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/ 10 November 2004
Women in India, home to the world’s second-largest HIV population after South Africa, are becoming more vulnerable to Aids.
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/ 31 October 2004
Stressed-out Indian MPs will relax at weekends with sack races and other games if a ministerial proposal is accepted, a report said on Sunday. According to a plan by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, a plethora of sporting events will be organised for the MPs at weekends during parliamentary sessions.
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/ 29 October 2004
The lizard biriani served on a Jet Airways flight in India proved just too spicy for a startled passenger who is taking the private carrier to court. The airline admitted in a statement published on Friday that it has launched an inquiry into how the two-inch lizard came to be cooked and served up to businessman Ashok Sharma.
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/ 26 October 2004
The Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, will visit South Africa in November, it was announced on Tuesday. The Dalai Lama will spend a week in South Africa from November 3-7, according to an official release issued by his office in Dharmshala in the northern Indian hill state of Himachal Pradesh.
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/ 13 October 2004
Leading internet search engine Google said on Tuesday it was planning a big expansion of its India operations which are run from the southern cities of Hyderabad and Bangalore. ”We are committed to substantial growth in terms of both manpower and infrastructure at both these offices,” Sergey Brin, co-founder of the search engine, told reporters at a press conference.
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/ 11 October 2004
India is to send about 3 000 troops for United Nations peacekeeping operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), making it one of the largest contingents in the strife-torn African nation, a senior official said on Monday. India’s present deployment consists of a 300-strong air force contingent armed with Mi-35 utility and attack helicopters and a 100-member army team.
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/ 10 October 2004
Rescuers in India’s flood-ravaged north-east have recovered a further 37 bodies, taking the death toll in flash floods and landslides in the region to 157 in the past five days, an official said on Sunday. Weather officials said the deluge was the worst in a decade to soak the region outside of a monsoon period.
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/ 22 September 2004
Torrential rain killed at least 36 people and washed away houses and farms in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, officials said on Wednesday. Thirty-five of the people, including a number of women and children, died when flash floods submerged homes on Tuesday in Sitapur district.
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/ 20 September 2004
India on Monday was set to launch its first satellite to be used exclusively for education, which will connect classrooms in remote parts of the country, the space agency said. The satellite was built with a mission life of seven years and will transmit information that will train teachers and provide primary and university education in remote regions.
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/ 17 September 2004
New Delhi’s police chief, who snared former South Africa cricket skipper Hansie Cronje for match-fixing in 2001, faces being fined for allowing mosquitoes to breed at his offices, an official said on Friday. His office was the subject of a sting operation by health workers fighting dengue fever.
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/ 15 September 2004
An illiterate sweeper doubles as the only doctor in an eastern Indian village, highlighting the dismal state of health care in rural areas, it was reported on Wednesday. Ganesh Das is a government-appointed sweeper at Ramchandrapur in Diamond Harbour, about 90km from Calcutta city.
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/ 3 September 2004
An Indian man has tried to enter the Guinness Book of World Records by feeding a live grass snake into his right nostril and taking it out through his mouth, media reports said on Friday. Last November, the man swallowed 200 earthworms, each measuring at least 10cm, in 30 seconds.
A grenade exploded at a crowded market in the north-eastern Assam state of India on Thursday, injuring seven people hours after two bomb blasts elsewhere in the state left four dead and 39 others wounded, police said. Suspected militants from the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom hurled the grenade at the market.
A 29-year-old Muslim women in the western Indian state of Maharastra was divorced by her husband over the telephone, it was reported on Tuesday. Shabana Sayyed said her husband divorced her by saying ”talaq, talaq, talaq” thrice when she called him up from her parent’s house last week, the Asian Age newspaper reported.
Tens of thousands of Mumbai’s bar dancers and owners staged a rally on Friday to protest against alleged police harassment and a draft municipal law that aims to clean up hundreds of drinking houses. The law requires, among other specifications, bar owners to ensure that dancers do not wear ”skimpy” dresses.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Tuesday he has set up a panel to find a permanent solution to floods that annually ravage the country’s east and north-east, as officials reported another 24 people killed. The death toll due to flooding caused by monsoon rains since mid-June in India has touched 217.
Forty people, most of them commuters, were killed on Monday when a crowded bus shot off a highway in torrential rains and plunged into a rain-filled ditch in India’s West Bengal state, police said. ”The bus sank in the ditch filled up by monsoon rains,” state police inspector general Chayan Mukherjee said.
Parents cremated the already charred bodies of their children on Saturday after a devastating fire that swept through a primary school in rural India, killing at least 90 children. Some officials said teachers fled the burning thatched-roof building without helping their students escape.
A fire that may have been caused by a short circuit igniting a thatched roof killed at least 70 children and injured more than 100 others in a southern Indian school on Friday. An earlier report quoted a senior police official as saying 77 bodies had been recovered. Most of those killed and injured were four to 10 years old.
Overflowing rivers have swamped villages in South Asia, leaving millions of residents stranded in their flooded homes and 272 people dead in the annual monsoon rains, officials and news reports said. More rain is forecast over the next few days in Bangladesh and India’s northeast.
The onset of the monsoon has sparked an exodus from the central Indian town of Harsud, which is facing submersion by a new dam, but thousands of families are still refusing to budge, an official said on Thursday. Residents had been warned they would have to move as long as a decade ago.
Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi has refused to become India’s next prime minister, it was reported on Tuesday. She has apparently told senior Congress Party leaders that she does not want to head the new government, television network NDTV reported.
Hindu party to boycott Gandhi ceremony
India’s oldest party, the Congress, virtually written off by political pundits and rivals, made a stunning comeback on Thursday in national polls under the leadership of its Italian-born chief, Sonia Gandhi. Results of India’s staggered polls showed the party sweeping the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party from power.
Six persons were killed and scores injured in scattered incidents of violence as India’s mammoth parliamentary election exercise drew to an end on Monday with the fifth and last round of voting. A total of about 38 people were killed and more than 200 injured in violence during the five polling days.
At least 10 people were reported killed and about 100 injured by the time polling ended on Monday in the third phase of India’s mammoth parliamentary elections. Bomb blasts, violent clashes between political parties, drive-by shootings, landmine explosions and grenade attacks were reported in six of the 11 states that voted on Monday.
Muslim separatist militants in Indian Kashmir narrowly missed a former state chief minister in a grenade attack as the revolt-hit state geared up for national elections, police said. Abdullah, whose National Conference party lost power in Kashmir in 2002, has survived at least three earlier attempts against his life.
At least 29 police officers were killed and many others injured when several landmines exploded in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, news reports said on Thursday. The blasts occurred on Wednesday night when a convoy of about 150 police officers triggered the landmines in a forest.
About 60 people were injured on Monday when suspected Islamic rebels hurled a hand grenade that exploded in a crowded market near a bus terminal in Indian Kashmir, police said. The rebels tossed the grenade at a passing security force patrol in Pulwama, 30km south of the summer capital, Srinagar, a police spokesperson said.
A retired Indian headmaster hanged himself three years after a court turned down his petition to exercise his right to die, it was reported on Friday. CV Thomas (85) hanged himself in his home in Thrissur in southern Kerala state. A note taped to his neck said: ”Bondage was worse than death. Let this fate not befall any other.”
Five people were killed and 51 injured in revolt-racked Indian Kashmir when Islamic rebels detonated a grenade to escape from a house where they had tried to abduct a civilian, police said on Wednesday. But witnesses said one of the men who entered the house west was working for Indian security forces.
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/ 17 February 2004
Software giant India is poised to become a large-scale hardware manufacturer on the back of explosive sales growth, India’s information technology minister said on Tuesday. ”We will see the large-scale manufacture of hardware in India in the next two to three years,” Arun Shourie told a telecommunications conference.
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/ 23 January 2004
A man who escaped from a fire that engulfed a wedding pavilion and killed at least 45 people in southern India on Friday, said he could hear people crying out from the flames. ”We could hear a lot of shouting from inside asking for help. We could do nothing because the fire was blazing,” he said.