-PTI GUWAHATI: Flood situation in Assam worsened on Sunday with 43 more villages in three districts getting submerged, while water entered the Kaziranga National Park where an antelope was killed, officials said. About 65,000 people of 170 villages in seven districts - Dhemaji, Tinsukia, Golaghat, Jorhat, Kamrup, Karimganj and Lakhimpur - were affected. However, there was no report of any casualty. According to Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA), Brahmaputra and its...

-IANS DEHRADUN/ HARIDWAR: There was still no clarity over the number of deaths in the flood-ravaged Uttarakhand, with a state minister on Sunday not ruling out an "estimate" of 10,000-plus and chief minister Vijay Bahuguna putting the number of missing people at 3,000. Uttarakhand health minister Surinder Singh Negi did not discount assembly speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal's claim on Saturday of the toll in the tragedy having crossed 10,000. "He (Kunjwal) has given...

-PTI   Chennai: With environmentalists citing ecological degradation as the reason for the natural disaster in Uttarakhand, the Centre on Sunday said it would take stock of the situation and study such concerns once rescue operations were completed. "We have to wait till the rescue operations are over and then we have to take stock of the situation before we decide on anything," the Union Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan told reporters in Chennai. She...

-PTI Dehradun: The blame game over Uttarakhand deluge escalated on Sunday with the Meteorological department saying it had issued "timely" warnings of heavy rains and Landslides but the state government claimed these were not "specific". The assertions by the MeT department and the state government, two weeks after heavy rains triggered floods and Landslides that ravaged Uttarakhand, came amid questions whether the administration ignored the warnings and whether large-scale deaths in the...

-The Hindu Indentured labour may be a forgotten part of our colonial economic history but Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh are still sending ‘Girmitya' to toil in distant Lands The descendants of indentured labourers, who migrated from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to erstwhile colonies, recently met at The Hague in the NetherLands to commemorate 140 years of migration - perpetuated through a system popularly known as ‘Girmit.' They gathered from all...