India

New Delhi, Sep 13 (IANS) Aiming to reduce pendency in the Government, Centre will start Special Campaign 2.0 from October 2 to October 31. As part of the campaign, Minister of State, Personnel, Public Grievances Jitendra Singh will launch a portal, www.pgportal.govlin/scdpm22 in New Delhi on Wednesday.

The Special Campaign 2.0 will focus more on field/outstation offices in addition to the ministries/departments and their attached/subordinate offices. The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) will oversee implementation of the Special Campaign 2.0.

Cabinet Secretary addressed all secretaries of Government of India on August 23 and DARPG Guidelines note for the same was issued on August 25.

The preparatory part will start with the launch of the Special Campaign 2.0 portal by Dr. Jitendra Singh and it will continue till September 30, when ministries and departments will identify the pendency in selected categories and finalise the campaign sites across their offices and complete necessary procedural requirements to conduct the campaign.

Every ministry/department is expected to use the portal during the preparatory phase to enter targets of their cleanliness campaign sites, files to be weeded out, and various pendency figures like MP's references, state government references etc. Until now more than 67,000 sites have been identified by ministries/departments of Government of India for conducting the cleanliness campaigns.

The Special Campaign 2022 reinforces the importance of timely disposal of references and a clean work space. The Campaign 2022 is expected to cover over 1.5 lakh Post Offices, overseas mission/posts, Railway stations and other public offices in mission mode during the month-long campaign. Training of nodal officers with respect to the portal of the Special Campaign has already been conducted by DARPG.

--IANS
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New Delhi, Sep 13 (IANS) Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Shehbaz Sharif are likely to have a meeting during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, which is scheduled to be held on September 15-16 at Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

If it materialises, then this would be the first meeting between the two leaders.

Modi had met then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on December 25, 2015, when he had landed in Lahore in a surprise stop-over to the country while on his way back to Delhi after completing a day-long visit to Afghanistan. It was the first visit to Pakistan by an Indian Prime Minister in more than 10 years.

Meanwhile, Modi will be visiting Samarkand to attend the 22nd meeting of the SCO council of heads of state, official sources said.

The SCO is the largest regional bloc in the world comprising eight full members -- India, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

The Prime Minister is also expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jingping and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the SCO summit.

Modi is visiting Uzbekistan on the invitation of the country's President, Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

The SCO summit will be attended by leaders of SCO member states, observer states, Secretary General of the SCO, Executive Director of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), President of Turkmenistan and other invited guests, a statement by the Ministry of External Affairs said.

At the summit, the leaders would be reviewing SCO's activities of the past 20 years and discuss various aspects related to multilateral cooperation as well as issues of regional and global importance, official sources said.

--IANS
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New Delhi, Sep 13 (IANS) There has been complete disengagement between Indian and Chinese forces at a key flashpoint in the Ladakh sector, government sources said on Tuesday.

The process, which started on September 8 after months of talks and 16 rounds of Corps Commander meetings, as per sources, entail both two sides moving back after their May 2020 friction. Both sides have verified their posts at LAC by the ground commanders, the sources added.

According to the sources, both India and China moved back their frontline troops from the face-off site of PP-15 in the Gogra-Hotsprings area in eastern Ladakh and dismantled temporary infrastructure there as part of a five-day disengagement process.

Sources close to developments averred that full details of the disengagement and the verification was done by the ground commanders.

Asked about the disengagement at PP-15 on the sidelines of an event, Army Chief General Manoj Pande had said: "I will have to go and take stock. But, it (disengagement process) is going as per schedule, and what was decided."

--IANS
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Kolkata, Sep 13 (IANS) The streets of Kolkata turned into a virtual battlefield on Tuesday afternoon as BJP activists, marching to the West Bengal Secretariat to protest corruption issues, clashed with police.

A police vehicle was torched, while a BJP councillor of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, an Assistant Commissioner of Police and several others, including both BJP supporters and police personnel, were injured.

At around 3 p.m., an group of BJP supporters led by party's national Vice President, Dilip Ghosh and the party's state General Secretary, Jagannath Chattopadhyay, started moving towards the state secretariat, Nabanna from BJP's state headquarters at Muralidhar Sen Lane.

As they reached central Kolkata, they came to know that Leader of Opposition in Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari had been arrested and taken to the Kolkata Police headquarters at Lalbazar. At this, a section of BJP supporters from the arms, led by Chattopadhyay started marching towards the police headquarters and were able to reach its gates after breaking through the barricades.

Although the police were initially pushed back, soon a huge contingent of security personnel, led by senior officials of Kolkata Police, stopped the BJP supporters, following which clashes broke out there.

Violence also spread to the adjacent Mahatma Gandhi Road, where a police PCR van was allegedly set on fire by BJP supporters.

An ACP and BJP councillor Meena Devi Purohit, along with several others, were injured.

Mahatma Gandhi Road, being a trading hub, has a number of shops with many storing inflammable items. The burning PCR van created panic in the locality and the traders quickly pulled down the shutters of their shops. However, the fire tenders quickly rushed to the spot and extinguished the fire before it could spread further.

A police kiosk there was also vandalised by the BJP supporters.

However, BJP state President Sukanta Majumdar alleged that the PCR van was set on fire by the police only and blame put on his party supporters. Senior city officials rubbished his claims.

--IANS
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New Delhi, Sep 13 (IANS) The Supreme Court has observed that the right to contest an election is neither a fundamental right nor a common law right and imposed Rs 1 lakh cost on a litigant who sought to contest Rajya Sabha polls without a proposer to propose his name.

A bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and Sudhanshu Dhulia said: "An individual cannot claim that he has a right to contest election and the said stipulation violates his fundamental right, so as to file his nomination without any proposer as is required under the Act."

The top court noted that petitioner Vishwanath Pratap Singh filed a writ petition before the Delhi High Court raising a grievance that a notification for election to Rajya Sabha was issued on May 12, to fill up the seats of members retiring from June 21 to August 1, and the last date for submission of the nomination was May 31.

"The stand of the petitioner is that he collected the nomination form but was not allowed to file his nomination without a proper proposer proposing his name. The petitioner sought his candidature without proposer which was not accepted and, therefore, he claims that his fundamental right of free speech and expression and right to personal liberty has been infringed."

Citing a judgment of Rajbala vs State of Haryana (2016), the bench said this court held that the right to contest for a seat in either of the two bodies is subject to certain constitutional restrictions and could be restricted further only by a law made by the Parliament.

Thus, the petitioner did not have any right to contest election to the Rajya Sabha in terms of the law made by the Parliament, it said, adding that the Representation of People Act, 1950 read with the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961 has contemplated the name of a candidate to be proposed while filling the nomination form.

"We find that the writ petition before the High Court was entirely misconceived and so is the present special leave petition. The right to contest an election is neither a fundamental right nor a common law right. It is a right conferred by a statute," the court said.

In the order passed on September 9, the top court said, "We dismiss the present special leave petition with cost of Rs 1,00,000. The said cost be paid to the Supreme Court Legal Aid Committee within four weeks. Pending application(s), if any, stands disposed of."

--IANS
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New Delhi, Sep 13 (IANS) Amid tough global market conditions, tech giant HCL Technologies has reportedly laid off 350 employees globally, including in India, Guatemala and the Philippines, who were working on a Microsoft news project, media reports said.

According to reports, the workers, who were employed by HCL's client Microsoft's news outlet MSN, reportedly learnt that they have been let go at a town hall meeting last week.

The last day of employment is reportedly September 30 for the laid-off employees, who will receive severance compensation.

Last month, a report said that at least half of the companies worldwide are planning to lay off people, with most reducing bonuses and rescinding job offers amid the economic downturn.

As per the latest PwC 'Pulse: Managing business risks in 2022' survey released last month, in the US, 50 per cent of respondents are reducing their overall headcount, even as business leaders remain concerned about hiring and retaining talent.

More than 32,000 tech workers have been laid off in the US till July, including at Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Meta (formerly Facebook), and the worst has not been over yet for the tech sector that has seen massive stock sell-off.

In India, more than 25,000 startup workers have lost jobs since the pandemic began -- and more than 12,000 have been fired this year.

--IANS
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Gurugram, Sep 13 (IANS) The Leela Ambience, a five-star hotel, in Gurugram on Tuesday received a bomb threat call, triggering panic in the premises, police said. However, it later turned out to be a hoax.

Police in a statement said, "A hoax call was made to a private hotel in Gurugram on Tuesday. Police reached the hotel, evacuated it and started an investigation. The caller was found to be a 24-year-old mentally ill person. He was found to be suffering from autism and he is undergoing treatment in a private hospital in Gurugram."

According to the report, more than a hundred guests were staying in the hotel.

However, after 90 minutes of search operation, it was found a hoax call.

An unidentified person had called the hotel's reception desk at around 11.55 a.m.

"It was a male voice that said a bomb will explode in the (Ambience) mall," the sources said.

The police were immediately alerted after which a dog squad and Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad (BDDS) rushed to the spot and evacuated people from the hotel.

The BDDS checked the entire hotel and its surroundings and a search operation is currently underway, the police said.

The hotel also increased the number of security staff after receiving the call.

--IANS
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New Delhi, Sep 13 (IANS) In the past few weeks, several shocking videos of young to middle aged people collapsing due to sudden heart attacks have gone viral.

Heart attacks, cardiac arrest and other cardiovascular diseases in large numbers of young Indians is becoming a major cause of concern.

According to cardiologists, there has been a spate of persons suffering heart attacks in their 20s and 30s over the last decade.

The findings say that Indians get heart disease 10 years earlier than their Western counterparts. As per the findings of Indian Heart Association, heart disease tends to strike Indians at an earlier age (almost 33 per cent earlier) compared to other demographics.

CVoter-IndiaTracker conducted a nationwide survey on behalf of IANS to understand people's views about the sudden rise in heart disease in young Indians.

The survey found that the biggest proportion of Indians, 31 per cent, believe that stress is the key reason for collapsing young hearts.

At the same, while 25 per cent of the respondents cited poor lifestyle as the main reason, 8 per cent of the respondents said that it is related to the side effects of Covid-19.

Similar sentiments were shared by both the urban and rural respondents.

During the survey, the biggest urban respondents, 35 per cent, and rural respondents, 29 per cent, blamed stress for the increase in cardiovascular diseases in young Indians.

After stress, the second largest proportion of urban respondents, 25 per cent, and rural respondents, 25 per cent, said that poor lifestyle is to be blamed.

During the survey, stress was cited as the main reason for increasing cases of heart attacks in young Indians by the respondents of different age categories.

Notably, maximum number of respondents in the age group of 35-44 years asserted that tension is killing young hearts.

Even the largest proportion of very young respondents, 25 per cent, in the age category of 18-24 years blamed stress.

After stress, the largest proportion of respondents from different age groups opined that poor lifestyle is the key reason for increase in heart disease in young Indians.

Many believe that it is related to side effects of lethal coronavirus.

--IANS
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Bareilly, Sep 13 (IANS) An eight-month-old infant in Uttar Pradesh's Bareilly district died after the battery of a mobile phone kept next to her on charging mode exploded, police said.

The phone, purchased nearly six months ago, already had a swollen battery plugged into a switch connected to a solar panel.

Kusum Kashyap, mother of the baby Neha, was not in the room at the time of the explosion.

She rushed in after hearing a loud noise and cries for help from her other daughter Nandini.

The baby had suffered serious burn injuries and died during treatment in the hospital.

Police said no complaint had been lodged so far but it was a case of negligence by the parents.

The father of the child, Suneel Kumar Kashyap, 30, is a labourer and lives in an under-construction house without a power connection. His family uses a solar plate and a battery for lighting and charging mobile phones.

--IANS
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Lucknow, Sep 13 (IANS) A strange trail of lights in the skies of Lucknow on Monday evening have left people stumped.

Local residents captured the blinking lights on their cameras and shared videos on social media platforms.

Some found it a celestial event while others termed it 'strange'.

The video was recorded by residents of Malihabad in the Lucknow district of Uttar Pradesh.

Sources, however, said that it was a Starlink-51 satellite train.

On September 4, Elon Musk-owned SpaceX had sent a space tug aloft along with another big batch of its Starlink internet satellites.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the east coast of Florida, carrying 51 Starlink internet satellites to orbit.

SpaceX has already sent more than 3,000 Starlink satellites into orbit, in an effort to create a huge constellation for broadband service targeted for remote areas.

The company founded by Musk has also launched more than 25 Starlink-centric missions in 2022 already. The September 4 launch was SpaceX's 40th of the year and continued to add to the Starlink mega constellation.

Some people on Twitter even said it could be an unidentified flying object (UFO).

--IANS
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