BJP defends Gadkari, rebuts Kejriwal’s charges

October 18, 2012
BJP_Gadkeri

New Delhi, October 18: The BJP stoutly defended party president Nitin Gadkari, facing charges of acquiring farmers’ land in Vidarbha, and turned the tables on Team Kejriwal saying, “hitmen have secured a self goal and damaged the credibility of civil society”.

India Against Corruption led by Kejriwal, on Wednesday, held a press conference to charge that Nitin Gadkari acquired farmers land in his native Vidarbha owing to his cosy relationship with former Maharashtra minister Ajit Pawar, the nephew of NCP chief Sharad Pawar and an important ally in the UPA government.

Immediately after, senior party leaders huddled at Gadkari’s residence to fine tune their strategy to counter Kejriwal’s expose, which did not rattle them as they had feared.

After the meeting, Gadkari dismissed the charges as "baseless, wrong and unfortunate".

Launching a counter offensive, he said Kejriwal, who has jumped into the political fray, was attempting to occupy opposition space with a tacit understanding with corruption-tainted Congress. "I am ready for any kind of probe," he said. According to him, the land (about 100 acres) was a wasteland valued at only Rs 20 lakh.

Though the allegations related to Gadkari’s business interests, BJP?party brass Sushma Swaraj and Arjun Jaitley were fielded by the party to defend the president. “Today’s press conference is a failed attempt to bring a moral equivalence between Congress and the BJP. A mountain of what was not even a molehill was desperately made out by the IAC,” Jaitley hit back at Kejriwal.

He also added that the “IAC has damaged the credibility of civil society” as he had to bend backwards to find out what the corruption was in acquiring waste land lying idle for 22 years.

But, the party failed to give a direct reply to why the Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra gave immediate consent to hand over 100 acres of land to Gadkari’s organisation and not to local farmers who had offered in writing to the district administration to buy back their land or to give it to them on lease.


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News Network
August 8,2020

New Delhi, Aug 8: The Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan on Friday directed the governments of four states -- Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, to analyse the factors driving the high COVID-19 mortality and devise ways and means to reduce the mortality.

Apart from the higher case mortality, these states account for 17 per cent of India's active cases, high daily new cases, low tests per million, and high confirmation percentage.

In a high-level virtual meeting, Bhushan advised state administrations to adhere to measures suggested by central advisories and guidelines to prevent and reduce mortality due to coronavirus infection.

According to the health ministry, 16 districts in these four states are reporting maximum virus fatalities. It includes -- Ahmedabad and Surat in Gujarat; Belagavi, Bengaluru urban, Kalaburagi and Udupi in Karnataka; Chennai, Kanchipuram, Ranipet, Theni, Thiruvallur, Tiruchirappalli, Tuticorin and Virudhnagar in Tamil Nadu; and Hyderabad and Medchal-Malkajgiri in Telangana respectively.

"The districts were advised to ensure that the advisories, guidelines and clinical treatment protocols issued by the Health Ministry are adopted and effectively implemented to reduce the mortality among COVID-19 patients and other preventable deaths among all sections of the people, particularly those with co-morbidities, pregnant women, the elderly and children," said the health ministry official.

"States were advised to ensure optimum capacity utilization of testing labs, increase tests per million population and reduce confirmation percentage, in addition to ensuring timely availability of ambulances with target zero refusal," the official further said.

"States were also advised to analyze availability and need for projected beds and oxygen, and plan in a timely manner. States and district administration have also been advised to ensure good infection prevention and control practices to control infection in the healthcare workers," said the official.

Principal Secretary (Health) and MD (NHM) from the four States along with district surveillance officers, district collectors, commissioners of the municipal corporation, Chief Medical Officers, and Medical Superintendent of Medical Colleges participated in the meeting.

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News Network
July 1,2020

Bengaluru, Jul 1: A day after the Government banned several Chinese apps, popular short-form video app Mitron reported that its daily traffic jumped up by more than 11 times.

Just 5 days after crossing the 10 million (1 crore) downloads milestone, Mitron has now announced that the app has been downloaded by 17 million (1.7 crore) users in India. Mitron app has been one of the most downloaded apps in India during the last two months.

"It is incredibly exciting to see the rapid adoption of Mitron by Indian users. 11-fold jump in traffic, immediately after the ban of Chinese apps, was beyond our expectations," said Shivank Agarwal, Founder, and CEO, Mitron.

Anish Khandelwal, Founder and CTO said, " We have built a solid backend infrastructure and our platform is now completely scalable and autonomous and that is helping us to cater to the sharp rise in traffic on Mitron App."

Mitron has been rapidly enhancing the product with several improvements for the users including an updated video upload process that is much easier, enhanced audio library with a wide choice of Indian content, and a feature that enables users to flag any inappropriate content easily.

Users uploaded millions of videos in 10 different languages and the number of videos viewed on the platform increased sharply to cross 30 million video views per hour.

Shivank added "We are a young company and we are hiring some of the best product & engineering talent to scale up Mitron rapidly. We are confident that we can build Mitron into one of the best apps in the short-form video space. Our focus is on building features and content that uniquely resonates with Indian users, while being sensitive to community standards and local laws in India and we believe that will help us build Mitron into a very large business."

Founded by two Computer Science engineers, Shivank Agarwal (alumnus of IIT Roorkee) and Anish Khandelwal (alumnus of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology), Mitron app is a short-form video app that allows users to create, upload and view entertaining short videos.

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News Network
June 24,2020

Thiruvananthapuram, Jun 24: Kerala on Tuesday was among those honoured for tackling the Covid-19 pandemic when the United Nations celebrated the Public Service Day.

The function, held on a virtual platform, saw the participation of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and other top UN dignitaries who applauded all the leaders which included state Health Minister K.K. Shailaja for effectively tackling Covid-19.

Speaking on the occasion, Shailaja noted that the experiences of tackling Nipah virus and the two floods - 2018 and 2019 - where the health sector played a crucial role, all helped in tackling Covid-19 timely.

"Right from the time when Covid cases got reported in Wuhan, Kerala got into the track of the WHO and followed every standard operating protocols and international norms and hence, we have been able to keep the contact spread rate to below 12.5 per cent and the mortality rate to 0.6 per cent," she said.

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