Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday vowed to provide around-the-clock electricity for India’s capital as he inaugurated his party’s campaign in elections for Delhi’s legislative assembly.
Delhi has an unenviable reputation both for blackouts and as one of the world’s most polluted capitals, with diesel fumes from backup generators adding to the cocktail of smog that regularly blankets the National Capital Territory.
However, in a speech to supporters of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the prime minister said he would soon make generators redundant.
“I promise that I will provide you with a 24-hour supply of electricity,” Modi said.
The prime minister came to power after a landslide general election win in May last year.
Although the electricity supply has improved since an infamous summer of widespread blackouts in 2012, the Indian capital is still regularly hit by localized power cuts that are seen as hampering economic growth.
India’s energy sector is almost entirely state-run and recent moves by the BJP government to open up part of the coal sector to private firms prompted a strike last week.
During his rally, Modi indicated that he wanted to bring in competition into the electricity sector.
“We will introduce a system where you can choose who you want to buy your electricity from; you can select your own service provider in the same way you choose your phone’s network provider,” Modi said.
Delhi, a city-state of about 17 million people, has been without a proper government since February last year, when anticorruption campaigner and then-chief minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal quit just 49 days after taking power.
While Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) flopped in the general election, he again represents the major obstacle to the BJP’s electoral hopes.
The BJP’s failure to win control of the Delhi assembly in a previous election was a major shock, and Modi made Kejriwal the main target of his invective, calling the self-styled anarchist a liar and “backstabber.”
However, former tax inspector Kejriwal hit back hours later, calling the BJP “a sinking ship without a captain.”
“I can see that the BJP is very nervous. It has no positive agenda for the Delhi elections,” Kejriwal added.
No date has yet been announced for the Delhi polls, although the election commission is expected to fix a date for in the next few days for the middle of next month.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS