Aayog member V K Saraswat said on Monday the number of COVID- 19 cases is not going to go beyond what’s being reported daily in India as he maintained that the country is in the process of flattening the curve. The former Scientific Adviser to Defence Minister said the coronavirus positive cases have seen a sharper rise in the last four-five days because of increase in the number of testing. “It’s a good sign; all those asymptomatic cases lying hiddenthey are also coming out,” Saraswat told P T I. “We certainly had a catalytic factor which was basically this (Nizamuddin)…
Author: Our Correspondent
Chief Minister K Palaniswami on Monday announced extension of lockdown in Tamil Nadu till April 30 and said the move was in accordance with the recommendations of medical and public health experts. Palaniswami, pointing out that he favoured prolonging the curbs till the end of this month in a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi held on Saturday, said several other State chief ministers too batted for extending the restrictions. Based on the deliberations in a meeting with the Prime Minister and in tune with the recommendations of an expert committee, public health experts and the World Health Organisation, and…
Former Attorney General of India and senior advocate Ashok Desai passed away on Monday morning. A Padma Bhushan awardee, Desai held office as the Attorney General of India from July 9, 1996 to May 6, 1998. Earlier, he was the Solicitor General of India from 18 December, 1989 to December 2, 1990. Desai studied at the prestigious Fergusson College in Pune and thereafter went to the Government Law College, Mumbai. He started his practice in 1956 at the Bombay High Court and was designated as a senior advocate on August 8, 1977. Desai took up several landmark cases, including decriminalisation…
Over two lakh Hindu priests in West Bengal have become jobless as various social functions, rituals and religious festivities have either been cancelled or postponed to prevent public gatherings in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, a pandits” organisation spokesperson said on Monday. They are in distress with no earnings as rituals usually organised at home have been cancelled while weddings and other social programmes postponed, he said, adding that several devotees are not visiting temples during the ongoing lockdown. “If there are no pujas and other religious functions in the next few months to prevent gatherings, how the priests…
Delhi Police Commissioner S N Shrivastava on Monday said the decision to take Tablighi Jamaat members from its headquarters (Markaz) in the capital’s Nizamuddin area directly to quarantine facilities helped in containing the spread Covid-19. “We have quarantined the corona carriers of Tablighi Jamaat. Majority of people were directly taken to quarantine center from Markaz. This helped in containing Covid-19. We have also registered a case in this matter,” ANI quoted Shrivastava as saying. Follow coronavirus latest updates here. Earlier this month, Covid-19 cases in Delhi spiked after hundreds of many Tablighi Jamaat members who attended a large congregation in…
A low-intensity earthquake of magnitude 2.7 shook parts of Delhi on Monday, the National Centre for Seismology said, the second quake to hit the national capital region in less than 24 hours but no report of any damage was received. The quake, with its epicentre near Wazirpur in northeast Delhi, occurred at 1.26 pm at a shallow depth of 5 km, said JL Gautam, Head (Operations) at NCS, an institute under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. On Sunday, a moderate intensity quake of magnitude 3.5 hit the national capital at a depth of 8 km. However, unlike Sunday, when people…
Six new coronavirus cases, including one death, were reported from Dharavi on Monday, taking the total number of the people affected by the infection in Mumbai’s biggest slum sprawl to 49, a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) official said. With this, the total number of deaths in Dharavi has gone up to five, he said. Three new coronavirus cases were reported from Madina Nagar, Janata Cooperative Housing Society and Gulmohar chawl of Dharavi, and one each from a chawl and Kalyanwadi locality, the official said. Besides, samples of a 60-year-old man from Nehru chawl, who died at Sion Hospital, came out…
Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Monday directed the Baska district administration to take effective measures to “stop movement” across the Indo-Bhutan border in the district and to ensure the nationwide lockdown completely. The chief minister directed this to the deputy commissioner and superintendent of police during his visit to the district to assess its preparedness to deal with novel coronavirus outbreak. The district has reported no positive coronavirus case so far. The district administration should essentially focus on three-pronged agenda like protection of health, maintenance of supply chain and complete adherence to lockdown for waging a war against the…
The carcass of a five-year-old tiger was found at Kurichiat in the Wayanad wildlife division on Monday, forest officials said. The death was caused by an injury in the neck probably caused by a wire snare or a fence, the officials said. “There is an injury mark in the neck, which could have been probably caused by a wire snare or a barbed fence. We are looking into the matter,” assistant wildlife warden told PTI. A case has been registered by the police, he said. As the spot where the carcass was found within the Karnataka border, wildlife officials of…
The Supreme Court on Monday said that those in Assam’s detention centres for the past two years may be released on a personal bond with two sureties and reduced the surety amount in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Bar and Bench reported. A three-member bench headed by Chief Justice SA Bobde, conducting a hearing via video-conferencing, was examining a plea pertaining to the issue of overcrowding and infrastructure of prisons across the country as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in India crossed 9,150. The apex court modified its 10 May, 2019 order, according to which foreigners who had…