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Taking a dig at the Centre for not furnishing information on deaths due to oxygen shortage during the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic, or data on members of the purported “tukde-tukde” gang, Congress Rajya Sabha MP P Chidambaram on Tuesday said the NDA stands for “No Data Available’ government.

"I am a member of the 'tukde-tukde' gang, which means ‘disruption’,” he said. “I am worried because in this Parliament a question was asked: ‘who are members of the tukde-tukde gang. The honourable minister said, ‘we have no data available on tukde-tukde gang’.”

“No data is also available on oxygen shortage deaths, corpses floating in rivers, migrants walking back to their homes, and doubling farmers income, which was supposed to happen in 2022,” he said.

The government on Monday said the country’s dependence on imports to meet thermal coal demand has sharply reduced and stressed that in the next financial year, this demand will be met from Coal India, Singareni Collieries Company Ltd and captive mines.

The power ministry has projected a requirement of 727 million tonnes (MT) of domestic coal for coal-based power generation for 2022-23, Coal Minister Pralhad Joshi said in a reply to a query in the Rajya Sabha.

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, has announced that it has commissioned Param Pravega– it’s latest supercomputer under the National Supercomputing Mission. Claimed to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in India, IISc also said that it is the “largest in an Indian academic institution”.

IISc said that the Param Pravega supercomputer comes with a total supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops (1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1015 operations per second). This supercomputer will be used for research purposes.

The Param Pravega supercomputer has a mix of heterogeneous nodes, with Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors for the CPU nodes and NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards on the GPU nodes.

Congress lawmaker Anand Sharma on Monday said the President’s address to both Houses of Parliament made no mention of issues related to national security and did not specify the government’s blueprint for the future.

Speaking during the discussion on the motion of thanks to the President’s address, Sharma said over a lakh security personnel have been deployed along the border shared with China but the government has not deemed it necessary to keep the opposition informed about the situation on the ground.

“...Newspapers in the country know, foreign departments know, shouldn’t this be discussed in Parliament?” he said.

Putting an end to speculation, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi declared Charanjit Singh Channi as the party's chief ministerial pick for the upcoming Punjab Assembly election during his visit to Ludhiana on Sunday.

The decision was taken days after the Congress high command had sought people's opinion to decide its chief ministerial candidate in Punjab through IVR (Interactive Voice Response) calls.

Announcing the Congress's CM face, Rahul Gandhi said as per the people's suggestion, the party wanted to have a chief minister from a poor background who understands the pain of the lower classes.