NEWS

The Congress, which said it had won freedom movement for the country by hitting the streets, has gone back to the drawing board, with its president Sonia Gandhi announcing the launch of ‘Jan Jagran Abhiyan’ where senior party leaders and workers will take to streets to address people’s issues.

While Congress was deliberating its strategy over tea and snacks inside the media room at its headquarters in New Delhi on Tuesday, a little farther away, Trinamool Congress held a press conference and accused Congress of having slipped into a comfort zone, and not being confrontationist.

TMC Rajya Sabha MP Sukhedu Sekhar Roy, who was asked about TMC’s expansion plans, said, “How long can we wait for the Congress? Mamata Bannerjee had on her visit to Delhi a few months told Sonia Gandhi that as a national party the Congress should take the lead, and wake up from its inertia. But now TMC can’t keep on waiting for the Congress. We are a political party and we have every right to expand.”

India logged 12,428 new daily Covid-19 cases, 13.1 per cent lower than yesterday, and 356 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Ministry data showed on Tuesday.

This is the lowest daily surge in Covid-19 cases since March.

On October 18, India had logged 13,596 new Covid-19 cases, which was the lowest daily spike in cases that the country saw in 230 days.

With fresh cases, the country’s overall caseload has now mounted to 3,42,02,202, according to the data released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare early on Tuesday.

As many as 356 deaths were reported in the country in the last 24 hours, increasing the total death count to 4,55,068.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday invited foreign defence companies to participate in the next edition of the DefExpo, saying India is open to conducting business on a mutually beneficial and collaborative approach in the spirit of "give and take".
In an address at an ambassadors' roundtable on the upcoming expo, Singh said India's defence exports have grown by 334 per cent in the last five years and now India is exporting military equipment to more than 75 countries.

He said the upcoming DefExpo will provide an overview of what India has been able to achieve in terms of defence research and development, production and application of modern technologies for use by the military.

With a fresh influx of refugees from coup-hit Myanmar in over a week, the total of number of people taking shelter in Mizoram has mounted to 13,000, officials said on Monday. According to district administration and police officials, men, women and children from Myanmar, specially from Chin state, are crossing over to Mizoram's southern and eastern border districts.

Officials and elected representatives, who are closely monitoring developments in Myanmar, said that continued clashes between the Army and the civilian groups there forced the people to cross over and seek refuge in the Indian state.