India's star hockey player Rani Rampal has become the first woman in the sport to have a stadium named after her, in Rae Bareli, Uttar Pradesh.
This was a rare instance when Gandhi raised an issue during the Zero Hour.
The Railway Board and employees at Integral Coach Factory in Chennai, makers of the train, are at loggerheads over the proposed transfer of design and reassigning the manufacturing of Train 18 to Modern Coach Factory in Raebareli.
On August 15 last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced from the ramparts of the Red Fort that the Indian Railways would launch 75 Vande Bharat Express trains by August 2023. Later, in her 2022 Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that 400 Vande Bharat trains will be manufactured in the next three years, which are expected to cost between Rs 40,000 crore and Rs 50,000 crore. Those upbeat announcements come after a series of cancelled tenders, vigilance actions against officials and interdepartmental rivalry that delayed the addition of these iconic trains developed entirely indigenously by the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai.
Robots are now being used increasingly in the integrated-shell assembly line and robotic bogie-fabrication line. The unit may soon see its phase-II expansion, which will increase its capacity to 2,000 coaches.
LHB coaches are safer. Two high-level railway safety commissions came down heavily on ICF coaches, recommending their replacement by LHB, says Bibek Debroy.