News on Agra & Current Affairs

VISHAL SHARMA AGRA, 22 Feb. Just a few days after it was inaugurated by the UP Development Council Chairman Amar Singh, the Taj Mahotsava being held in Agra to promote tourism through a display of handicrafts suffered a major setback when a fire burned down the entire crafts village on Monday evening, causing loss worth several crores to the craftsmen who had arrived here from all corners of the country. No casualties have been reported so far. According to the initial reports, the fire was caused by a short-circuit in the wiring over the roof of stall no. 82. Starting at about 6:30 in the evening just before the performance of Kathak Maestro Birju Maharaj, the fire quickly spread from one stall to the other, accelerated by the presence of inflammable handicrafts items and in barely an hour, the complete Shilpgram, spread in about 12 acres area was ablaze. The intensity of the fire was so great that even the trees inside the campus were burned down. Though at least 40 fire engines were...

VISHAL SHARMA AGRA. The Surajkund crafts fair may have ended, but it does not mark the end of festivities in Northern India. The famous ten-day “Taj Mahotsava”, a crafts fair symbolizing the end of the tourist season, began today in Agra. This annual Taj Fest, which shall continue till 27th February, was inaugurated at the Shilpgram in Agra on Friday by the UP Development Council Chairman Amar Singh and UP Tourism Minister Kawkab Hamid. An interesting aspect of this year’s Mahotsava is that unlike previous years, while Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited has refrained from any publicity at the crafts fair, mobile companies like Reliance, Tata Indicom and Airtel have installed large hoardings of “Mahotsav offers” to capture a bigger market share than BSNL. Even the automobile manufacturer Bajaj took full advantage of the Taj Mahotsava to launch the environment friendly version of its auto-rickshaw brandnamed “Eco-Rick”, running on LPG. Though this crafts fair is an annual event, this...

VIJAY UPADHYAY If you are childless, come to Agra. Who knows, you may find a baby girl lying in a trash can yearning for your loving embrace. Incredible as it may sound, infant girls are turning up in Agra's trash cans at a rate which has shaken this sleepy town out of its inertia. In clearly the worst possible form of female infanticide, in the past month alone, about half a dozen new-born girls have been found alive in trash cans of Agra while three others have been discovered dead in sewers. Two such girls were recovered alive from the elite neighbourhood of Judge Compound, a residential colony of senior administrative officials of Agra, early this January, while one was found behind a bus-station and another in a 20-feet deep sewage drain. These abandoned girls have been taken over by the Rajkiya Shishu Sadan in the city which is already raising 33 orphan children. After the local administration refused to give away these orphaned girls for adoption without proper verification...