'In 2016, it was mining baron Gali Janardhana Reddy who raised eyebrows for hosting the biggest and fattest spread Bengaluru had seen for his daughter's multi-crore wedding. Four years on, it appears that Janardhana Reddy's clout will be given a run for its money by his close aide and Karnataka Health and Family Welfare Minister B Sriramulu who has set aside 9 days for the multi-crore wedding of his daughter Rakshita with Hyderabad-based industrialist Ravi Kumar.
'Truck drivers and fleet owners shell out around Rs 48,000 crore annually as bribes to traffic or highway police, besides personnel from the transport and tax departments, according to a study carried out across 10 major transport and transit hubs. Even local groups like “puja samitis” extort from truckers before allowing them to cross informal checkposts, with one-fourth of drivers paying cash to them...'
'One in three Aadhaar-based payments for the Centre’s maternity benefit scheme, or Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY), was credited to a wrong bank account, according to a progress report on Poshan Abhiyaan (Nutrition Mission) released by the NITI Aayog on Saturday. “A substantial number of payments (28% of all Aadhaar-based payments, of 31.29 lakh) are going to different bank accounts than what had been provided by the beneficiaries. Sometimes these are even untraceable by beneficiaries and field functionaries.
'The news of discovery of gold mines with 3,500 tonnes of gold reserve in Uttar Pradesh’s Sonbhadra district first broke on the Feb 20th in regional papers. By February 22nd, 2020, the entire Indian media was abuzz with the news that Sonbhadra gold mines had gold deposits estimated to be around 3,350 tonnes and worth Rs 12 lakh crore, which is almost five times India’s current gold reserve.
'Not a single person was killed by police bullets during the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act on December 19 and 20, 2019, and those who died were killed by the “bullets of rioters”, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath stated in the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday. At least 23 people died in the violence during the protests, most of them of bullet injuries...'
'Even as the Indian government claimed that Debbie Abrahams’s visa was revoked before her travelling to India and that she was informed in advance, the British MP has asserted that she had not seen or received any such intimation. Abrahams, who heads the British All-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Kashmir, was deported from India after she arrived at the Indira Gandhi International Airport on Monday morning. In her initial statement, the Labour MP had said that on arrival, she was rudely informed by immigration officials that her visa had been revoked...'
'A deepfake of the president of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Manoj Tiwari, went viral on WhatsApp in the country earlier this month, ahead of legislative assembly elections in Delhi, according to Vice. It’s the first time a political party anywhere has used a deepfake for campaigning purposes. In the original video Tiwari speaks in English, criticizing his political opponent Arvind Kejriwal and encouraging voters to vote for the BJP.
'On February 16, India Today ran ‘exclusive’ footage on the events of December 15, 2019, in Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI). This was after a CCTV video of police charging students with lathis inside a reading room went massively viral. The footage was handed over to the channel by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Delhi police. It was played as ‘authentic’ clip and used to claim that students entered the reading room with stones in their hands. A plethora of other news organisations carried the clip and claimed that the students had stones clasped in their hands.
'More than a month after National Statistical Commission (NSC) chairman Bimal Kumar Roy said the official survey report showing a dip in consumer spending for the first time in over four decades would be made public, the autonomous data body decided against releasing the report. When asked why the NSC departed from its earlier view, Roy said: “I did try. I made a proposal (in an NSC meeting on January 15) to release the survey but I didn’t find support. I did put in the proposal as chairman but it didn’t get through.
'...Last Wednesday, the sonu and monu of online misinformation, OpIndia and My Nation, jointly organised an event at Delhi’s Constitution Club titled “Bharat Bodh”. The esteemed house had Twitter influencers, authors, columnists and Madhu Kishwar as panellists. “Is India being pushed towards Khilafat 2.0?” was the question to be urgently contemplated. The blurb: “Riots, anti-Hindu imagery, Jinnah wali azadi and more — dissent or foundation for Khilafat 2.0?”...
