Good morning, In today's edition: NITI Aayog’s Governing Council meeting; “illegal colonisers” of land in Ayodhya; JD(U) and BJP's increasingly fractious alliance; and more. The Big Story In what was the first physical meeting of the Niti Aayog's Governing Council since the onset of the pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded the efforts of the state governments in the fight against Covid-19, saying the country’s federal structure and cooperative federalism have emerged as a “model for the world”. Sunday’s meeting was attended by 23 Chief Ministers, three Lieutenant Governors and two Administrators, and Union Ministers. The Chief Ministers of Bihar, Telangana, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Mizoram, the L-G of Puducherry, and the Administrator of Chandigarh, did not attend the meeting. At the meeting, Chief Ministers of Opposition-ruled states raised a range of issues: legal guarantee on Minimum Support Price for farm output, shortage of IAS officers, GST exemptions, higher allocation of funds for states, and adequate consultation with states on policy issues. Only in The Express With a distance of 13.80m, triple jumper Eldhose Paul couldn't even make it to his college team in the first two years. He tried the most difficult of events, even pole vault, to fill up the hollowness of not making any headway in a sport he loved. Cut to Sunday at the Common Wealth Games, with no 17-m jump to his name, Paul wasn't a medal favourite. But he leapt and flew further than anyone else in that morning's triple jump final. In this edition of the Idea Exchange, medal-winning long jumper Anju Bobby George talks about a scientific method of grooming talent and why high jumper Tejaswin Shankar was not selected at first for the Common Wealth Games. From the Front Page The maiden flight of ISRO’s newly developed Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) suffered a setback on Sunday, with “data loss” at the terminal stage, after three stages had “performed and separated” as planned. The satellites ended up being placed in an elliptical orbit, and are “no longer usable”. Ayodhya City Mayor Rishikesh Upadhyay, sitting MLA from the district’s Sadar constituency Ved Prakash Gupta and former legislator from Milkipur constituency Gorakhnath Baba are among the 40 persons named by the Ayodhya Development Authority (ADA) as “illegal colonisers” of land plots and building infrastructure in such land. Gupta and Upadhyay were among more than a dozen buyers of land parcels investigated by The Indian Express on December 22 last year who bought land in Ayodhya after the Supreme Court verdict clearing construction of Ram Temple. Must Read A week after the BJP quoted Union Minister Amit Shah as telling a party meeting in Patna that the BJP and JD(U) would contest the 2024 Lok Sabha and 2025 Assembly elections together, the JD(U) national president Rajiv Ranjan Singh said the question of whether the two parties would contest together in coming polls was far from settled. He also cited "two conspiracies" against Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in recent times. Open rooms as study centres, small classrooms with a student-teacher ratio of 1:8, and “bottle-shaped” bazaars and shopping arcades for students — a mere 12 km from the ruins of Nalanda, this soaring idea of a learning space has been taking shape over the last four years in Rajgir, a town that’s over a 100 km from Patna. Now, as the new campus of Nalanda University prepares for a formal inauguration, the focus is on how best it can retain the cultural and architectural ethos of the 5th-12th Century AD university. And Finally Rajendra Dhondu Bhosale, who retired from Mumbai Police seven years ago, was haunted by the case of seven-year-old Pooja Gaud, who went missing in 2013 and remained the lone girl he hadn’t managed to trace. Now there is closure. Delhi confidential: In the Vice-Presidential polls, the Opposition may have fielded a candidate against Jagdeep Dhankhar knowing fully well that it was a losing battle but once the NDA candidate won, almost all senior opposition leaders. In today's episode of 3 Things, we discuss India's new Vice-President and his role, the country's renewed climate promises, and NIA's arrest of an Islamic State suspect. Until next time, Leela Prasad
