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India has launched a traceability system for churpi, the rock-hard cheese of the eastern Himalaya whose largest foreign market is not the dinner table but the pet shop, where it sells as a long-lasting natural dog chew. Image Source: @LalanSingh_1 on X The initiative was inaugurated in Gangtok on Tuesday by Rajiv Ranjan Singh, the union minister for fisheries, animal husbandry and dairying, at a programme held by the Sikkim Milk Union. The ministry said the system was intended to strengthen traceability and improve the product’s identity and marketability — the documentation that regulated import markets require before they will take a food product in volume. Churpi is made across Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan and the Tibetan plateau by draining and pressing cow or yak milk and drying the result until it is almost too hard to bite. Locally it is chewed slowly or softened into soups.  Abroad, demand is driven overwhelmingly by its durability in a dog’s mouth. Nepal, which has built a...

India’s defence exports grew by nearly 63 per cent last financial year, leaving them within a third of a target set for 2029 and on course to clear it well before then. The production target for the same year is the far harder one: it requires an industry that has been growing at about 18 per cent a year to keep that up, without pause, for three more Image Source: PIB India Rajnath Singh, the defence minister, reaffirmed both goals — 3 trillion rupees of annual defence production and 500 billion rupees of exports by the financial year ending March 2029 — while opening the third Delhi Defence Dialogue at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in the capital. The arithmetic separates them. Production reached a record 1.78 trillion rupees in the year to March 2026, up from 1.51 trillion the year before and 1.27 trillion the year before that. Reaching 3 trillion by 2029 needs about 19 per cent growth every year, marginally above the pace already being set. Export...

A metro line built by a private consortium to serve one of India’s largest technology parks begins carrying passengers in Pune on Wednesday, the first corridor delivered under a union policy that made private participation a condition of central funding for urban rail Image Via: @narendramodi on X Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the line by video link on Tuesday, alongside foundation stones for further work, in a package of Pune metro projects the government valued at about 218 billion rupees. The 23.3-kilometre elevated corridor runs from Maan, beside the Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park at Hinjawadi, to the district court at Shivajinagar in the older part of the city, with 23 stations. Hinjawadi employs several hundred thousand technology workers and its road congestion is among the worst in the country. The line is intended to take a substantial share of that commute off the road, and connects the newer western edge of Pune to its historic centre. It was developed by Pune ...

India will have to ship goods and services worth 520 billion dollars in the six months to March, close to 18 per cent more than it managed in the same period a year earlier, if it is to meet the one-trillion-dollar export target its commerce minister reaffirmed on Tuesday. Over the first half of the financial year it grew exports by 14 per cent Image Source: @PiyushGoyal on X Piyush Goyal, the minister for commerce and industry, told students at Kirori Mal College in Delhi that exports had reached 480 billion dollars between April and September. The country shipped 863 billion dollars’ worth in the previous financial year, its highest on record. October, he said, had also been a good month. He was candid that the target had been set to stretch. India could have chosen 900 billion dollars, representing growth of about 5 per cent, and that alone would have been more than twice the 1.9 per cent expansion in global trade the International Monetary Fund was projecting when the target ...

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...