January 27, 1978, Forty Years Ago: No Padma awards

Nehru prize winner

Tulsi Meharji Shrestha, one of the foremost followers of Mahatma Gandhi in Nepal who has done pioneering work for the uplift of the downtrodden, has been chosen for the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding. Vice-president B.D. Jatti, who made the announcement in New Delhi, described Shrestha as a humble selfless, social worker who has quietly and unpretentiously worked for the uplift of the poor and the unfortunate. “He has been a disciple of Gandhiji who has carried, his message beyond his country and also cemented between Nepal and India,” Jatti said. The last recipient of the award was Guiseppe Tucci, the Italian explorer and philosopher.

AI blackbox found

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) or the black box of Air India jumbo, Emperor Ashoka, that crashed on New Year’s Day, killing all 213 people on board has been recovered by Navy divers and handed over to the the Directorate General of Civil Aviation for decoding. The CVR was recovered by a naval diver, A.S. Sawant, nearly 30 feet from the place where the aircraft’s Digital Flight Data Recorder was recovered from. The CVR will help the DGCA authorities to ascertain the cause of the accident and the subsequent tragedy as it records for about half an hour from take-off, the conversation between the pilot, co-pilot and the navigator had between them and the ground control before the crash.