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At least 24 people, among them college students, were killed on Friday when a minibus collided head-on with a truck on a highway in Assam, in India’s north-east. Image Source: @SouleFacts on X The crash happened at about 1pm at Rangajan in Golaghat district, on National Highway 715, roughly 230 kilometres east of Guwahati. Officials said 39 people including the driver were aboard the minibus, which was travelling towards Nagaon in central Assam; earlier accounts put the number at around 30. Assam: The exact moment of the Kaziranga Accident between the traveller and the truck that killed 27 passengers. It is clearly evident that the traveller took the wrong side of the highway at a high speed. Shockingly, this traveller has 12 challans for traffic violations, including overspeeding. Yet, it was operating commercially. Second shocking point to note, the traveller has accommodation capacity of 26 passengers. How come more than 38 passengers were in the traveller? — aboyob bh...

The city that produces more than a third of India’s software exports crossed a hundred kilometres of metro railway on Friday and became only the third in the country to do so, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a stretch of seven and a half kilometres. Image Source: @narendramodi on X That stretch is the elevated portion of the Pink Line, six stations running from Kalena Agrahara to Suddaguntepalya in the city’s south, built at a cost of about 34.7 billion rupees. Passengers begin using it at six on Saturday morning. The line as designed is 21.25 kilometres with eighteen stations and twelve of those are underground that are still being built. Bengaluru had seventeen kilometres of metro in 2014, through a decade in which it became the centre of India’s technology industry and one of its most congested cities. Only Delhi and its surrounding districts, and the Mumbai metropolitan region, have longer networks. The metro was the centrepiece of a package the government valued...

India has extended for a further five years its ban on the Islamic Research Foundation, the organisation founded by Zakir Naik, keeping in place a prohibition first imposed a decade ago Image Source: @RShivshankar on X/theedgemalaysia The home ministry notified the extension under Section 3 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, which allows the central government to declare an association unlawful. The order runs for five years from its publication in the official gazette. The foundation was first declared unlawful on 17 November 2016 and the designation was extended on 15 November 2021; the existing order was due to lapse on 14 November. Such declarations do not rest on the executive alone. A tribunal constituted under Section 5 of the Act, which must examine and confirm them, upheld the ban in orders dated 22 May 2017 and 30 March 2022. The ministry said Naik and the foundation had encouraged religious hostility that threatened national security, described his s...

An Indian warship sailed from Yokosuka after more than a week at the Japanese port that serves as headquarters of the United States Seventh Fleet, having spent it exercising alongside the navies of Japan, the United States and Australia Image Source: PIB India INS Sahyadri had arrived on 4 November for Malabar 2026, which ran from the 5th to the 12th. The opening ceremony was held at Funakoshi, and the sea phase took place in waters south of Japan’s Kanto region, the stretch of coast that includes Tokyo. This was the thirtieth year of Malabar and the sixth edition involving all four navies. It began in 1992 as a bilateral drill between India and the United States, with Japan and Australia joining later. Japan contributed the helicopter destroyer JS Ise, the frigate JS Mogami, a submarine and a P-1 patrol aircraft. Australia sent the frigate HMAS Stuart and a P-8A Poseidon. The United States committed two amphibious transport docks, USS Anchorage and USS John P. Murtha, and a P-8A of...

India’s main fund for cultural heritage has completed 66 projects in thirty years, the culture ministry set out on Friday as it appealed for private partners to help it do more Image Source: @gssjodhpur on X The National Culture Fund, established as a trust in 1996, has worked with 39 partners over that period. The separate Adopt a Heritage programme engages partners at 66 monuments. The ministry oversees 43 organisations and more than 3,600 protected monuments, along with museums, archives and academies, which it described as the public infrastructure of the country’s creative economy. The figures were presented at a conference, Creative India: Collective Possibilities, held at Bharat Mandapam in Delhi and opened by the culture minister, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat. It drew state governments, industry, philanthropic bodies, artists and foreign partners. “Government’s role is to be a catalyst,” said the culture secretary, Vivek Aggarwal. “When the ministry opens the door and partners c...

India’s air force has put a suite of artificial intelligence applications built in-house into service on its secure network, and been told by the defence minister to draw up dedicated doctrine for electronic, cyber and space warfare. Image Source: @rajnathsingh on X The applications were launched by Rajnath Singh at the Air Force Commanders’ Conference in Delhi on Thursday. Developed by the AI centre of excellence within UDAAN, the service’s unit for digitisation, automation, artificial intelligence and application networking, they are meant to automate work across operations, administration and aerospace safety. Singh said the force needed doctrines and architectures for the newer domains of conflict, and that these should be built into institutional planning rather than treated as adjuncts. “Victory in future conflicts would depend not merely on the number of aircraft, but also on technological sophistication, speed of response and precision of preparations,” he said. He retur...

For about ninety-five years, the two long sandstone buildings on the ridge above India’s ceremonial avenue have been where the country was administered. The files are leaving. The government intends to put a museum i n their place . Representational Image Only India’s cabinet committee on economic affairs approved the project on Wednesday at an estimated 32.3 billion rupees, clearing the Yuge Yugeen Bharat Museum for construction inside the North and South Blocks, the Secretariat buildings designed by Herbert Baker and completed in 1931. Ministries housed there are being relocated under the redevelopment of the surrounding government district, which is what makes the buildings available. A museum is a decision before it is a building. Every one of them is an argument about what a society keeps, what it throws away and in what order it tells the rest. Which is why the choice of premises here carries as much meaning as anything that will eventually hang on the walls: the corridors from w...

The Indian Prime Minister spent the festival of lights in a forest clearing, handing sweets to men in olive green at a commando base that until recently was a launch pad for operations against Maoist guerrillas in Bastar and the dense interior of Abujhmad Image Via: @kumar_talukdar1 on X “Diwali is sweeter with those who protect us,” Narendra Modi wrote afterwards. “Naxalism is history. Development is the way ahead.” Diwali, which fell on Sunday, is the largest festival in the Indian calendar and the simplest in its central idea. Households clean and then everything gets illuminated — rows of small clay lamps along parapets and doorsteps, fireworks, patterns of coloured powder laid on floors to welcome Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune. The oldest thought in it is that light is something you put deliberately where the dark is. That was perhaps also the point of the venue. On 8 April the home ministry wrote to nine state governments to say that no district in India any longer falls...

India’s home minister said on Friday that his party would introduce a uniform civil code in every state it governs, telling a crowd in Uttarakhand that 15 states had moved towards one since the Himalayan state became the first to enforce it Image Via: PIB India Amit Shah was speaking at Uttarakhand’s foundation day, marking the creation of the state — originally named Uttaranchal — on 9 November 2000, when a government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee carved it out of Uttar Pradesh. It was renamed in 2007. A uniform civil code replaces religion-specific personal laws on marriage, divorce and inheritance with a single statute. Uttarakhand brought one into force in January 2025, the first Indian state to legislate its own; Goa retains a civil code inherited from Portuguese rule. Under it, Shah said, no one in the state can take multiple spouses and no woman can be subjected to instant divorce. He also set a target for elections due in 2027, asking for 50 per cent of the vote and more than ...