News on Agra & Current Affairs

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra At a time when the tourist traffic began to show upward trend in Agra, Wednesday’s communal riot, that broke in morning, has acted as a deterrent, thus crushing down the hopes of tourism industry of having a good year ahead. With the blocking of Mahatma Gandhi road, which leads to the city, due to curfew in six police station areas, the tourist traffic into the town remained disrupted throughout the day and a number of package tours, due to arrive in Agra, are reported to have cancelled their plans following the news of the riots. Talking to Business Standard, Prahlad Agarwal, convener, Agra Foreign Tourist Traders & Exporters Association said the tourism business was highly sensitive and slightest disruption of peace in the city dissuaded the tourists from visiting a place. He said each day’s disruption in tourist traffic could cause a loss worth Rs 1crore-1.5 crore to the tourism industry in the city. He said they had been receiving

GLOBETROTTING Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra Taking steps to cater to the leather footwear demands in the South American countries, the Council for Leather Exports (CLE) has announced the opening of Leather Desk in the city of Nova Hamburgo, Brazil, to facilitate Indian leather companies to do business with Brazilian firms and expand into new markets. CLE sources at Agra said Nova Hamburgo is the leather footwear production hub and among the leaders in exports to the world. CLE, in an attempt to boost up its members, has opened this desk where companies can get an open platform to expand their business. Agra, being the hub of Indian leather sector, the desk is also a stage for the town's exporters to grab orders from the untapped western markets. Speaking about the new initiative, Mukhtarul Amin, chairman, Council for Leather Exports, said: "This is a wonderful opportunity for footwear manufacturers at Agra. Unless we look at expanding our horizon to include new ma

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra Taking steps to minimise power theft by industrial consumers in Agra, UP power distribution company Dakshinanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam Ltd (DVVNL) has developed a wireless automated meter reading (AMR) system, which could make the process of manual meter reading redundant. Developing a wireless solution by working in collaboration with Jaipur-based Genus Power Infrastructure Ltd (GPIL), DVVNL has begun the installation of wireless power meters at the premises of its industrial consumers that was expected to bring down both the meter reading costs and power thefts drastically. Talking to Business Standard, DVVNL Managing Director Kirpal Singh said that though cases of power thefts were found more in domestic consumers, the real loss of revenue was still due to power theft in industrial units where the discom crew could not easily enter to check the meters, and by the time they reached the place where the meter was installed, the evidence of me

Vishal Sharma Agra State administration tells manufacturers to shift to gas burners or face closure. For a prospering industrial cluster of nearly 500 units, relocation is one of the worst nightmares. The petha manufacturers of Agra are facing exactly that prospect after having been served a month’s notice to either move to the new petha cluster established outside the city or face complete shutdown. At a meeting of petha manufacturers, Green Gas Ltd, a joint venture between GAIL (India) Ltd and IOC Ltd, the UP Pollution Control Board and city municipal officials held recently, it was decided that the Noori Gate area, which has been the hub of petha manufacturing units in Agra, will be vacated in a month and the units shifted to the Agra Development Authority’s petha cluster outside the city. “The petha units were causing a serious two-pronged pollution problem inside the city. The units released several tonnes of organic waste and smoke every day,” said Ashok Kumar Tiwari, regional o

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra After losing its chance of being turned into an international airport, Agra has again suffered a major setback with the union aviation ministry deciding to “overfly” the city’s airport while offering Lucknow a chance to share the winter flight load of the fogged-down Delhi airport. Each year during the winters, the international airport at Delhi gets covered with fog making it hard to land flights there for several days in the season. Flights approaching Delhi during these bad conditions are often routed to nearby airports of like Jaipur, Lucknow and Ahmedabad. The larger aircraft have to be diverted to Mumbai as other airports have smaller runways unfit to land large aircraft. Some of these aircraft are also landed at Agra, which is barely 15 minutes away from Delhi. Sources claimed that as it was a part of the Agra air force base, the runways available at the Agra airport were sufficient to land even the largest of aircrafts and advanced instrumental lan