlessly tested. Heatwaves would scorch the soil, and the only new shoots growing relentlessly tall would be of a certain unidentified weed that would be plucked and torn away weeks later. Slimy stealthy caterpillars would voraciously feed on the leaves and flowers.

However, one day, the sunlight bounced off a hitherto unseen shiny green leaf shivering behind the dark big one. I could not ignore the rekindling that the reflecting sun rays had sparked in me. Every morning, I would walk in with a jug of water and cautious optimism. A few days later, the plant that I had shifted into shade showed signs of resurgence. The brown leaves dried off, and new shoots emerged. The earthy fragrance of its wet soil became a harbinger of its renewed health. And so, the adventure continues.

Jaydeep Sarkar

Why queer joy needs space on Indian screens and cursory LGBTQIA+ mentions might reek of charity

1 of 6 Confident voices (Clockwise from top left) Karla Sofía Gascón in Emily Perez; Sridevi in Mr. India; Konkona Sen and Tillotama Shome in Nayantara’s Necklace; Vijay Sethupathi in Super Deluxe; Daniella Mendonca in Rainbow Rishta; and filmmaker Jaydeep Sarkar.

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Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit in the 90s defined queer.

As someone recently told me, the best definition of being queer is ‘when you can be your absolute authentic self without having to fit the prescribed morals of society’. A lot of the cinema of the 90s saw women celebrating their bodies and their sexuality, without ever giving away their agency. Madhuri and Sridevi were the closest I came to seeing desire being celebrated.

I’m always asked the question: ‘Is your next story a queer story?’ I feel it’s an unfair and unimaginative question. It can be a cishet (cisgender heterosexual) love story and still be a queer film because I look at life, desire and relationships outside of society’s binaries.

The minute you try to box people, you are doing them a disservice. The reductionist label undermines my other identities — I’m also a Bengali filmmaker, a Mumbai-based filmmaker. I’ve made Nayantara’s Necklace, which is about two women bonding over many idle afternoons and talking about their desire for the men in their lives. It is the politics of desire, whether queer or straight, that interests me the most.

Realities of a

hyper-capitalist world

I hate the word ‘representation’ because it reeks of charity. It suggests that in a largely straight world a few stray mentions should be enough to acknowledge our existence. You see a lot of token queer characters in mainstream shows and films today. But show after show, they either die in the end, or they kill people, or are just comic tropes. It has reduced us to victims, villains or clowns. It’s symptomatic of the fact that these filmmakers see us as the ‘other’.

I remember watching a show last year, at the end of which a gay man kills his lover and then dies immediately after. That sensational end was celebrated by critics. The audience, however, learned nothing about the couple — not their pain, their loneliness, or even what drove them to the act, except that ‘the world is cruel to them’. The gays came in just to fill a plot hole in a cishet narrative.

A lot of people may feel that the representation box has been ticked with these roles, but who has it actually helped? It’s not going to help a queer person who is hoping to find the strength to come out.

What’s missing in our shows is queer joy. Humour and subversion are so much a part of our history and our lives, and it’s hardly made it to our cinema. I feel we need to tell lighter, more positive stories of queer love. This was the main reason why I wanted to make Rainbow Rishta (Amazon Prime Video). Predictably, one review of the show stated it’s ‘not deep enough… surely their lives can’t be that easy!” I was amused at how the critic couldn’t fathom a queer life that wasn’t sad. The review was sweet triumph for what I set out to do: break the trauma narrative around queer folx.

What I’m really interested in is how to sell queer stories. We live in a hyper-capitalist world and queer films will get made only if they get viewers. I wonder when an Indian trans actor will be celebrated on a global stage, like Karla Sofía Gascón, who won the Cannes Best Actress award for Emily Perez.

There is some great independent queer cinema being made, but when will mainstream Hindi cinema have its own Kaathal, backed by a big star like Mammootty — a film that takes you close to the queer experience with empathy and grace. Or Super Deluxe, where Vijay Sethupathi played a trans woman. We urgently need this churning, to tell queer stories confidently and at par with other mainstream cinema, and sell tickets and provoke conversations in living rooms.

We need more stories

from small towns

When I made Rainbow Rishta, I was very clear that I wanted it to be diverse — not only in terms of orientation and gender, but also geography. So, I looked for stories in small towns. What I discovered there was very ironic; small town India is far more progressive than metropolitan India.

I have encountered a lot more queerphobia in Bandra than I did in Daniella Mendonca’s Bhayandar. The suburb is full of small-scale industries run out of people’s homes. In a neighbourhood where people live hard lives, every little joy is precious. So when Daniella, a transwoman, decided to marry Joel, a cishet man, all of Bhayandar came out to celebrate. Morality remains the bane of the middle class.

I’ve experienced this in my own life, too. I had never allowed myself to dream of a sasural, of the kind I had seen in the movies of Sooraj Barjatya, growing up. But then I met my partner, and later his family based in Jamshedpur. My mother-in-law is my role model. I’ve seen her walk into rooms and shatter every prejudice with her confident support and love. I have seen people feel diminished by their own biases, when they encounter someone as empathetic as her.

Are we on the right path?

Quantitatively, there are more gay characters on screen now. While they are not being ridiculed, they are definitely being patronised and stereotyped. We are nowhere close to where we should be. However, I feel it’s all a continuum, and we are taking the right turns.

The campy films have happened, the trauma plots have happened, now queer joy must come in. We need to be more irreverent, fearless, and cheeky to make queer cinema that will have an impact.

The writer is a Mumbai-based filmmaker.

— As told to

Surya Praphulla Kumar

Spells and a reluctant bride

Women are more than capable of saving themselves, says Phuphee. They don’t need magic, maybe just a helping hand

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Years ago, on a hot summer’s day, Phuphee and I were lazing on the verandah. It was so hot that everyone refused to eat lunch and, instead, chose to nibble on cool cucumbers from the kitchen garden, which Phuphee drizzled with some honey and dusted with chilli powder and salt.

We were both looking up at the blazing blue sky, trying to discern animal shapes in the clouds, when we heard footsteps. We peeped through the rails to see a spindly man with a walking stick making his way towards us.

‘It is Hassan saab from Tengwani,’ Phuphee whispered. Tengwani was a village close by. She greeted him and asked after his family. She offered him a plate of honey-chilli cucumbers, which he decimated before washing it down with a large glass of cold lassi. After letting out a rather long and extended belch, he turned towards her and said, ‘My dearest sister, I am in desperate need of your help. If you do not help me, this devastated brother of yours will not know what to do with himself.’

Phuphee watched him for a minute or two, an expression of mild annoyance mixed with curiosity on her face. She lit a couple of cigarettes and smoked quietly. ‘What can I do to alleviate the deep suffering you find yourself in?’ she asked.

The gentleman narrated his tale of woe. He was a retired teacher whose wife had died many years ago. His children were grown up and married, and lived in the city. He wanted to get married again. He had a very handsome pension of ₹6,000, which he felt really ought to make any woman happy. No, he did not need help in finding a lady. He had already found one and that was where he needed help. The lady in question was a young widow of 36. She had two sons. Her husband had died unexpectedly a few years ago, and she had so far refused all offers of marriage.

‘You want me to talk to her on your behalf?’ asked Phuphee.

‘No,’ he said. He had tried that many times and she had flatly refused. ‘I see,’ Phuphee replied. ‘I guess there isn’t anything else I can do then.’

‘There is,’ he said rather excitedly. ‘Can you put a spell on her so she marries me?’

Phuphee closed her eyes for a few seconds and then said, ‘You want me to cast a spell on her, even though she has repeatedly rejected your offer of marriage?’

‘Yes,’ he stated, slightly out of breath. I could see Phuphee cross her brows and purse her lips. ‘Leave it with me, I will see what can be done,’ she said.

Once he left, I asked her, ‘Why does he want to marry her if she doesn’t want to marry him?’

‘Because he is a man and his sense of entitlement overshadows any common sense he ought to have,’ she replied.

That evening, Phuphee went to see the lady and returned just in time for dinner. After dinner, I asked her what the woman had said. She had told Phuphee that her husband, whom she loved very dearly, had been an honourable man and a wonderful husband.

A week later Hassan saab was back. ‘There is a huge obstacle in your way,’ Phuphee told him. ‘The reason the lady is not agreeing is because your enemies have put a spell on her.’

He looked relieved and then his nostrils flared up. ‘I knew her refusal could not have had anything to do with me,’ he said, running his fingers through the three strands of hair that clung desperately to his scalp.

‘There is a way out. The spell is strong but it can be broken. Every Thursday, you must go to Makhdoom saab’s shrine and offer a chicken. You must do this for at least 39 Thursdays,’ she told him.

‘But that is a long time,’ he stammered.

‘I know. The other solution is, of course, you could just leave it,’ she said, her eyes twinkling ever so slightly.

‘I will start straight away. I will leave for Srinagar first thing tomorrow morning,’ he said and left soon after.

When I returned a few months later, I asked Phuphee if he had been going to Makhdoom saab’s to make the offering. She laughed. He had indeed been going like clockwork.

I was a little annoyed at Phuphee. Why hadn’t she turned him into a frog or a goat yet? She could not just let him get away with this. Would he be able to force the lady to marry him?

‘You look worried,’ she said. I told her how I felt. ‘At times, I would like to turn some people into frogs and goats, but that would soothe only my irritation. As a peer, I have come to understand that sometimes just offering help is enough. Most people, and especially women, are excellent at finding solutions to their problems.

‘When I went to see the lady, she did not ask me to turn Hassan saab into a frog, she just wished she could have some time to think of a way out of this situation. While Hassan saab is away in Srinagar, she can think without distractions,’ she explained.

‘Do you remember, my gaash [light of my eyes], when you were little, you were afraid of going into a dark room alone. But instead of going with you everywhere, sometimes I would talk to you from another room until you did whatever it was you had to. You didn’t need me there, you just needed to know I was, if the occasion arose.’

I was a little taken aback by what she said, but she was right. Sometimes in life knowing someone has your back is enough, as most of the time we are more than capable of saving ourselves. Phuphee’s advice, just like her cooking, was simple but it always restored your soul.

SM/SM

- Kasaragod’s cloudbursts and pulinkari

- Stalking the wild

- Ideas to improve NEET

- green Humour

Kasaragod’s cloudbursts and

Thulasi Kakkat

Sprouted cashew nuts and mushrooms that carpet the hills after a thunderstorm find their way into special curries and stir-fries in Kerala

1 of 4 For a rainy day (Clockwise from left) pulinkari; sprouted cashew nuts; and picking fallen cashew nuts from the orchard. (Thulasi Kakkat)

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Just as it has colour and scent, the monsoon has taste. The cashew orchards would be strewn with leftover nuts from the summer; most of which would have sprouted. They are gathered and used whole in the koratta curry, a traditional gravy made with dry roasted coconut and black pepper. Some of the sprouted nuts have to be carefully coaxed out of their skin and this is quite a task — it could stain and peel off the skin of the fingers.

Even if one succeeds in accurately describing the taste of this dish, how can one experience its true essence without the brooding rain that pours over the arecanut and cashew orchards of Kasaragod?

Think corm, not corn

From the start of the Southwest monsoon till the 18th of the month of Karkidakam (mid-July), leafy dishes are not made or consumed. The leaves, they say, turn toxic and “impure”. But taro is cooked, in the form of a pulinkari. This thin, tangy curry is made with the corm (stem of the taro) and garnished with the monsoon!

Not all corms can be cooked; the most favoured is the colocasia. The corms are plucked, cleaned, cut and cooked with a dash of turmeric and salt, before being added to a potent concoction of ground coconut, buttermilk and bird’s eye chillies. It is a delight to pick out the corms from the white enamel dish filled with pulinkari and generous serving of brown rice, and to bite into their spongy middles that melt in the mouth.

Thunder heralds their arrival

If there is a thunderstorm, there is bound to be kumal (mushrooms). The morning after the rains, the hills would be covered in a rash of mushrooms, called ‘pakumal’. The ones that sprout in singles are the ‘nilampolappan’. Both edible varieties are picked, skinned and soaked in water. The mushrooms are cooked the same way as a naadan chicken curry, with dry-roasted grated coconut. No readymade powder mixes are used.

In a large uruli (traditional heavy-bottomed vessel), coriander, parangi (as red chillies are often referred to in Kasaragod), grated coconut, cumin, shallots, and a few pods of garlic are sautéed. This is ground to a fine paste on an ammikkallu (grinding stone). The mushrooms may appear tender, but they need to be cooked for a while before they turn soft.

Then comes the leaves of the thakara (cassia tora) herb, which grows widely in the backyard with plentiful yellow flowers. A stir fry is made with these leaves. It is simple; just don’t forget to add a sprinkle of roasted rice grains.

Thomas Zacharias

Lessons from a celebrated chef on embracing the elusive desi monsoon vegetable

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4 of 4 Elusive (Clockwise from below) Chef Thomas Zacharias with wild taro stolons in Cotigao, Goa; shevla picked in Palghar district; desi white corn; and shelva being prepared. (Thomas Zacharias)

I first stumbled upon shevla, or dragon stalk yam, about seven years ago while wandering through Bhaji Galli on Grant Road in Mumbai. Its otherworldly, almost alien appearance immediately caught my eye. Intrigued and curious, I decided to bring it home and try my hand at cooking it. What followed was a culinary misadventure I’ll never forget.

After preparing and cooking the shevla, I eagerly took a bite, only to experience an intensely painful, itchy sensation that spread through my mouth and throat. Bewildered and slightly alarmed, I returned to the market the next day to seek advice from the vendor who sold it to me. With a hearty laugh, he explained that shevla, available only for a few short weeks during the monsoon, contains toxins that cause itching if not cooked properly. He also introduced me to kakad, another monsoon vegetable that neutralises these toxins when cooked together with shevla, making it safe and delicious to eat.

I recently shared a video about shevla on Instagram, recounting this encounter, and the lessons I learned. The reel went viral, amassing nearly 80,000 views, which didn’t surprise me. I chose shevla not only to highlight its brief availability and its earthy umami rich flavour, but also because its distinctive properties and the mishap associated with it make for a great story. However, in an era where virality is necessary to grab people’s attention, what about the less enigmatic vegetables? How do we ensure they receive the recognition they deserve?

The decade of discovery

Ten years ago, I started the hashtag #KnowYourDesiVegetables to promote awareness and appreciation of India’s incredible local produce. Many hyper-seasonal vegetables are slowly being forgotten, and the diversity on our plates is shrinking. It’s ironic that while India boasts a rich array of unique vegetables, we are more familiar with imported ones like broccoli and avocado. There’s a growing disconnect with the everyday vegetables available in our local markets, and it’s crucial to address this. Monsoon vegetables are not only flavourful but are packed with specific nutrients that help maintain health and protect against common monsoon ailments. Travelling through 25 states across India over the last decade, I’ve come across so many of these vegetables that are hardly eaten anymore.

Most unusual, not most expensive

In Maharashtra, kantola, a fluorescent green spiny gourd remains relatively popular, but phodshi bhaji, or mountain knotweed, is elusive. Inspired by its distinctly vegetal flavour and spring onion-like crunch, I successfully showcased it as a salad green at The Bombay Canteen where I’ve previously helmed the kitchen, pairing it with red chilies, shrimp, peanuts, and a pungent kasundi mustard dressing.

Avarakkai, commonly known as broad beans, is frequently used in Tamilian cuisine during this time of the year, appearing in dishes like stir-fries, sambhar, and poriyal. In contrast, athalakkai, a wild vegetable from the same family as bitter gourd, is less commonly cooked. Known for its healing properties, especially for diabetic patients, athalakkai is delicious when pickled, cooked in aporiyalorkulambu, or dried with buttermilk and fried into vathal. In Assam, dhekia xaak, or fiddlehead ferns, are a monsoon delight known for their tangy flavour and versatility, but kochur loti or maan-kosu (taro stolons) remain relatively unknown among today’s youth.

During a recent food trip to Rajasthan, my hosts lamented that the tiny melon kachri, a drought-tolerant fruit once a hallmark of Rajasthani cuisine, is hardly cooked anymore. Specific varieties of commonly consumed vegetables are also becoming rare, such as the desi white corn being sidelined by the yellow Monsanto variety, commonly known as American corn.

Project revival

The issue goes beyond declining consumer awareness or the homogenisation of our diets; we are losing our remarkable biodiversity, one avocado at a time. What is elusive today wasn’t so even a couple of decades ago, and it’s crucial that we acknowledge the impact of the climate crisis on our already fragile food systems. We’re already seeing early signs of this bleak future as many local vegetables are replaced by more commercially viable options. If we don’t act now, we risk losing these unique flavours and the cultural heritage they represent. As the founder of The Locavore, a platform championing local food and sustainability, I can tell you that there is still hope. We can actively protect and revive these precious foods by making conscious choices to support sustainable practices and embrace local and seasonal produce. This way, our plates remain diverse, our food systems stay resilient, and our culinary heritage thrives.

The writer is a chef who swapped his kitchen career to create meaningful impact through his platform, The Locavore.

Ideas to improve NEET

‘Give industry status to the twin businesses of paper leaking and question paper solving so that more of India’s talented youth can join solver gangs’

1 of 2 TV series Scam 2003: The Telgi Story has ‘empowering lessons’.

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The other day I walked in on a friend’s nephew — a future NEET aspirant — watching Scam 2003: The Telgi Story. He had a notepad on his lap.

“Are you taking notes?” I asked.

“Just jotting down inspiring quotes, uncle.”

I peered over his shoulder and caught a line he had scribbled, ‘Sab mein aur mere mein bahut farak hain. Main khiladi aur tu…’. Below that: ‘System mein rehke khud ka system banayenge.’ Frankly, who wouldn’t find such sentiments empowering? I certainly did. In a country like ours with limited opportunities even for the privileged, people like Abdul Karim Telgi and Harshad Mehta are heroes.

Sadly, public discourse in India is stuck in the moralistic morass of the 1970s, and for that, I blame the country’s ivory tower intellectuals who keep telling us that scams are bad and scamsters are evil — wrong! We don’t hate scamsters — we give them our savings, defend them on social media, and elect them to public office. As for those that fall afoul of the law — we make OTT shows glorifying them.

Aspiring to scam

What is a scam anyway? It is a market-based evolutionary mechanism which ensures that only the fittest (i.e. the richest) survive. The best scams are completely legal, such as electoral bonds, demonetisation, and now NEET. To condemn them is to misread how most Indians view scams and aspire to hoodwink the system, scamster-style.

I was therefore concerned to read that the government is planning exam reforms, including for NEET. For all the millions of words spilled over NEET, no one will tell you the truth about it — its purpose. NEET was created to solve a specific problem: how to ensure private medical colleges fill all their seats even if their fees are laughably grotesque for the majority of applicants. NEET solved the problem in three elegant steps.

Step 1: It created a single national pool of applicants to feed all the medical colleges in the country. Step 2: It kept the cut-offs so low that even if a student practically ‘fails’, he can get in if he is an HNI who can afford an MBBS course fee of ₹2-3 crore. Step 3: To the lakhs of non-HNIs who cleared NEET with above 40% marks but couldn’t get into a public-funded college, it said, ‘Go to Russia’.

Designed for the rich

NEET is thus a win-win. Why fix a system that is clearly working for the rich — the only section that counts in a poor country? Well, now that an exam reforms committee is here, I hope they don’t push for anything radical — like a cap on fees charged by private colleges. For what it’s worth, here are some ideas they could consider:

l Give industry status to the twin businesses of paper leaking and question paper solving so that more and more of India’s talented youth can join solver gangs without fear of being harassed by law enforcement agencies.

l To weed out touts and eliminate black money, streamline the paper leak ecosystem with a centralised app — we could call it EggJamWarrior — where the National Testing Agency (NTA) could auction a limited number of questions (not more than 75% of the questions for any given exam). Parents can bid for the questions in a transparent bidding process, with the bid winner having the option to make the payment immediately or post-counselling. This would go a long way in restoring public trust in the NTA.

l Keep the NEET cut-off for MBBS admissions permanently at zero. This will lower exam-related stress, as every aspirant who is rich enough would be secure in the knowledge that he will get a seat even if he scores minus 720 out of 720. It will also level the playing field, as only the rich will aspire to become doctors.

l Sign an agreement with Russia under which India would get an additional 10 billion barrels of crude oil free in exchange for sending qualified NEET aspirants to Russian medical colleges and providing lucrative WFH to Russian hackers.

l Where the exam is offline and paper-based, save students the trouble of travelling long distances to select centres — such as from Odisha to Godhra, etc. — by tying up with Zomato or Dunzo for home-delivery of pre-paid question papers.

l Clear the confusion over the awarding of grace marks by releasing a standardised rate card: 1 to 10 marks (₹1 lakh); 11 to 15 marks (₹5 lakh); 100 to 200 marks (₹2 crore), and so on.

All these changes, if implemented, will usher in greater transparency and protect the sanctity and integrity of the exam.

Rohan Chakravarty

Table of Contents

The Hindu Jun 30, 2024

Regional

CBI conducts searches in Gujarat in NEET-UG case

4 workers die in explosion at fireworks unit near Sattur

Two government hospitals in city get new equipment

Study finds rising prevalence of type 2 diabetes in younger individuals compared to older people

‘No one can beat the life and work ethic of Karunanidhi’

Memoir of ex-T.N. Governor P.S. Ramamohan Rao released

Off-site drill on industrial safety organised in Ponneri

Resident of K.P. Park in Pulianthope dies after falling accidentally from lift

Kalaignar centenary hospital in Guindy to get paediatric multi-speciality block

‘India is a powerhouse of mathematics, says Krishnaswami Alladi

Storm in the rice bowl

Death of 4 in fireworks unit blast spur renewed pleas for regulation

CAG reports flag overcharging at Tasmac outlets, lapses in e-procurement system

Illicit liquor crimes: imprisonment for life among punishments in new Bill

SPs will be held accountable in cases of hooch-related deaths, says Chief Minister

House passes Bill, increasing age limit of chief of SC/ST commission

New health insurance scheme to be restructured, says Stalin

Members of PMK stage walkout from Assembly

Two tribals admitted to hospital after drinking liquor

National

No ED notice yet arraigning CPI(M) as accused in bank scam: Govindan

D.K. Shivakumar warns of action against party leaders if they speak on change of leadership

Former united APCC chief D. Srinivas passes away

After delay due to supply chain-related issues, LCA-Mk1A deliveries may begin by end of July

On CBI plea, Delhi court sends Arvind Kejriwal to judicial custody till July 12

Five soldiers killed as tank swept away in Ladakh’s Shyok river

Grave danger in perceiving courts as temples, judges as deities: CJI

Create a force that is first in the field of disaster management, says Shah

2 lynched in Kolkata over suspicion of stealing cellphones

CBI conducts searches in Gujarat in NEET-UG case

INDIA bloc plans a united front for a possible Deputy Speaker election

Janata Dal(U) appoints RS member Sanjay Jha its working president

Quota posts cannot be unreserved, U.P. government replies to Anupriya’s letter

Bengal Governor files defamation suit in HC against Mamata

Congress targets Modi over Adani Group’s ties with Chinese firms

Om Birla’s comments on Emergency not apt: Pawar

NTA’s plan to add more online exam centres yet to take off

‘Dengue may have helped stem COVID-19 wave severity’

TISS terminates nearly 100 teaching, non-teaching staff across various campuses

NCPCR to felicitate 30 district officials for containing drug abuse among school children

Canopy of new Rajkot airport collapses in heavy rain

Congress attacks BJP over NEET paper leak

NEET-PG dates will be announced soon: Minister

Officer suspended in J&K for ‘sabotaging’ Amarnath Yatra

Nine arrested in Gauhati University marksheet scam

5 policemen injured during demolition drive in Kathua

Profile 1

Profile 2

Rabble-rouser

In fear of freak weather

Business

Synergy in data must for ‘coherent’ policy decisions: NSC chief

Collate finance panels’ data in one place: Panagariya

Vermeiren India chalks out ₹100 crore expansion plans

Vietnam’s Q2 GDP growth accelerates to 6.93%, led by exports

Interest equalisation scheme extended for MSME exporters

Steel Ministry raises alarm on Chinese imports, urges trade curbs

FSIB recommends C.S. Setty for SBI Chairman’s post

Merge RRBs with sponsor banks, say 2 bank unions

Titan takes its jewellery brand Tanishq to Bangladesh

Agrawal named Central Board of Direct Taxes Chairman

Science

India lacks diagnostic tests for emerging infectious diseases

inStem’s fabric offers protection from pesticides

Specific PET scan for TB for more effective treatment

Marsquakes

Anti-measles antibody prevents viral fusion: study

Proteins in cerebrospinal fluid offer markers of Alzheimer’s

Antibody shields hamsters from SARS-CoV-2 variants

Edit

Why has the NTA failed to deliver?

What is holding up the Teesta treaty?

What was the tussle over Covaxin IPR?

Foreign

Vinicius special drives Brazil to big win over Paraguay

Ultraconservative, reformist to face off in Iran elections

Gazans living in bombed-out buildings and camps near piles of trash: UNRWA

Women’s rights is an internal issue, say Taliban before talks

Malvika shocks Kristy, enters the semifinals

German far-right party AfD re-elects leaders at convention

‘At least 30 killed in anti-government protests in Kenya’

Attacker with crossbow killed outside Israeli embassy in Serbia

Russian attacks on south and east regions of Ukraine kill 10 persons

Ruling party wins parliamentary elections in Mongolia

IS killed more than 4,000 since Syria territorial defeat: monitor

Iran warns of full-blown war if Hezbollah is attacked

Sports

Rohit’s ‘Miracle Men’ conjure stunning title win

Nerves of steel

Golden sunset for Kohli and Rohit as stalwarts call time on T20I careers

SCOREBOARD

‘The ICC did a fantastic job to promote the game in America’

India’s 176 the highest team score in a T20 World Cup final

Kohli’s second-highest score by an Indian in final, says it’s his last WC

Kohli-Axar partnership the biggest for India for any wicket in final

South Africa fights back through Luus and Kapp

Sable overwrites own meet record, Kushare consolidates Paris spot

We stuck to our game plans: Luus

Switzerland sends holder Italy packing from the Euro 2024

‘We were focusing more on stock balls’

Verstappen wins sprint, takes pole

Shiven, Aadya emerge boys’ u-15 and girls’ u-13 champs

SCOREBOARD

Ducati’s Bagnaia wins Dutch MotoGP sprint

Praggnanandhaa lets Gukesh off the hook

LiVE TELECAST

Slovakia no pushover for misfiring England

Dominant Hemanth Muddappa notches up a double crown

Around THE CITY

India beats Philippines, enters quarterfinals

tnca U-14

BFI assures extensive support for u-18 women

Engagements

Sabalenka not certain for Wimbledon due to injury

HI names core probables group for women’s camp

Varnika downs Harjani in State-ranking table tennis

Vaidehi Chaudhari cruises into the final

MRF Natl. supercross attracts 120 entries from across the country

SM

Living with extreme weather

Queer romances to make your day

It begins with a betrayal

Disruptive desire and the Indian male

Ahead of her time

Fractured identity

The face of science

Portrait of an artist in the rains

Easy like Sunday morning

Seeking information

The immortal lines

The fellowship of the dark hall

Tuning into classical music

Nurturing a patch of green

‘I hate the word representation’

Spells and a reluctant bride

SM/SM

Kasaragod’s cloudbursts and pulinkari

Stalking the wild

Ideas to improve NEET

green Humour