The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India’s selection of interesting news and opinion from the day’s newspapers.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen on Thursday withdrew his candidature for a second term as Chancellor of Nalanda University in Bihar, saying that the Narendra Modi government didn’t appear interested in keeping him on. Sen was one of the champions of the university, as he references, in this public resignation letter.
In a case of corporate espionage, the Crime Branch of the Delhi Police has arrested five men for alleged theft and sale of official secrets of the Oil Ministry to private corporate entities in the petrochemical sector. A Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) official and another person are among those detained.
The coalition government that is likely to emerge in Jammu Kashmir between the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the BJP appears to have miffed Pakistan as it has denied visa to a PDP spokesperson to attend a Track-II conference in Islamabad next week. This comes even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided to send Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar to Pakistan next month.
On the eve of the confidence vote in Bihar, Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi on Thursday appeared to make a desperate bid—virtually bordering on horse-trading—for support by publicly claiming that “he had several ministerial births to offer…”
Jindal Power may have lost its coal blocks on the Supreme Court’s orders but on Thursday the Naveen Jindal-promoted company won two major blocks in Chhattisgarh in an auction at Rs 108 a tonne, the lowest bid for any block so far.
Climate crusader R K Pachauri, who received the Nobel in 2007 on behalf of an international panel on climate change, is being investigated in a sexual harassment case. The complainant is a 29-year old woman who works in his office at The Energy and Resources Institute, the research thinktank he heads as director general.
Pachauri has been granted "interim protection" from arrest till 23 February, when he can approach a local court for bail.
The Narendra Modi government that came to power on a huge social-media updraft is in the process of
commissioning a project to analyse public sentiment about it on various online platforms. The project will cover the state-owned MyGov.in, Facebook and Twitter, and the top 10 news websites in the country.
Off The Front Page
The causes of the raging swine flu epidemic may be stumping epidemiologists, but the Mumbai mayor seems to see it like a heart disease and West Bengal CM, Mamata Banerjee, believes it to be brought about by mosquitoes.
While it has been steadily getting further from the corridors of power since May 2014, the Congress party may lose its iconic headquarters at 24 Akbar Road, along with three other bungalows in Lutyens Delhi after the Modi government has issued eviction notices.
If one goes by promoter holdings of listed companies, Reliance Industries chairman, Mukesh Ambani, may have to cede his spot as India’s richest man to Dilip Shanghvi, the 59-year-old promoter of Sun Pharma. Their compatriot, albeit from a different species, is Chunmun, a pet monkey in Uttar Pradesh’s Raebareli district, who’s been declared the legal heir to a wealthy, childless couple.
While court cases are known to frequently outlive their complainants, a courtroom in the Mysore district court has been locked and unused for nearly a year as it is believed to be haunted by the ghost of a judge, who died in a road accident last year.
However irate the Indian Railways might get you, it would be a good idea to keep smiling on board as the Railways has decided to record passengers aboard trains on sensitive routes as part of sprucing security measures.
Two pilots of the Red Bulls aerobatic team, performing at the Bangalore Aero show, narrowly escaped after the wings of their aircraft touched each other mid-air, but managed to land safely.
Opinion
Shamika Ravi and Rahul Ahluwalia criticize the forthcoming National Health Policy in The Hindu, and liken it to putting a “Band-aid on a corpse.”
Seema Chishti in The Indian Express sardonically enumerates how Biryani, a catholically-popular dish in the country, is frequently used as a metaphor to associate violence and terror with the Muslim community.
TP Sreenivasan argues in The Indian Express that frequent noises by the United States of making India a permanent member of the UN Security council are perfunctory and irrelevant to the present world order.