Rush Hour: 12 killed in Telangana chemical factory blast, four shot dead in Manipur and more
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A blast and the resulting fire at a chemical factory near Hyderabad has left 12 dead and 35 injured. The explosion took place in a drying unit at Sigachi Industries Private Limited, located in the Pashamylaram industrial area in the Sangareddy district.
The fire caused part of the building to collapse, trapping workers under the debris.
Emergency teams, including 11 fire department vehicles, were deployed and efforts were underway to locate any persons who have ben traipped.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that an ex gratia amount of Rs 2 lakh will be paid from the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund to the next of kin of those who died. Those who suffered injuries will be given Rs 50,000 each, he said. More on Scroll.
Unidentified gunmen in Manipur's Churachandpur have shot dead at least four persons, including a 60-year-old woman. The firing reportedly occurred near Mongjang village in the district around 2 pm as the victims were travelling in a car.
Initial reports suggested that they were shot at point-blank range, the police said.
Manipur has been mired in ethnic clashes between the Meiteis and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities that have killed at least 260 persons and displaced more than 59,000 persons since May 2023. There were periodic upticks in violence in 2024. More on Scroll.
Telangana MLA T Raja Singh has quit the Bharatiya Janata Party, expressing shock at reports saying that former Member of Legislative Council N Ramachander Rao was set to be the next state party chief. Singh, the MLA from Goshamahal in Hyderabad, said that the decision disappointed party workers, leaders and voters.
The MLA, however, said he remained committed to the ideology of Hindutva, and that he would 'continue to raise my voice and stand with the Hindu community with even greater strength'.
Singh has frequently made inflammatory remarks targeting Muslims and has been booked in several criminal cases.
In August 2022, he was briefly arrested for allegedly making disparaging remarks about Prophet Muhammad. The BJP had suspended him for the remarks, but reinstated him in October 2023. Even when he was suspended from the party, Singh had engaged in hate speech against Muslims several times.
Singh went on to contest the 2023 Telangana election, winning his third term from Goshamahal. More on Scroll.
The Supreme Court has declined to entertain a petition seeking directions to hand over the control and management of Bihar's Mahabodhi Mahavira temple in Bodh Gaya to Buddhists. The bench, however, said that the petitioner could approach the Patna High Court instead.
The petition was filed by former Maharashtra minister Sulekha Kumbhare, who sought amendments to the Bodh Gaya Temple Act 1949. The Act states that a committee constituted by the Bihar government will look after the 'management and control' of the Mahabodhi temple and its property.
The law says that the committee should include eight members nominated by the state government and four of them should be Hindus. The district magistrate will double as the chairman of the committee, provided the official is a Hindu.
In February, several Buddhist monks began an indefinite hunger strike in Bodh Gaya, demanding full control of the Mahabodhi temple.
This was followed by rallies organised in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu, culminating in a massive rally in Bodh Gaya on March 18 and 19. Read more.
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Indian Express
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The publication of the survey of household consumption expenditure for 2023-24 by the National Statistics Office in January 2025 has been followed by a flurry of estimates of poverty in India. Of these, two have received the most attention. The first off the block was a report from SBI in January, which was followed by one from the World Bank. They report more or less similar findings. The former flags 'a remarkable decline in rural poverty, estimated at 4.86 per cent in FY24… urban poverty estimated at 4.09 per cent'. The World Bank's report is far more optimistic, pegging 'extreme poverty' at 2.8 per cent for rural India and 1.1 per cent for urban India in 2022-23. If poverty in India is what these estimates show, it would be a matter for rejoicing, as it would have been virtually eradicated. These estimates of poverty have brought forth many responses. The Narendra Modi government's votaries have been quick to claim that the outcome reflects the success of its policies. Critics have focused on the non-comparability of the latest consumption data with those for 2011-12 as the survey methods have undergone change since. Both neglect the issue of the standard of living in India, and whether the extant methodology of poverty measurement underlying these estimates can lead to anything at all being said on the matter. Finally, more detached observers have brought up the question of what the 'historic low' in poverty implies for the subsidy regime. Officially approved poverty measurement in India has involved estimating the level of consumption expenditure sufficient to enable the minimum calorie intake necessary for living and working. As calories measure the energy ingested through food and drink, the methodology represents a physiological approach. Arguably, though, there can be another approach. This is to recognise that humans view food in terms of the energy, nutritional value and satisfaction that it provides. Societies have over time arrived at a geographically and culturally mediated norm for food consumption. In India, arguably, this would be represented by a thali, a serving of food comprising carbohydrates, protein and vitamins. Though it may be referred to differently across the country, a thali would be understood to include rice/roti, lentils and vegetables, with dairy/meat/fish extra according to diet and affordability. Indians recognise the thali as a fairly complete and nutritionally balanced unit of food consumption, a meal. Given the centrality of the thali in Indian life, it would be appropriate to treat it as the metric by which to measure the standard of living. This implies measuring the standard of living in terms of food, but then we believe that the level of food consumption should be treated as its most important constituent. Now, a meaningful question to ask would be, 'How many thalis does the daily consumption expenditure on food translate into?' We use the price of a vegetarian thali to measure the level of food consumption across the population as it is the most basic meal. The price of a thali at Rs 30 was taken from the rating agency Crisil, which calculates the cost of a home-cooked thali using data on the cost of its ingredients sourced from the east, west, north and south of India. The value of food consumption per capita given in the consumption survey for 2023-24 was expanded to include items purchased from the public distribution system and items received free as part of social welfare programmes. We found that in 2023-24, up to 40 per cent of the rural population could not afford two thalis a day. In urban India, up to 10 per cent of the population could not afford two thalis a day. These findings indicate that levels of food deprivation are much higher than what are implied by the poverty estimates using the same data, which we recounted at the outset. A possible reason for the difference between our estimate of the standard of living and the poverty estimates from the SBI and the World Bank is that we take the expenditure on food as opposed to total consumption expenditure as the relevant measure of consumption. The reasoning was as follows. There are five items of essential expenditure – housing, conveyance, telephony, health and education – that a household cannot forgo if it is to ensure its livelihood. Now, expenditure on food ends up as the residual. Therefore, when appraising the standard of living in terms of food consumption, basing it on the actual expenditure on food would be realistic. Poverty estimation needs a food standard that is based on goods. The thali index serves this purpose while being compatible with accounting for the calorific value of food intake. We may now address the issue of subsidies. Basing their argument on the much-publicised recent estimates of poverty, some observers have queried whether subsidies in general should be persisted with in economic policy. We believe that this is a discussion that needs to take place, as for too long the discourse on subsidies has been hijacked by political parties to justify competitive welfarism. However, our findings using a thali index of consumption implies that the food subsidy needs more to be rationalised rather than eliminated. For instance, in rural India, the per capita subsidy at the 70th percentile is not much lower than it is at the fifth, even though those in the former class can afford more than twice the number of thalis even without subsidisation. Eliminating the food subsidy at the upper reaches of the distribution while enhancing it at the lower levels would now be optimal. Balakrishnan is honorary visiting professor, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram and Raj is an economist based in Patna
