News on Agra & Current Affairs

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. This August could see an end to the woes of tourists who are made to wait in long queues at the Taj Mahal entrance. Acting on the complaints lodged regarding the complex process of issuing tickets for entry to the Taj, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is preparing to introduce e-ticketing system for entry to the monument in August this year. According to Assistant Superintending Archaeologist ASI Agra, SK Sharma, the system will be similar to that of the Kolkata and Delhi Metro Rail with a magnetic strip-equipped ticket being used to open a "turnstile" gate automatically for each person who would have to buy an individual ticket marked with a date and time of entry. He said that the e-ticket would initially ASI staff would be given the authority to issue these tickets. Later on, the process will shall be automated with ticket vending machines being installed at major tourist hubs, including five-star hotels. According to officials, onc...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. With biscuit manufacturers indicating a 15 per cent hike in the prices of the Glucose and Marie brands from May this year, due to heavy taxes in UP as well as the rest of the country, both the brands are fast disappearing from the local market, with retailers blaming distributors for holding up stocks. Over 60,000 tonnes of biscuits are consumed in Uttar Pradesh annually. In the Agra market, large family packs of both Marie and Glucose have become hard to find, an indicator of the impending crisis. Market sources say the distributors had reduced the supply after the Biscuit Manufacturers Association indicated that the biscuits might see a huge price hike in the coming month. This was so because the prices of inputs like wheat, sugar and edible oil had risen over the past decade. Besides, high tax rates were also forcing this price hike. According to industry sources, there is 8 per cent excise duty plus 12 per cent VAT for biscuit manufacture...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. Almost four months after it successfully developed a completely radical form of power-generating set, Agra-based Prakash Diesels Pvt Ltd held the formal commercial launch of their latest innovation—a 100 per cent bio-mass based genset—on Saturday. Talking to the mediapersons on this occasion, Rajesh Garg, Director (Technical), Prakash Diesels Pvt. Ltd. said that the generating set that is capable of producing electricity in the range of 15 to 50 KWh had been developed by the company in early December and was being subjected to trial runs in a couple of rice mills & leather tanneries where the genset was being fed with rice-husk and leather scrap to generate electricity that was pollution - free to a large extent, even better than CNG based gensets. After running the genset successfully in trial conditions, the company decided to introduce the genset in the market as a cheap method of electricity co-generation in rice-mills, sugar mills e...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. The market for ice-creams in India exceeds Rs 750 crore annually. For soft drinks, ice-creams, other beverages, and milk-based products, the period between March and October accounts for as much as 85 per cent of annual sales, and with the summer lasting 7-8 months each year, the demand for ice-creams and other “cool stuff” including soft-drinks has rarely shown a slack over the past few years. But over the passage of time, the demand for milk-based Indian soft-drinks like lassi and salted curd (chhach) too is beginning to emerge as a burgeoning market that the soft-drink and ice-cream manufacturers seek to capture. On Sunday, Universal Dairy Products Pvt Ltd, a Jaipuria Group company that has a technical tie-up with French dairy major Sodiaal for the Cream Bell brand of ice-creams in India introduced its new milk-based products “Punjabi Lassi” and “Gujrati Chhach” in Agra. Talking to the mediapersons on this occasion, Madhu Parikh,...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. After beginning its “CNG for Automobiles” project last week in Agra, the joint venture company of Indian Oil and GAIL, Green Gas Ltd, is preparing to provide piped CNG to households in Agra and Lucknow from October this year. According to the director (commercial), Green Gas Ltd, R K Sharma, six localities of Agra had been selected for providing piped CNG, in which the company would provide 1,000 connections in the first phase. Later, more areas will get connections, according to the feasibility situation in a particular locality. Sharma said booking for the connections would begin in May and the pipelines would be laid later, with the company installing its gas meters inside the houses at its own cost. He said the piped CNG was similar to LPG in every aspect and only a slight modification would be needed in the gas-stoves to adapt them for using CNG as a fuel instead of LPG. Sharma said that the initial cost of piped g...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. Airtel launched Airtel broadband and telephone services in Agra last week. The city will now form part of the Airtel network of fixed-line services present in Ghaziabad, Noida, Meerut and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, besides 10 other states. Announcing the launch of these services, in Agra, Rohtash Mal, CEO, Airtel Broadband and Telephone Services (North Circle), said Airtel was India’s first private fixed line operator and it had made a commitment to its subscribers to bring about the best in network services to its clients. On the occasion of the formal launch of the services, he said that the company had established its presence in 17 localities of Agra and in the coming few months, it shall be spread over the entire city. In the process of connecting Agra, he said, the company had laid out 55 km. of OFC and 248 km. of copper cable in a time of barely 4 months and sit had even got hold of an initial base of 2600 subscribers to i...

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. The nationwide debate over holding "office of profit" that took the toll of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and SP MP Jaya Bachchan has now hit the lowest levels of Governance in Uttar Pradesh. With the state Government issuing an order restraining the relatives of a village pradhan from holding any "office of profit", which in this case are the ration shops; the village pradhans in Agra are scrambling to dissociate themselves from their husbands or wives by getting a "legal divorce" through the court, while living together. Talking to The Pioneer, R.R. Pal, District Supply Officer, Agra said that there were 1236 ration shops in Agra district catering to about 8 lakh people, living both above and below the poverty lines. Out of these, a large proportion of ration shops belonged to the relatives of village pradhans, with the possession being either between husband-wives or father-sons. He said that the s...

Vishal Sharma Agra. After a long delay, the Centre has agreed to provide assistance to Agra industrialists for the development of an integrated special economic zone (SEZ) in the town that can serve handicrafts, leather and carpet units. Talking to representatives of industrial organisations of the town, Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh said the central government was ready to provide any assistance that was required for the development of an integrated SEZ in Agra, and as soon as the industrialists were able to form the special purpose vehicle (SPV) to take over the management of the SEZ, the government would approve the project submitted by this SPV. Ramesh came to Agra to preside over an interactive session on export potential from Uttar Pradesh, organised by the Federation of Indian Export Organisations (Northern Region) and the UP Export Promotion Bureau. According to the minister, since involving the state government construction agencies in s...

Vijay Upadhyay Etah. In sequence to the numerous politicians that are being gunned down by contract killers with an astonishing rapidity in Uttar Pradesh, another Block Pramukh was shot dead on Wednesday on the lines of the Aligarh RLD district President Malkhan Singh and Meerut Block Pramukh's murder, but this time in Etah. According to the eye-witness accounts, Bhupendra Singh (40), who had been elected as the Block Pramukh of Sheetalpur development block of Etah for the first time in the recent Panchayat polls, was sitting in his Maruti Zen with his associate Pappu and driver Pawan Varshney in the Civil Lines area of Etah town. Barely a couple of hundred feet from the Etah police and district administration offices at about 3 p.m. on Wednesday, when the car was surrounded by a group of armed, masked goons riding motorbikes who peppered the car with semi-automatic fire, hitting all three people sitting in the car. While both Bhupendra Singh and Pappu died be...

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. The disappearance of a Bihar based RSS leader from Agra had the police departments of both Agra and Patna racking their brains on Wednesday. RSS leader Abhijeet Kashyap, who was also a prominent businessman of Patna and the owner of a gas agency in the town, had arrived in Agra from Patna on 9th April to attend a national conference of Sanskar Bharti, an RSS frontal organisation and on 10th April, Kashyap left Agra in a taxi to Tundla, from where he had to board the train back home. When the train reached Patna on Tuesday, the family of the RSS leader began calling Kashyap's mobile phone that remained switched off through the entire day but Kashyap's daughter continued trying to call on the phone that finally got switched on by late evening and answering the call, Kashyap confirmed that he had been abducted and that he did not know where he was at that time. Immediately afterwards, the phone got disconnected and has continued to remain s...

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. Beginning this April, the environment of Agra will witness the precursors of a complete makeover with CNG finally available in Agra. On Monday, the GAIL-Indian Oil joint venture company, Green Gas Ltd, began dispensing CNG from its first pumping station in Agra, setup at the Inter-State Bus Terminal. Another four CNG stations will also come across the city soon. Though the Agra administration is still wary of shifting the entire public transport system to CNG now, with just one CNG station in the town, over 500 schools have been directed to either buy new CNG buses or convert the existing ones to the pollution-free "green fuel". In compliance with the Supreme Court directives on cleaning up the environment to protect the Taj Mahal, Agra divisional commissioner Ashok Kumar has asked the city schools to pull off the 2,500 diesel-run school buses as soon as possible. This was to prevent further air pollution with noxious diesel fumes t...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. Three months after it formally launched CNG for automobile project in Agra, the GAIL–IOCL joint venture, Green Gas Ltd, has completed the construction of the first CNG mother station in the town that began dispensing CNG to automobiles on Monday. According to J K Singh Tevatia, managing director, Green Gas Ltd, the pump, that had been established with the cost of Rs 5.5 crore had remained in pipeline for long due to the unavailability of land for the pump construction, before it could be finally setup. He said the company had fixed the CNG prices in Agra at Rs 26 per Kg which, though much more expensive than what the gas costs in Delhi, was still a cheaper alternative to petrol as a fuel as was evident from the increase in the fuel economy of the auto rickshaws that were making 39 km per Kg of CNG against the 19 km average on petrol. On the first day, he said, the pump that had been setup at the Inter State Bus Terminal in Agra, served gas to only seven a...

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. After months of dithering over the issue of Agra MP Raj Babbar's rebellion against it, the Samajwadi Party seems to have made its mind to make him realise the true price of his "impudence". While the MP and his star family has been indicted in a charge of fraud over a land deal in Agra last week, Mr Babbar has also been erased from the Agra Yearbook-2005 for voicing his opinions against the Samajwadi Party. Released on Monday by the Uttar Pradesh Information Department, the yearbook, named "Chowpal", sports the photographs and short congratulatory messages by the Samajwadi Party MPs from the neighbouring towns of Firozabad and Jalesar, apart from the Uttar Pradesh MLAs. However, despite the fact that it is a yearbook of Agra and Raj Babbar is the Agra MP, his photograph and message are conspicuously absent. Even the photographs of events that Mr Babbar participated in the past year have been skipped. When contacted regarding the...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. Of late, Agra has been witnessing a major change in its landscape, with dozens of multi-storied shopping malls and complexes coming up all over the town in the past one year. This indicates a possible change in the shopping behaviour of the fast-growing urban population. The city was recently declared the 27th metropolitan city of the country. Market analysts, however, believe that as most of the malls are coming up at a distance of 4-5 km outside the main township area, they could not experience much foot traffic, unless a major part of the city’s population decided to move into the residential colonies being developed in the vicinity of these malls. Sensing the need among the builders for prime land inside the city and the inability of the Agra Development Authority to provide this land, the Agra Cantonment Board, which holds almost 30 per cent of the total land available in Agra, with most of the land lying largely underutilised in the form of dis...

Lower 4% VAT in surrounding states hits business Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. Agra is known to be one of the largest markets for medicinal drugs and formulations in North India, grossing a monthly business of almost Rs 120 crore in the trading of medicines alone. But with UP being left behind the rest of the states in the country in adopting VAT as a uniform taxation system for businesses, this booming market is now witnessing a major slack in business. Faced with a trade tax of 8 per cent and an additional 1 per cent UP state development tax, against the uniform 4 per cent VAT in the rest of the states, the UP medicine market, which is primarily governed by Agra, has begun to experience difficulties in marketing the drugs at a higher price than in the neighbouring states, prompting the medicine traders of the state to go on a symbolic one day strike this week. The medicine market of Agra, which is located at the borders of four states - Delhi, Haryana, Madhya Pra...

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. Indictment of the accused in cases of rape and sexual assault is primarily dependent on the medical report prepared by Government doctors and it is this report that sends the accused behind bars or sets him free. But in Agra, the greed for extra cash of some doctors played heavy on their moral duty this week as they played with the life of a gang-raped adolescent girl - first declaring her an adult and a virgin and then vouched for her being nine weeks pregnant. According to Jagdishpura Police Station official Sanjeev Chauhan, Geeta (name changed) had disappeared from her home about six months back and was recently recovered by the police from Aligarh. In a recorded statement before the police, Geeta claimed that two local Muslim youth - Tinku Khan and Hanif Khan - had kidnapped her from her home about six month back. She said the youth, one of whom was her neighbour, had raped her for the past six months, first in Agra and then in Aligarh, w...

VISHAL SHARMA Agra. The Uttar Pradesh government decided to shift its banking transactions from SBI to Allahabad Bank. From April 6, Allahabad Bank will performs treasury functions for the state government. According to a government order issued by UP Principal Secretary (finance) Shekhar Agarwal, the district magistrates and treasuries of all UP districts have been directed to shift their banking transactions to the Allahabad Bank to prevent the collapse of the state's economy due to the SBI employees' strike. District magistrates were asked to ensure the safety of cash stacked at the sub-treasuries in each district. According to Agarwal, the state government departments will continue to avail the services of Allahabad Bank during the period of the strike as the bank had been authorised by the Reserve Bank of India to handle state government accounts during the strike. Owing to the strike the state government, at the beginning of the new fiscal year, has no...

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. Throwing a teacher off the moving train near the Etah district of Agra division, proved to be an expensive mistake for a Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel after the teacher was crushed under the train and an angry mob of students set the train afire. In the resulting mob violence and RPF firing, one person has received grievous gunshot injuries. Beginning early in the morning, the situation could only be brought under control late in the afternoon, when a large contingent of civil police, alongwith the Government Railway Police reached the spot to get the Kasganj-Kanpur railway track cleared of the agitated mob. According to Superintendent, Government Railway Police Agra Raj Bahadur Singh, Mukesh (25) S/o Dalchand, a resident of Ganeshpur in Sahawar town, who was serving as an Acharya in the Saraswati Shishu Mandir Kasganj, had mounted the Farrukhabad passenger train from the Sahawar railway station to reach Kasganj but he fell off the moving train, ...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. A name better known for Skoda, Honda and JCB dealerships, besides its real estate projects, Agra-based Triveni group is going to be the newest player in the booming satellite television industry. After trying its hand in automobiles, infrastructure development, real estate and finance, the Rs 2,000 crore Triveni group is planning to enter the entertainment industry through the launch of its own satellite television channel, which is expected to be launched in mid-October this year. Talking to Business Standard, Madhur Mittal, managing director, Triveni group, said the group was entering a phase of expansion and at a time when television channels were making good business in the country, it was almost natural for the group to take a step into this field. He said the Triveni group’s television channel shall be based completely on entertainment that included daily soaps and in-house programming and it had not been designed for any specifi...

Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. At a time when almost all the states in the country have accepted the VAT regime, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav has again reiterated his stance on not accepting VAT in the state, expressing his confidence in the trade-tax regime in the state. According to the chief minister, Uttar Pradesh shall not accept VAT at any cost, even if it meant that the state became completely segregated economically from the rest of the country. He is, however, confident that the state shall have lower inflation rates than the rest of the country. While other states are busy adjusting to the new tax regime, UP traders are divided in their opinion over the possible economic repercussions of the state not adopting VAT. According to UP Udyog Vyapar Pratinidhi Mandal Chairman Banwarilal Kanchhal, the state is faring well without VAT and the revenue earned by the state in trade tax had increased by 28 per cent, compared with the states that had accepte...

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. Question paper leaks in competitive examinations have become a routine feature these days. The AIIMS incident is just a speck of the big picture. However, while the CBI is cracking down on the culprits, involved in desecrating the highest medical entrance test in the country, the Dr BR Ambedkar University of Agra is setting new records in paper leaks. Barely a year after the sensational leakage of CPMT-2005 and BCom. question papers in the University, that even caused a University employee to commit suicide after he was charged for the paper leak, two question papers for BCom-III and BSc-I were again leaked on Friday morning in the Kasganj town of Etah after which the University was forced to cancel the examination for the leaked question papers. According to senior superintendent of police Etah Rajesh Kumar Rai, the police had received information that the question papers for the University examinations will be leaked and acting upon this informa...

Vijay Upadhyay Agra. For the people of Agra, who are accustomed to witnessing several religious processions passing through the city streets each year, it was a carnival with a difference. On Saturday, the residents of Agra witnessed a sight they could not help admiring when more than three thousand Eunuchs, dressed in their best garb, both traditional and western casuals and expensive jewelry, participated in a "Hijra Carnival" that passed through the major streets of the old city enroute to "Mankameshwar", the historic temple of Lord Shiva located in the center of the town. Dancing on the streets on traditional tunes and displaying their trademark mannerisms, the eunuchs, who prefer being called "Mangalamukhi" instead of "Hijras", participated in a time-honored ritual of offering a "Kalash" at the Shiva temple before formally beginning discussions on this year's agenda of the convention. Against the usual, mundane image associated...