India will roll out e-passports with embedded chip in 2022-23 financial year (April-March) to enhance convenience for citizens, country's Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said today.

A student of a girl's pre-university college in the southern Indian state of Karnataka has moved the state High Court with a plea to allow the right to wear hijab inside the classroom.

Weekly Covid-19 cases in India fell for the first time in the third wave of the pandemic while deaths from the virus continued to rise, registering a growth of 41% against the previous week’s toll.

Indian opposition parties said yesterday they will move parliamentary motions accusing the government of providing misleading information around the use of technology from Israeli spyware firm NSO Group.

Bhutan’s success in avoiding coronavirus is almost unrivalled but a rare patient death -- just the kingdom’s fourth -- shows more work was needed to fight the pandemic there, its leader says.

Indian troops yesterday killed five militants, including a top commander from the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) group, in stepped-up anti-militancy operations in Kashmir, police said.

India’s capital yesterday announced the end of a weekend curfew and eased other stringent coronavirus restrictions yesterday, with government data suggesting the country’s recent Omicron variant outbreak had slowed.

Former chief minister and Marxist veteran Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and versatile actor Victor Banerjee were among six persons from West Bengal who got this year’s Padma awards announced by the Indian government.

Thousands of youngsters in India have burned down empty train coaches and blocked rail traffic this week in protest against what they call irregularities in recruitment by the mammoth railways department, one of the world's largest employers.

Former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee tonight refused to accept the Indian government’s third highest civilian award Padma Bhushan this year, sparking a political row.

Author Taslima Nasreen said her recent tweets flaying surrogacy as exploitative of poor women, who lend their wombs, was not designed as an attack on Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra and her husband Nick Jonas.

Omicron, the highly-transmissible Covid-19 strain driving the ongoing third wave of the pandemic across India, is in “community transmission stage” in the country, said a report released yesterday by a consortium of labs of the Indian government. 

As India celebrates the 125th birth anniversary of iconic freedom fighter Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, here’s a look at some of his descendants:

At least two people were killed and over 15 injured when a large fire broke out in a multi-storey residential building in India’s financial capital Mumbai yesterday, authorities said.

At least seven persons were killed and 19 others injured in a major fire that broke out on the 18th floor of a 20-storey building in India’s financial capital Mumbai today, officials said.

India’s Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the daughters of a male Hindu dying without a will would be entitled to inherit father’s self-acquired and other properties obtained in the partition.

India today said it has ordered the blocking of 35 Pakistan-based YouTube-based news channels and two websites which were involved in spreading anti-India fake news in a coordinated fashion over digital media.

A grand granite statue of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, an iconic leader of India’s independence struggle, would be installed at the India Gate in New Delhi “as a symbol of the country’s indebtedness to him,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said today.

India’s Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the daughters of a male Hindu dying without a will would be entitled to inherit father’s self-acquired and other properties obtained in the partition.

India’s Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur today warned that any website or YouTube channel found to “conspire against India” will be blocked.