News18.com Daybreak | Nagaland Assembly Elections, Delhi CS Assault Case and Other Stories You May Have Missed
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A total of 195 candidates are in fray for the February 27 Assembly elections being held in Nagaland. BJP candidates have promised senior citizens a trip to the holy land of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Congress, in its manifesto, has assured to work towards setting up a board "to facilitate minorities to visit Holy Land at a subsidised cost". As both the parties are trying to woo the Christian-majority of the state, regional parties will try to hold the fort. Here’s a cheat sheet to understand the less covered state of Nagaland.
The Delhi government machinery came to a virtual halt as the alleged assault of chief secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP MLAs sent bureaucrats on a war path against the Arvind Kejriwal-led government, leading to scenes of utter chaos inside the secretariat. Scores of officials led by the IAS body met home minister Rajnath Singh at his residence, demanding action against the MLAs who allegedly assaulted Prakash. They threatened to go on a strike if their demands were not met.
Private hospitals in Delhi/NCR routinely prescribe expensive branded drugs instead of the price-controlled ones and also earn profits up to 1737 percent on drugs, consumables and diagnosis, the national pharma price control authority revealed. The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority of India (NPPA) has analysed billing patterns of four private hospitals in the Delhi/NCR to find that drugs under the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) or scheduled drugs constitute only 4.10 percent of the billing amounts while expensive non-scheduled drugs that have no price caps make up for 25.67 percent of the total billing amounts.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi, on his second visit to poll-bound Meghalaya, hit out at the BJP-led central government, alleging that it ''actively" participated in corruption by allowing bank-loan defaulters Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi to escape the country.
Asserting her right as an individual with free choices, the woman at the centre of the 'Kerala Love-Jihad' case has told the Supreme Court that she is a Muslim and wants to continue living like a Muslim. She has also told the Court that she wants to live with her husband as a couple because she embraced Islam and married him on her own free will. "I have been under confinement without the freedom that I am entitled to. Even now, I am under police surveillance. I most humbly pray that my entire liberty may kindly be restored to me," her 25-page affidavit has stated.
A mob barged into a police station, dragged out two men accused of raping and killing a minor and then lynched him on the streets in a town in Arunachal Pradesh's Lohit district. The two had been arrested for the alleged rape and murder of a five-year-old girl at Namgo village in the district, the police said.
In a shocking incident that brings back horrific memories of the December 2012 Nirbhaya rape case in the country’s capital, a 28-year-old mentally challenged tribal woman was brutally gang raped in Dehaband area under Kushmandi police station in West Bengal’s South Dinajpur district.
Setting off alarm bells for Jharkhand administration, a tribal group in the state has created an independent area mere 35 km from Ranchi, where people are governed by their own laws and have their own system of education and income.
Virat Kohli has made it a habit to break records and the latest one is special. Kohli has received the highest batting ratings for ODIs in the latest rankings revealed by the ICC and he sits on the top with 909 points — the highest for any player in the last 27 years.
Agree or disagree?
In a country like India, where large businesses routinely default on loans to public banks, is there a blockchain silver bullet? It all depends on what you mean by blockchain. There is blockchain with a small b, which should really be called Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). This can be used to beef-up interbank protocols and may have ensured slightly higher security standards. But such DLT solutions would eventually also have been circumvented by Nirav Modi’s accomplices inside and outside PNB Bank because the failure here was just not at the level of technology — it had to do with the design of the system of trust through which the institution operated. Aditya Dev Sood explain why blockchain could have prevented frauds like that in Punjab National Bank.
The budgetary announcement of National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS) is a good step in right direction, but it cannot be a panacea for India’s ailing health sector, writes Mayur Trivedi, an Associate Professor with Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhinagar. India needs to focus on health, healthcare, and health coverage of its population. While multipronged reforms are needed to strengthen India’s public health sector, a strong regulation is needed to make private health sector more accountable. NHPS, as a health insurance scheme, can only offer financial protection. However, such schemes are necessary but not sufficient for ensuring universal health coverage.