Goodmorning Readers,
We are covering the latest Covid guidelines, Reliance's latest acquisition and senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal speaks to The Indian Express on the ongoing leadership crisis in the party.
Big Story
The Unlock 4.0 guidelines are here. Metro services will start “in a graded manner” from September 1 and students from Class 9 to 12 can come to school on a voluntary basis. And states can no longer impose lockdowns outside containment zones without the Centre’s permission and must not seal borders.
From The Front Page
The Centre has come out with detailed borrowing options proposed to states for meeting the GST compensation shortfall of 2.35 lakh crore. The first option does not take into account the impact due to the pandemic, while the second option does.
Reliance is in the process of acquiring Kishore Biyani’s Future Group, which operates the Big Bazaar hypermarket chain, in a mega deal worth Rs 24,713 crore. The deal paves the way for Reliance to control nearly a third of organised retail revenues in the country.
[Exclusive] Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal says that not even one of the concerns the 23 dissenters had raised in their letter to party president Sonia Gandhi was either addressed — or even shared — at the Congress Working Committee meeting. Read the full interview here.
Awards, Virtually: Boxer Lovlina Borgohain with her Arjuna Award citation at the UT Secretariat in Chandigarh on Saturday. (Kamleshwar Singh)
The Pandemic
In efforts to find an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, global hopes rest on an Oxford University vaccine candidate — and the few who have signed up for its advanced trials. We met six among those on whom rests the fate of ‘Covishield’ in India, to find the roads that led them here.
Among the non-Tier I and II areas with one of the highest Covid death tolls in the country, Ganjam appears to have turned a corner. The district has gone three days without any fatalities and the daily positivity rate is now less than 2%, from 14.89% in the beginning of the month.
Beyond Covid-19
Dalits, tribals and Muslims continue to be jailed in numbers disproportionate to their share in the population, unlike OBCs and those belonging to the general category or upper castes, latest data on prisons released by the National Crime Records Bureau have revealed.
Unwilling to participate in any friendly exercise amid the Ladakh row, India has cited the Covid pandemic as the reason behind turning down Russia’s invite to participate in a multilateral tri-services military exercise next month following the participation of a Chinese contingent.
In the first-ever virtual ceremony, a record 74 sporting heroes of India were bestowed with the honours on the birth anniversary of hockey legend Major Dhyan Chand, annually celebrated as India’s sports day.
BSF personnel near the cross-border tunnel in J&K's Samba district. (PTI)
ICMYI
- Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who chairs the IT parliamentary standing committee, has written to Speaker Om Birla, saying the panel can take up the issue of Internet connections in J&K.
- A cross-border tunnel “150-160 metres towards the Indian side” has been detected in Jammu and Kashmir’s Samba sector, the Border Security Force announced on Saturday.
- An Indian doctor was arrested in New Delhi after his deportation from Saudi Arabia, where he was detained in connection with an alleged LeT recruitment plot registered in Bengaluru.
- A 58-year-old uncle of cricketer Suresh Raina died while four members of his family sustained injuries allegedly in an attack by robbers in Punjab’s Pathankot district.
- The wife and a son of a senior officer were shot dead, allegedly by the officer’s teenage daughter, at their Lucknow home on Saturday, police said.
And Finally...
Several British and Japanese soldiers died in the hills of Manipur during World War II. They do not lie here forgotten. A team of ‘battlefield diggers’ has been scouring the terrain to find their remains -- and bring closure to families seeking answers about their final days in a foreign land.
Inside Track: The drafting skills of the top lawyers and spokespersons who signed on to the letter to the Congress president seeking changes in the party were found wanting. The letter was actually meant to target the coterie surrounding Rahul Gandhi, known as the Tughlaq Lane club, and not the Gandhis themselves.
Until tomorrow,
Leela Prasad and Liu Chuen Chen
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