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Objections raised by India’s constitutional auditor against government spending have in some cases gone unresolved for twenty years, the Speaker of the lower house of Parliament said on Tuesday, calling the delays a serious question mark over the country’s financial accountability machinery Image Source: @ombirlakota on X Om Birla was opening a two-day conference in the unhurried southern city of Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala and a seat of administration since the princely state of Travancore governed from here in the eighteenth century. It brought together the chairpersons of the public accounts committees of Parliament and of the state and union territory legislatures. He said audit observations pending for ten, fifteen or even twenty years demanded a concrete and time-bound action plan, and that the federal and state governments would have to strengthen monitoring and follow-up together so that accountability was “not merely established on paper” but produced c...

India supports, in principle, the multinational efforts led by France and the United Kingdom to make shipping safe again through the Strait of Hormuz. But it will commit its own capabilities only once the fighting is over, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said recently Image Via: @VikramMisri on X Misri was speaking at a plenary on maritime security, the second-last session of the 22nd IISS Manama Dialogue in Bahrain. He shared the stage with senior military and political figures from Saudi Arabia, Singapore and France. Each speaker made the same basic point from a different angle: the sea lanes the world economy depends on can no longer be assumed to stay open. Why this matters The Gulf region sits on two of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints. The Strait of Hormuz links the Gulf to the open ocean. The Bab el-Mandeb connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Large volumes of oil, gas, fertiliser and container cargo pass through both. The French Rear Admiral who commands F...

The Indian Navy has rescued all 20 crew members of the fishing vessel Azini from armed pirates in the Arabian Sea. The 48-hour operation, carried out with support from the Indian Air Force, ended on Monday more than 3,000 km from Mumbai Image Via: @rajnathsingh on X Defence Minister Rajnath Singh announced the rescue on X. He said the Navy had located and intercepted the vessel and secured the release of both the crew and the boat from “significantly-armed pirates,” and that the IAF’s timely support had helped. The operation, he said, reflected the Navy’s “high operational readiness and ability to respond decisively to maritime threats across the region.” A photograph shared by the minister shows the destroyer INS Kolkata standing by. Heavily armed commandos are guarding men who appear to be the pirates, seated on the fishing vessel’s deck, with a large cache of seized weapons beside them. The rescue took place farther from India’s coast than the Navy’s best-known anti-piracy ac...

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...