Vaccines are answer, not one-day lockdowns: Omar Abdullah | India News – Times of India

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SRINAGAR: National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on Sunday said one-day shutdowns to contain the spread of coronavirus is a “meaningless tokenism” which can lead to complacency, and called for allowing more people to take vaccine against Covid-19.
The Madhya Pradesh government had on March 19 announced Sunday lockdowns in Bhopal, Indore and Jabalpur till further orders in view of the spurt in coronavirus cases.
“With a rampaging virus that has a 2-14 day incubation period this one-day lockdown is meaningless tokenism. All it will do is create a misplaced sense of complacency,” Abdullah tweeted.
The former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister said vaccines were the answer to the spread of Covid-19 and called for opening up the vaccines to more people.
“Vaccines are the answer not one day lockdowns. Open up vaccines to more people,” he added.
His statement came as India recorded 43,846 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, the highest single-day rise so far this year.
India is currently vaccinating people above 60 and those aged between 45-59 years with 20 identified comorbidities.

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Eight states showing rising trajectory in Covid-19 cases: Health ministry | India News – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: A rising trajectory of daily new cases is visible in eight states and UTs, including Delhi and Maharashtra, while Kerala is showing a declining trend, the health ministry said on Saturday.
The ministry said Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab cumulatively account for 76.22 per cent of India’s total active caseload, with Maharashtra contributing to 62 per cent of such cases, while Kerala and Punjab account for 8.83 per cent and 5.36 per cent of active cases respectively.
The top five districts in Maharashtra recording the highest number of cases are Pune (37,384), Nagpur (25,861), Mumbai (18,850), Thane (16,735) and Nashik (11,867).
The top five districts in Kerala recording the highest number of cases are Ernakulam (2,673), Pathanamthitta (2,482), Kannur (2,263), Palakkad (2,147) and Thrissur (2,065).
The top five districts in Punjab recording the highest number of cases are Jalandhar (2,131), SAS Nagar (1,868), Patiala (1,685), Ludhiana (1,643) and Hoshiarpur (1,572).
“A rising trajectory of daily new cases is visible in eight states. These are Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka and Haryana. Kerala is showing a consistently declining trend,” the ministry said in a statement.
The ministry further said that five states account for 81.38 per cent of the new deaths. Maharashtra saw the maximum casualties at 70, Punjab followed with 38 daily deaths and Kerala reported 17 deaths in the last 24 hours.
Meanwhile, fifteen states and UTs have not reported any COVID-19 deaths in the last 24 hours. These are Assam, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Puducherry, Lakshadweep, Sikkim, Ladakh, Manipur, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Arunachal Pradesh.
The ministry further said India has scaled a significant peak in its battle against COVID-19 pandemic. The total vaccination coverage has surpassed 4 crore.
“About 4,20,63,392 vaccine doses have been administered through 6,86,469 sessions, as per the provisional report till 7 am today. These include 77,06,839 healthcare workers (HCWs) (first dose), 48,04,285 HCWs (second dose), 79,57,606 frontline workers (FLWs) (first dose) and 24,17,077 FLWs (second dose), 32,23,612 beneficiaries aged more than 45 years with specific co-morbidities (first dose) and 1,59,53,973 beneficiaries aged more than 60 years,” it said.
As on day 63 of the vaccination drive (March 19), 27,23,575 vaccine doses were given. Eighty per cent of the 27.23 lakh vaccine doses administered in the last 24 hours are from 10 states.
Of the total, 24,15,800 beneficiaries were vaccinated across 38,989 sessions for first dose (HCWs and FLWs) and 3,07,775 HCWs and FLWs received second dose of vaccine.
The ministry said eight states account for 60 per cent of the cumulative vaccine doses given so far. They are Kerala, Karnataka, Odisha, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

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Dattatreya Hosabale elected RSS general secretary | India News – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on Saturday saw a change of guard with Dattatreya Hosabale being elected as its ‘Sarkaryavah’.
The Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha of RSS elected Hosabale as its ‘Sarkaryavah’ or general secretary.
Speculation were rife that Bhaiyyaji Joshi may step down as the ‘Sarkaryavaha’ of RSS on the second day of the Sangh’s triennial that began in Bengaluru on Friday, its first such meet outside Nagpur.
Hosabale will be RSS general secretary for three years.
Dattatreya belongs to Hosabale village in Karnataka’s Shivamogga district and joined RSS in 1968 and then the student organization Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in 1972.
He was imprisoned for more than a year under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) during emergency imposed by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
On Friday, the RSS said anti-national and anti-social forces were trying to foil efforts for a solution to the ongoing farmers’ agitation against three central farm laws.
“The prolonged protests are apparently being aimed at creating an environment of disturbance and instability in the country for political gain,” the RSS said in its annual report of 2020-21 released on the first day of the two-day triennial meeting of Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS), the RSS’s highest decision-making body.
It’s the RSS’s first official statement since the agitation broke out late last year.

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Over 40k coronavirus cases recorded in India, highest in 111 days | India News – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: India saw 40,953 new coronavirus infections being reported in a day, the highest single-day rise recorded in 111 days, taking the nationwide Covid-19 tally to 1,15,55,284, according to Union Health Ministry data updated on Saturday.
Registering an increase for the tenth day in a row, the total active caseload has reached 2,88,394, which now comprises 2.49 per cent of the total infections, while the recovery rate has further dropped to 96.12 per cent, the data stated.
The daily rise in infections (40,953) was the highest recorded in 111 days, while the death toll increased to 1,59,558 with 188 new fatalities, the data updated at 8 am showed.
On November 29, 41,810 new infections were recorded in a span of 24 hours.
The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 1,11,07,332, while the case fatality rate stood at 1.38 per cent, the data stated.
India’s Covid-19 tally had crossed the 20 lakh mark on August 7, 30 lakh on August 23, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on September 16. It went past 60 lakh on September 28, 70 lakh on October 11, crossed 80 lakh on October 29, 90 lakh on November 20 and surpassed the one-crore mark on December 19.
According to ICMR, 23,24,31,517 samples have been tested up to March 19 with 10,60,971 samples being tested on Friday.

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‘Founders bartered away its soul’: Raghuram Rajan on PB Mehta’s resignation from Ashoka University | India News – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: Leading economist Raghuram Rajan has termed academicians Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Arvind Subramanium’s resignation from Ashoka University as a “grievous blow to free speech” saying that the founders “bartered away its soul”.
In a social media post on Saturday, Rajan said that Professor Mehta is a “thorn in the side of the establishment” as he “skewers those in government and in high offices like the Supreme Court with vivid prose and thought-provoking arguments”.
Last week Ashoka University, which had quickly made a name for itself as one of India’s premier new-age private educational institutions, found itself at the centre of a furore following the resignation of noted economist Arvind Subramanian and leading political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta.
Rajan reacting to the resignation of the academic duo said that if founders of the university feel that their compromises have been made in the greater interest of the university, then they are wrong.
“Free speech is the soul of a great university. By compromising on it, the founders have bartered away its soul. And if you show a willingness to barter your soul, is there any chance the pressures will go away?,” wrote Rajan in a Linkedin post.

“As a true academic, he (Mehta) is an equal opportunity critic. He is, and I hope will continue to be, one of the intellectual leaders of liberalism in India,” said Rajan.
The former RBI governor said that professor Mehta’s resignation was so sudden that in his resignation letter, he had to plead with the university to make arrangements for his driver, who would be left jobless.

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Spring Season: Google marks beginning of spring season with colorful doodle | India News – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: Google on Saturday marked the beginning of the spring season with a doodle.
The Google Doodle marked the day with a hedgehog, that has flowers on its back. The doodle also features honey bees buzzing around flowers, which together spell out ‘Google’.
March 20 is the first day of the spring season in the Northern hemisphere and it continues till June 21.
The first day of spring season, also known as Spring Equinox, occurs when the sun passes the equator moving from the southern to the northern hemisphere.
At the equinox, days and nights are approximately twelve hours long.

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Self-enumeration at two stages of Census | India News – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: The option of self-enumeration in the upcoming census — allowing residents to respond to questionnaires online before census workers come calling possibly in the second half of this year — will be offered both at the ‘houselisting’ and ‘population enumeration’ stage.
The government had earlier announced that respondents could self-enumerate only in the population enumeration phase.
Self-enumeration for the houselisting phase will allow residents to enter details like housing conditions, housing amenities and assets possessed online through the census app or the Central Monitoring and Management System (CMSS) portal. A reference code will be generated and shared later with the enumerator during her field visit. Similarly, for the second phase of population enumeration, people can use the app/CMSS portal to self-enumerate data on religion, literacy, language, SC/ ST, economic activity, migration and fertility.
There shall be a selfenumeration option for National Population Register (NPR) update as well, allowing residents to furnish online demographic details such as name, parents’ name, date and place of birth, nationality, voter ID, Aadhaar number (voluntary) and mobile number.
Sources in the government told TOI that a pre-test for the mobile application and CMSS portal had been completed. The pre-test covered one location in every state and Union Territory.

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MoD inks ₹1,200cr contract with PSU for 5,000 anti-tank missiles | India News – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: The defence ministry on Friday inked a Rs 1,188 crore contract with defence PSU Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) for the supply of 4,960 Milan-2T anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) to the Army.
The contract for these old secondgeneration ATGMs, with a range of 1.8-km, comes in the backdrop of the over 13-lakh Army facing an acute shortage of advanced missiles to thwart enemy tanks. The Army had last year gone in for the emergency induction of a limited number of the third-generation Israeli Spike ATGMs to meet immediate operational requirements amidst the military confrontation with China in eastern Ladakh, as was then reported by TOI.
With the indigenous third-generation Nag ATGMs yet to be inducted, the Army is currently largely equipped with the Milan-2T and Konkurs (4-km) ATGMs, which have been produced by BDL under licence from French and Russian companies for years.

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Couple bleeds on road, crowd makes videos | India News – Times of India

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BAREILLY: A young couple with a child on their way to Haldwani from Budaun on a bike were hit by a speeding vehicle in Bareilly district on Thursday. The child had a narrow escape while his parents lay on the busy Bareilly-Nainital highway — bleeding profusely — for 25 minutes even as passersby made videos instead of rushing them to a nearby hospital, reports Kanwardeep Singh.
A video of the incident went viral on social media and police finally rushed to the spot to shift the couple to a medical facility. In the video, a person can be seen asking the couple to inform their family while another person is heard asking them to call cops.“Things could have been different if the passerbys had taken them to a hospital instead of making videos. The couple is critical now,” ASP (Rural) RajKumar Agarwal told TOI.

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SC collegium picks 13 names for Bombay high court judge posts | India News – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: Weathering a storm within, the Supreme Court collegium headed by CJI S A Bobde on Friday recommended the names of 13 people to the Union government for appointment as judges of the Bombay High Court, which is functioning with 62 judges and has a vacancy of 32 posts.
The collegium, comprising CJI Bobde and Justices N V Ramana and R F Nariman, recommended the names of nine advocates — Aruna S Pai, Shailesh P Brahme, Kamal R Khata, Sharmila U Deshmukh, Amira Abdul Razaq, Sandeep V Marne, Sandeep H Parikh, Somasekhar Sundaresan and Mahendra M Nerlikar — and four judicial officers, Rajesh N Laddha, Sanjay G Mehare, G A Sanap and S G Dige, for appointment as Bombay HC judges.
The Bombay HC, during the very short tenure of Chief Justice B P Dharmadhikari, had recommended 22 names — 18 advocates and four judicial officers — for appointment as judges of the HC. However, the names had run into serious objection from two consultee judges, Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, whose parent HC is Bombay.
Justices Khanwilkar and Chandrachud had in writing asked CJI Bobde to send all 22 names back to Bombay HC CJ Dipankar Datta for effective evaluation of merit and maintaining objectivity in the constitutional process of selection of HC judges. Sources said the two judges believed that the Bombay HC, being in the financial capital of the country, required judges with domain knowledge in emerging fields of law and suggested that since Justice Datta had been chief justice for nearly 10 months, he should be asked to reconsider the names.
However, Justice B R Gavai approved the names of “deserving” candidates from among the 22 but agreed with Justices Khanwilkar and Chandrachud for returning the remaining names for reconsideration. Justice Gavai did not fault Justice Dharmadhikari for recommending a large number of people for appointment as judges. He said Justice Dharmadhikari had been a judge of the HC since 2004 and had functioned on various benches to have reasonable knowledge about the talent pool in the HC.
When CJI Bobde asked Justice Chandrachud to specify his objections against individuals, the latter wrote an even more stinging response and said when he was suggesting reconsideration of the entire list by the Bombay HC, to give opinion on individuals would amount to “cherry picking”, sources said. After less than encouraging views from Justices Khanwilkar and Chandrachud, the CJI had sought the opinion of Justice U U Lalit on the 22 names.
With just a little more than a month to go for his retirement, CJI Bobde believed the vacancies in Bombay HC needed to be filled urgently and scheduled the collegium meeting without waiting for Justice Lalit’s response. The meeting found 13 of the 22 names suitable for appointment as judges of Bombay HC. If these are approved by the government and they are appointed as judges, Bombay HC will still have 19 vacancies against a sanctioned strength of 94 judges.
Justice Dharmadhikari was acting CJ of Bombay HC from February 20 to March 19 last year. He was CJ from March 20 till his superannuation on April 27, 2020. Justices Khanwilkar and Chandrachud had said it was well nigh impossible for a chief justice to prepare a list of 22 probable candidates for appointment as HC judges within a short span of two months.
They said shortlisting a candidate for appointment as a judge required the HC CJ to watch the performance of the advocates, consult bar leaders and colleague judges about the integrity, ability and capability of each individual.
They said most of the recommended people were around 55 years old and appointing people of this age group was not advisable as they would have a short tenure of around six years as HC judges, who retire at 62. According to them, most HC judges take at least two to three years to get acquainted with the art of writing judgments and adapting to the discipline intrinsic to the constitutional post.
The two judges said it would be in the interest of the justice delivery system to return the 22 names for reconsideration. They said the selection of candidates needed to be broad-based keeping in mind the hopes and aspirations of deserving advocates practising not only in Bombay HC but before its benches in Aurangabad, Nagpur and Panaji.

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