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A fire broke out near a storage tank at Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd’s (HPCL) Visakh Refinery in Visakhapatnam on Monday evening. Tall flames and thick smoke rose over the city’s industrial belt, and rumours spread that a tank had exploded.  Image Source: @vizagweatherma9 on X Visakhapatnam Police Commissioner Shankhabrata Bagchi has confirmed the incident. He said the fire was confined to the tank and posed no threat to other sections of the refinery. “A fire broke out in Vizag HPCL facility and there were no casualties,” Bagchi said. HPCL fire tenders and other firefighting teams were working to control the blaze late on Monday. Authorities said the smoke was not considered hazardous. It is the second fire at an HPCL-run refinery this year. On April 20, a fire in the crude distillation unit of HPCL Rajasthan Refinery Ltd, the company’s joint venture at Pachpadra in Barmer, forced the postponement of the plant’s scheduled dedication by Prime Minister Narendra Modi th...

India will add another 500 gigawatts of non-fossil power capacity over the next ten to eleven years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Monday, roughly doubling a target the country is already within reach of meeting, and putting the investment opportunity in the sector at 220 billion dollars by the end of the decade. Image Source: @himantabiswa on X Speaking at the inauguration of the Bharat Renewable Energy Summit and Expo in New Delhi, Modi said India had reached nearly 300 gigawatts of its existing commitment of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil capacity by 2030, made at the Glasgow climate conference in 2021. He said the country had met a separate pledge, to draw half its installed power capacity from non-fossil sources, in 2025, five years ahead of schedule. “This target is somewhat difficult, but I have faith in the capability of my country,” he said of the new goal. India now ranks among the three largest producers of solar and renewable power in the world. But installed capaci...

Relics of the Buddha held at India’s National Museum have been carried to the Himalayas for public veneration, beginning a three-week exposition at monasteries in Arunachal Pradesh, in the far northeast of the country. Image Via: PIB India The relics were received on 31 October at Tawang Monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery in India and the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama, by the state’s chief minister and the union culture minister  Gajendra Singh Shekhawat . They remain there until 7 November, move to Bomdila until 13 November and then to the Golden Pagoda at Namsai until 20 November, returning to Delhi the following day. The arrival coincided with Lhabab Duchen, which marks the Buddha’s descent from the heavenly realm in the Tibetan tradition. They come from Piprahwa in Uttar Pradesh, a site that is associated with ancient Kapilavastu and with the Shakya clan into which the Buddha was born, and they have a bit complicated history. In 1898 a British estate manager, Wil...

India has signed contracts worth about 539 billion rupees for eight next-generation corvettes, the first warships to be designed in-house by the Indian Navy and built by state-owned yards that had to compete for the work Image Source: @rajnathsingh on X Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers, in Kolkata, will build five. Goa Shipyard will build three. The contracts were signed in Delhi on Monday in the presence of the defence secretary. Both elements of the arrangement are new. Indian warships have long been built domestically, but their designs have frequently drawn on foreign origin or external consultancy. The navy’s own design organisation produced these. And rather than nominating a public-sector yard, as is customary, the ministry put the work to a competitive process among them before dividing the order. A corvette is the smallest class of ocean-going warship, below a frigate, and is built for work close to shore and in confined waters. The ministry says these will carry...

India opened an advanced radiotherapy unit in western Gujarat on Monday, serving eleven districts and about 15.4 million people whose cancer patients have until now travelled to Ahmedabad or Mumbai for the same treatment Image Via: @JPNadda on X Distance matters more in radiation oncology than in most specialties. A course of treatment is typically delivered in small daily doses over several weeks, so a patient from Porbandar or Amreli faced either repeated journeys of several hundred kilometres or a long stay in a city away from home and work. The facility at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Rajkot removes that for the Saurashtra region. It cost around 390 million rupees and was built under a central programme intended to correct regional gaps in specialist care. Patients covered by India’s public health insurance scheme will be treated free; others will pay subsidised rates. The unit houses a linear accelerator, a wide-bore CT simulator for treatment planning and...

Foreigners living in several Indian states will no longer have to deal with an immigration office in a different state as India aims to extend its registration network to every state capital by 2027. Eight offices have been opened or notified since 2025, taking the current total to twenty Representational Image Via: @IndianInfoGuid on X Until recently, a foreign student or long-stay visitor in Mizoram was administered from Kolkata, more than a thousand kilometres away; one in coastal Andhra Pradesh dealt with Hyderabad, in a neighbouring state; and foreigners in Rajasthan were handled from Delhi. New offices have since opened at Jaipur, Chandigarh and Guwahati, followed this year by Aizawl and Amravati. Three more have been notified at Kohima, Agartala and Bhubaneswar. The Foreigners Regional Registration Office is where a foreign national’s stay in India is formally managed. It carries out post-arrival registration for those required to complete it, issues registration certificat...

India’s opposition alliance drew tens of thousands to a rally in the capital on Sunday demanding the removal of the country’s chief election commissioner, a turnout far below the million its organisers had promised but the broadest gathering of opposition leaders on one stage in years. Image Via: @INCIndia on X Delhi police had expected around 50,000 and put the working capacity of Ramlila Maidan at 30,000 to 40,000 once the stages and enclosures were up. Organisers had said ten lakh — a million — would come. The ruling party said 40 per cent of the ground stood empty and counted several thousand vacant chairs out of 28,000 by mid-afternoon. More than 3,000 police and 10,000 paramilitary personnel were deployed, with cameras covering the venue and a cordon to stop any movement towards the de-notified protest ground at Jantar Mantar. Leaders marched the final stretch from Connaught Place in open-top vehicles. On the platform were Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge, Pri...

India’s opposition alliance held a mock removal proceeding against the country’s chief election commissioner on Saturday in the garden of the Congress president’s official residence. This exercise carries no legal force and was staged a day before a mass rally in the national capital Image Via: @RahulGandhi on X About 250 people attended, among them opposition MPs, civil society figures, journalists and voters who say their names were wrongly struck from the electoral rolls. A former Speaker of the lower house presided from a stage built to resemble the old parliamentary chamber, with a wood-panelled backdrop, seats in a semicircle and microphones set in the front rows. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge moved a motion listing six allegations against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. It was seconded by a Samajwadi Party MP and carried by a show of hands. The charges allege that Kumar conspired with the governing party to manipulate elections, that the nationwide revis...

Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit becomes the 29th chief of the Indian Air Force on Saturday, bringing to the post an unusual background for the job: he is an experimental test pilot Image Via: @ShadowIND_IN on X He takes the rank of Air Chief Marshal and succeeds Air Chief Marshal Amar Preet Singh, who retires the same day. The appointment was announced on 6 October. Dixit has been vice chief since 1 July. Commissioned into the fighter stream in December 1986, he is also a qualified flying instructor and has logged more than 3,500 hours on types ranging from the Mirage 2000 and the Jaguar to the IL-78 tanker, the Hawk trainer and the indigenous Tejas. He has commanded a frontline fighter base in the western sector and a fighter training base in the south, and before becoming vice chief he was chief of the integrated defence staff and commanded Central Air Command. He has served in operations including Safed Sagar, the air campaign during the 1999 Kargil conflict, Operation Rakshak and ...