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The Morning Wrap: Essar Paid For Gadkari's France Vacation, No Bullet Solutions To Railway Recovery

The Morning Wrap: Essar Paid For Gadkari's France Vacation, No Bullet Solutions To Railway Recovery
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Nitin Gadkari wears a traditional Assamese Japi and welcomes supporters before that start of the Shahid Shraddhanjali Yatra, Journey to pay homage to Martyrs, in Gauhati, India, Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012. The BJP is carrying out the tour from Guwahati to Tawang bordering China to pay tribute to Indian soldiers who died during the 1962 India-China war. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)
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Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Nitin Gadkari wears a traditional Assamese Japi and welcomes supporters before that start of the Shahid Shraddhanjali Yatra, Journey to pay homage to Martyrs, in Gauhati, India, Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012. The BJP is carrying out the tour from Guwahati to Tawang bordering China to pay tribute to Indian soldiers who died during the 1962 India-China war. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)

The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.

Through the Union Railway budget on Thursday, the Narendra Modi government has signalled that it would tread slower on bullet trains in favour of more practical but fast trains that would cost less and could run on existing tracks. Though passenger fares weren't hiked, freight rates got costlier.

A "whistleblower" from the Essar group has decided to go public with internal company communications of the company that show how it cultivated individuals in positions of power and influence, such as Transport minister Nitin Gadkari and his family, for whom the company facilitated a luxury vacation in France.

Trinamul all-India general secretary Mukul Roy, who's becoming increasingly distant from CM Mamata Banerjee, praised the Railway Budget and had a meeting with finance minister Arun Jaitley. door. His comments were at variance with those of Mamata Banerjee, who accused the Centre of "trying to fool people and slammed it for not decreasing train fares."

PDP patron Mufti Mohammad Sayeed is likely to be sworn in as CM on Sunday after the Peoples Democratic Party and Bharatiya Janata Party have "sorted out all the hitches" in the Agenda for Alliance.

Two employees in the Union environment ministry were arrested for allegedly selling confidential information to Lokesh Sharma, the energy consultant, apprehended in the corporate espionage scam.

The Enforcement Directorate swooped down on some properties of YSR Congress Party leader Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, and India Cement's boss and BCCI chief, N Srinivasanhas and attached properties worth over Rs 200 crores, in the disproportionate assets case.

The CBI alleges that N Srinivasan bribed Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy in the guise of investments in group companies of Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy.

TERI Director-General R K Pachauri, who is facing sexual harassment allegations from a woman employee, was on Thursday barred from entering the office premises by a Delhi court. However the court also protected him from arrest until March 27.

Amid the controversy over "ghar wapsi", the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a person who "reconverts" from Christianity to Hinduism shall be entitled to reservation benefits if his forefathers belonged to a Scheduled Caste and the community accepts him after "reconversion".

In a blow to transparency, the Prime Minister's Office has decided to block public access to the wealth declarations made by ministers. Though the details of assets and liabilities of the union council of ministers has been available online since 2010, they are now password protected.

Off The Front Page

An Air India flight from Delhi (AI 467) suffered a tyre burst while landing at the Cochin International Airport on Thursday.

The Haryana government's Educational Consultative Committee, headed by RSS ideologue Dinanath Batra, is expected to advise the State Council of Educational Research and Training on selection of Bhagvad Gita slokas to be introduced in school curriculum.

In yet another attack on freedom of expression, Tamil Nadu novelist 'Puliyur' Murugesan was physically attacked in Karur for including a short story about a relationship between a man and his daughter-in-law, in his newest anthology.

To counter the menace of 'killer' dogs, district authorities in Bareilly said the canines, who'd become notorious for attacking children, would be painted blue to differentiate them from 'normal' dogs.

Essential HuffPost

Investigators believe that the masked killer known as "Jihadi John," who fronted Islamic State beheading videos, is a British man named Mohammed Emwazi.

When Indian cricketer Yuvraj Singh went under the hammer for Rs 16 crore at the auctions of the Indian Premier League's season 8, he broke his own record and became the most expensive buy in the history of the tournament and showed how much football players in the football Indian Super League need to catch up.

Opinion

Dinesh Trivedi in The Hindu says that a Railway budget must have a vision, a policy, destinations, and achievable targets with timelines--all of which were lacking in Mr. Suresh Prabhu's speech.

Milan Vaishnav and Neelanjan Sircar in The Hindu, analyse the results of a survey that finds Delhi to be an unusually-unsafe megacity with perceptions of safety on par with smaller cities in India.

Akash Prakash says in The Business Standard that those expecting the Union Budget to be "path breaking" and on the lines of 1991, would be wise to temper expectations.

Madhavi Goradia Divan notes in The Indian Express that if promoting obscurantism and superstition were the triggers for the Censor Board to ban MSG, then television is doing far more damage than films.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.