Daily Briefing: Coastal security upgrade gathers dust in Mumbai; Rajasthan votes today; and more

In the three years after the 26/11 terror attacks in 2008, the Mumbai police purchased 46 high-speed boats to beef up the city’s 114-km coastline. The High-Level Enquiry Committee set up to probe the security forces’ response to the attacks had flagged this shortage and need.

However, in less than 15 years after the attack, only 8 of these work today while 38 stand defunct, The Indian Express has found. 

Rajasthan votes today in an election that has gone down to the wire, with the BJP confident about its campaign targeting the incumbent government on law and order and “appeasement politics”, and the Ashok Gehlot-led Congress banking heavily on the popularity of their welfare schemes in the state. 

Read our pre-poll analysis for a better understanding of what’s going on this election season in Rajasthan. 

As the annual COP-28 summit kicks off in Dubai, on a remote, cyclone-battered island in the Sundarbans, a schoolteacher has rallied the climate crisis’s most vulnerable community —mothers — to secure a mangrove forest and, consequently, their lives.

Find out more about it in this week’s Big Picture.

In our Opinion section today, Sanjay Srivastava writes on the 41 workers trapped inside the collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand: “They have become enveloped in hype regarding their role as representatives of national diversity and unity. What is needed is less media nationalism and greater and sustained attention to policies that address the peculiar and complex lives of mobile labour.”

Thinking of checking out Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, a biography of the eponymous French emperor? Check out what Shalini Langer has to say first: “His Napoleon, written by David Scarpa, is an impressively mounted biography of the general who would redefine the battlefield, but you will come away not much wiser about the man himself.”

Business As Usual by E P Unny