FRESH PLEA SEEKS RETURN OF IDOLS FROM AGRA FORT
“I hope there will be more experiments in the usage of drones in the future. I invite investors from the country and all over the world. I also appeal to the industry experts, to make drones more accessible to people. I want to appeal to youngsters that new drone startups should come up,” the Prime Minister said.
Agriculture is a key area where the government wants to encourage drone use. “Few types of pulse crops grow very tall and it gets cumbersome for farmers to water and spray pesticides on them. Hence, the production of pulse crops is expected to increase with the use of drones, as the process will get easier,” Modi said, illustrating how it will help farmers.
An agricultural drone can undertake precise farm operations, from spraying to monitoring crop health. They can cost anywhere between ₹5-10 lakh. In February, Modi launched 100 ‘Made in India’ agricultural drones across the country, which carried out farm operations in unique simultaneous flights. Farmers will in the future be able to rent drones during various phases of the cropping season like they do other farm machinery.
Modi also cited PM Swamitva Yojana as another use case. “Under this scheme, for the first time, every property in villages is being digitally mapped and digital property cards are being given to people,” he said.
The event took place a day after the Modi government completed eight years in power. Scindia said the strides the country has taken in the field of adopting technology was owed to the Prime Minister’s “resolve, determination, far-sightedness and transformative thought”.
In the months since the government released the new rules last August, drones have been showcased as last-mile delivery platforms when health officials used these in test runs to deliver Covid-19 vaccines in a remote location in Manipur, and were deployed in a first-of-its-kind light show in India during the Beating the Retreat ceremony this year.
In recent years, drones have been deployed by law enforcement agencies for monitoring, and disaster management teams to get eyes on remote, crisisstruck areas. Some state governments, such as Telangana, have also used these in reforestation drives to spray seeds, while private companies are carrying out trials of package deliveries — which India’s new regulations too will allow.
Smit Shah, director of Drone Federation of India said, “Policy liberalisation and reforms have created a friendly ecosystem for an individual planning to start a drone company. Drones are the future of our country.”
Indian literature as a whole. Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi, and in other South Asian languages. World literature will be richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages.”
Language has its own presence and independent personality, Shree told HT in March. “I enjoy the audio quality of language, I enjoy turns of phrase. Language is all about breath, not just easy breathing but fun breathing, different kinds of breathing. But you can’t have erratic breathing which will make you collapse,” she said at the time.
Rockwell, a painter, writer and translator living in Vermont, US, joined Shree on stage to receive the award for translating the novel she described as a “love letter to the Hindi language”.
“It was one of the most difficult I have ever translated because of the experimental nature of Geetanjali’s writing and her unique use of language,” said Rockwell, who now only translates women “after becoming fed up with the male gaze, misogyny”.
Originally published in 2018, Tomb of Sand is the first of Shree’s books to be published in the UK in English by Tilted Axis Press in August 2021. The publishing house was founded by translator Deborah Smith — who won the 2016 International Booker for translating Han Kang’s The Vegetarian — to publish books from Asia.
The book has not been published in the US yet, but Shree’s other works have been translated into English, French, German, Serbian, and Korean.
The author’s playful tone and wordplay resulted in a book that is “engaging, funny, and utterly original”, and an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, the Booker jury said.
Dubbing the novel a “joyous cacophony”, judges’ panel chair Frank Wynne said the novel “has an exuberance and a life and a power and a passion which the world can do with right now”.
“This is a luminous novel of India and Partition, but one whose spellbinding brio and fierce compassion weaves youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole,” he said.
Despite confronting traumatic events, Wynne said, “It manages to take issues of great seriousness — bereavement, loss, death — and conjure up an extraordinary choir, almost a cacophony, of voices.”
Shree’s novel competed against five other shortlisted titles, Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse, Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro, and The Books of Jacob by former winner Olga Tokarczuk.
This year, the judges considered 135 books and for the first time in 2022, all shortlisted authors and translators will each receive £2,500 pounds, an increase from 1,000 pounds in previous years — bringing the total value of the prize to £80,000.
Complementing the Booker Prize for Fiction, the international prize is awarded every year for a single book that is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. It is run alongside the Booker Prize for English-language fiction.
Wynne said the prize aimed to show that “literature in translation is not some form of cod liver oil that is supposed to be good for you.”
AGRA: A fresh lawsuit has been filed in the court of civil judge in Mathura, seeking return of idols which were reportedly removed by Mughal emperor Aurangzeb from Sri Krishna Janambhoomi temple and placed below the stairs of Begum Sahiba Mosque near Deewan-e-khas in the Agra Fort.
The plea, however, could not be registered as the court “returned” the suit over noncompliance of legal provision requiring service of notice before making Union of India a party to the case, the petitioner and lawyer Mahendra Pratap Singh said.
PM AT DRONE FEST